Every motivational speaker peddles the same tired formula: visualize success, work harder, stay positive, and victory will be yours. The self-help industry has convinced millions that failure represents nothing but a temporary setback on the inevitable march toward triumph. We treat closed doors as obstacles to overcome rather than opportunities to explore.
The Bible offers a radically different understanding.
Joseph’s story stands as one of the most dramatic success narratives in Scripture. Sold into slavery by his brothers, he somehow rises to become second-in-command of Egypt, saves the ancient world from famine, and reconciles with his family. The Torah captures his achievement with a peculiar verse:
But something about this verse demands our attention. Why state both conditions? If God was with Joseph, isn’t his success self-evident? If Joseph succeeded, doesn’t that automatically mean God was with him? The redundancy suggests we’re missing something fundamental about the nature of success itself.
Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa, writing in nineteenth-century Poland, offered one explanation. We reach out to God when things fall apart. The diagnosis comes back terminal, the business collapses, the child rebels—and suddenly we remember to pray. But when everything works according to plan, we forget. We credit our intelligence, our work ethic, our strategic planning. Once we achieve prosperity, we often forget that God remains the source.
Joseph, however, maintained his connection to God in both success and failure. The verse’s dual statement captures this rare spiritual achievement. He maintained his fear of Heaven and belief in God no matter what. Both when he was in trouble and when he was succssful.
But Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, suggests another reading entirely, one that challenges everything we think we know about success and failure.
What if God can be with someone who is failing? What if the doors slamming in our faces are actually opening pathways we never imagined?
Rabbi Mirvis points to the prayer we recite each month before the new month. It doesn’t just ask for a life where our requests are fulfilled. It specifies: “A life in which the requests of our heart will be answered for the good.” This wording acknowledges a troubling reality—we have no idea what genuine success looks like. We petition for promotions that would crush us, relationships that would destroy us, and opportunities that would ultimately lead to our downfall. We mistake the glittering door for the right door. We confuse what we want with what we need.
Rabbi Mirvis demonstrates this principle through Joseph’s biography with brutal clarity. The attempted fratricide by his brothers, being sold into slavery, Potiphar’s wife’s false accusations, years rotting in an Egyptian dungeon—every apparent catastrophe positioned him for his ultimate purpose. Had his brothers welcomed him home after his dreams, he would have remained a privileged son in Canaan. Had Potiphar believed his integrity, he would have stayed a household servant. The failures weren’t obstacles to his destiny. They were the mechanism of his destiny.
The verse “Hashem was with Joseph, and he was a successful man” contains both truths simultaneously. God remained with Joseph through every failure and humiliation. God also made Joseph successful. But the success came through the failures, not despite them. The prison cell wasn’t a detour from God’s plan—it was God’s plan. The betrayal wasn’t an interruption of divine providence—it was divine providence.
Rabbi Mirvis’s understanding transforms how we read Joseph’s story. When the Torah reports that “Hashem was with Joseph” during his enslavement and imprisonment, it’s not offering consolation for temporary setbacks. It’s revealing that God orchestrates closed doors as methodically as open ones. The verse clarifies that Joseph grasped this reality. He felt God’s presence in the dungeon the same way he felt it in Pharaoh’s palace. He recognized that the pit and the prison were God’s classroom, not God’s punishment.
Winston Churchill, who led Britain through her darkest hour, understood something of this paradox. “Success,” he observed, “is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” Churchill knew failure personally—his political career included multiple disasters before his finest hour arrived when Britain needed him most. His earlier failures positioned him uniquely for his ultimate purpose.
The Sages teach that everything God does is for the good, but they don’t promise that the good will be immediately apparent or comfortable. Joseph’s story illustrates this teaching with particular force. His brothers intended their betrayal for evil, but as Joseph later acknowledges, God intended it for good—to save many lives. The seventeen years of suffering weren’t unfortunate prerequisites to success. They were the training ground that shaped him into the leader Egypt and his family needed.
We pray for answered requests “for the good” because we lack the wisdom to distinguish between success and failure, between open doors and closed ones, between what will build us and what will break us. God’s love sometimes manifests in unanswered prayers, in closed doors, in what we mistakenly label as failures.
Joseph understood that God’s presence doesn’t guarantee smooth sailing. It guarantees purpose. The same divine presence that elevated him to Pharaoh’s right hand sustained him in slavery and imprisonment. His success wasn’t measured by constant advancement but by maintaining his integrity and connection to God regardless of circumstances. The Torah’s redundant language—”Hashem was with Joseph and he was a successful man”—captures both realities because they’re inseparable. True success means recognizing God’s hand in every circumstance, not just the pleasant ones.
This recognition doesn’t make failure painless. Joseph pleaded with his brothers as they sold him into slavery. He suffered genuine anguish in prison. The Bible doesn’t present him as a stoic unmoved by circumstance. But he maintained something more valuable than optimism—he maintained trust that God remained with him and that these apparent disasters served purposes beyond his understanding.
Your closed door might be the best thing that ever happened to you. The rejection, the loss, the humiliation—these might be God positioning you for something you cannot yet envision. Joseph couldn’t have imagined, sitting in that prison cell, that he was being prepared to save the ancient world from starvation. He simply knew that God hadn’t abandoned him despite every indication to the contrary.
That’s the hidden truth in the verse. God was with Joseph through both failure and success. Rabbi Mirvis’s teaching shows us that recognizing God’s presence in both triumph and disaster transforms how we face our own closed doors. What appears as failure might be divine preparation for purposes beyond our comprehension.
