This refers to the story of Joseph who places Menashe at Jacob’s right and Efraim at his left, and then Jacob switches his hands for the blessings. Most commentators wonder at Jacob's action. But I am more amazed by Joseph, who insisted on the bechor getting the major blessings. This bothers me: why did he do it? After all, Joseph himself in his own life, in his own youth, violated that very principle the son of the younger wife of Jacob, the eleventh child of the patriarch. As such, by the established conventions of primogeniture, he had no right to push himself to the top. He had no moral claim to supremacy over his sibling. What right did he have to dream about the sun and the moon and the eleven stars bowing to him, about the sheaves of his brothers bowing to his? Yet he did that — andhis father indulged him, giving him the "coat of many colors," which was the symbol of roylaty, the right to succession as chief of the tribe.The Torah is teaching us a timeless insight: that revoluntionaries who want to overturn the establishment order, usually become quite rigid and ippose their own s^Eling pf x order, becoming establishmentarians themselves. In Russia, the Proletarian revolutionary c2i®fs d° not \*01־k in the mines, but are driven to plush officer by chauffeurs. In India, the anticasts groups develop their own pecking order. In the US, counterculture egalitarian rebels who demand participatory democracy and a free society, have precious little of either one in their Internal structure.Rabbi Israel Salanter interpreted thus the verse in Ecclesiastes: Q \* which usually and evidently nfeahi ^that ^d seeks "the welfare of" (the pursued) as: God looks for the pursued: He can’t find them, because he was pursued yesterday is a pursuer today!so, Jacob said to Joseph: no such rigidity\*! I will reverse my hands and prefer the younger of my grandchildren, even as I did amongst ray own children, when I gave preference to Joseph over his older siblings, and even as I did …