Vayigash: the final trepidation

Avoiding starvation drives this story,  Ultimately, Yaakov is willing to risk the life of his son, Benjamin, to avoid the death of his family from hunger. Famine can permit almost anything.

I remember my mother  talking about starvation. She would express her memory of it with a frightening ferocity. It was worse than death. There is almost nothing that a person would not give to relieve the agony of such hunger.   The people of Egypt  sell their freedom - their land and their bodies- to avoid starvation.

When Joseph entices his brothers to come (close to) Egypt, he says:  פֶּן־תִּוָּרֵ֛שׁ lest you are impoverished. He does not talk survival, he talks wealth.  Joseph had been, and remained, a slave, and as such, he may have been hungry,  but he had never tasted starvation, like those around him . 

My father had the same experience.  Although he had been degraded, a slave surrounded by the murder of his brothers and sisters, he was spared the experience of starvation.  On that basis, he felt that he had been better off than my mother- who had never been in the camp, but had, at times, no source of food  

What motivates Yehudah to return and attempt to ransom Benjamin from servitude? His stated intent  is to prevent Jacob from going  white head down to Sheol in sorrow

He is concerned about his father's end of life.   He does not want his father to have a difficult, distressing decline in old age to death.  Yehuda would rather spend his life in servitude than be the cause of his father's terminal agony.  

The end of life is enveloped in Elysian fantasy.  The mystery of what follows death aside, sick people,people who know that they will need to confront the end, are concerned about how it will happen.  They fear terminal pain.  They often see the hardship that the dying process imposes upon those they love. There is often a scrum of mercies, the penultimate kindness. 

The parsha confronts what we are: hungry and afraid. Does the awareness protect?