Miketz, a drash

Pharaoh dreams of seven handsome fat cows being eaten by seven ugly, skinny cows.  Pharaoh dreams of seven solid healthy ears of wheat on a single stalk, being followed by seven thin sickly ears on a stalk scorched by the east wind.  He is a hereditary monarch, and therefore not very bright, so he calls for a man of discernment and wisdom to interpret the dreams, and Joseph is remembered and summoned. 

Joseph tells Pharaoh that God had determined there were to be seven years of plenty that would be followed by seven years of famine, when, as Rashi wrote, “the plenty would be forgotten”.  Joseph, not being an idiot, follows this interpretation with a recommendation to Pharoah that he find a man of discernment and wisdom to oversee a program of gathering food during the good years so that it can be distributed during the bad years. We know our man Joseph got the job, and the rest is, well, Exodus.

Seven years of plenty and seven years of famine; seven years of good-looking and seven years of ugly;  seven years of profit and partying; and seven years of grief and shock.  We know this cycle.  Boom and bust.  And we’re busted. 

So now, some of us are oblivious and some of us are scared.  Some prosper and some barely get by.  Some get bonuses and some have been broken.  Some of us blame the greedy and some of us blame ourselves.  Some of us have been permanently beaten down and some of us have risen up.

Good times, bad times.  Good guys, bad guys.  Good and evil.  How can the good survive the evil? And, why do we read this parsha, Miketz, on Chanukah, the Festival of Light & Dedication?  

Rabbi Arthur Green, in his interpretation of the Hasidic Sefat Emet’s commentary on Miketz, writes:

 “Divinity is everywhere:  there is no other source of being.  All that exists is of God, whether revealed or in hiding.  But the power of hiding, the exile of the mind from any awareness of divine presence, can sometimes be very great.  And the evil that human beings can perpetrate in the course of hiding from God’s light can indeed be without end.”

I hate the banks.  I hate the banks so much that I can’t walk past an ATM without wanting to throw a rock at it.  I hate the banks so much, that even as I quote Arthur Green telling you that God’s light is without end, when it comes to banks and bankers, I don’t believe that for a minute.     How can God be in something that is so impersonal, so uncaring, a machine that crushes without a glance at who or what it is crushing?    It’s hard to see the people in that machine.  I know they’re there.  I know most of them must think of themselves as good people. I must try to have compassion for them, find  God’s light in them, even if they can’t see it themselves, even if they hide from that light, I should be able to see it.  But it’s hard work.  I want justice.  I want consequences.

Since the recession I have not been able to get a full time job but I lived like I was working.  I refused to forget the time of plenty.   I hid from the truth of my own financial foolishness and trouble, and I hid from the inevitable consequence of waiting to for someone else to fix up my personal mess.    I find myself desperately wanting a man of discernment, a Joseph to come and organize me through the lean times.  For a while after the recession began, I wanted to rely on Obama to get us through this experience and I squirmed or denied or felt hopeless when he did not or could not fix our economic mess.  We are on our own.   We must organize ourselves.

Why do we read Miketz on Chanukah, the Festival of Light and Dedication?   This is the time when the mighty were delivered into the hands of the weak.  Chanukah is a Festival of a light that shines on the lies and delusions, on the delusions of the fat years and the troubles of the lean ones.  It shines on the pharaohs and the starving peasants and the banks and the unemployed.  And it asks us to choose whether we will embrace or hide from God’s light. Joseph was in prison, falsely accused with no end in sight.  The Maccabees lived under the thumb of invaders and a mad capricious king.  But neither wallowed in the despair of their situation.  They did what they needed to do. 

So, are we Joseph, that discerning man who serves the powers-that-be so he can feed the hungry?  Or are we Maccabees, resisting the bad guys with direct action?

Good and evil, boom or bust, all that exists is of God.

Rabbi Shefa Gold writes:  

“We can honor and protect the seeds of liberation that are in us - our compassion and open-hearted vision of the preciousness of every being. When we carry old hurts, and the bitterness that surrounds those wounds, then our every attempt to do justice is distorted by a sensation of pain.  And so the spiritual challenge is to heal those deep places of bitterness. In that healing, the Spirit of God in us is made manifest.”

So—

It’s the winter solstice,

The earth tilts away from the light,

The east wind scorches.

So we must lean forward

And light candles

So we can see whatever there is to see.

And the days will grow longer

When the earth tilts toward the sun.

Shabbat Shalom.  Happy Chanukah.

Miketz: Behold!

Behold!
We dream of the past, they dreamt of the future.

In this parsha, Pharaoh has two dreams that puzzle him, and his butler recommends an interpreter that he met in prison two years earlier, Joseph. Joseph appears, interprets the two dreams about upcoming seven years of good harvest years and then seven years of famine and Pharaoh, like everyone else before him, spots Joseph as someone who is deeply capable, appoints him ruler over all but Pharoah, with the power to organize things so that they’ll all have something to eat. After seven years, the famine hits and Joseph handles it well, with the exception of a rather disturbing episode during which he exploits the peasants’ hunger to steal their land but…we won’t talk about that now.

People come from all over to ask Joseph for food, including his family. The brothers don’t recognize Joseph and in this parsha, the dance between Joseph and his past begins, as he tests his brothers to see what manner of men they are, and, I think, examines his own heart and motivations. The story concludes in the next parsha with forgiveness stemming from Joseph’s belief that this was all set in motion by God so that Joseph could save his family and, we can read into it, to eventually get all the Hebrews to the crucible of slavery and the dessert and thus to Sinai so we can receive Torah. Yay.

In the Torah, when there’s a dream, this word appears:

Hinei!
Translated in this context, as Behold. Hinei! Behold! A dream!

If I’m sitting with you and say, hey I had an amazing dream last night you might, to my face, say, oh cool but inside you are more likely to say, please don’t tell me please don’t tell me, because a dream is never as fascinating to the listener as it is to the teller, alas. Which is too bad because a dream is so interesting, biologically, psychologically and spiritually. What is a dream? A neurologist may tell you it’s a series of random images thrown up during sleep that your brain needs to make sense of and so it turns it into a story. A therapist may tell you that the images your brain chooses are windows into past traumas and current anxieties. But to the ancient Hebrews, a dream is prophecy, literally every image is a coded message from God and really important, fully worth of a Hinei! Because God knows the future and has chosen to show it to you.

We dream of the past, they dreamt of the future

Now to the rabbis of the Talmud, a dream without interpretation is a wasted message from God, a letter unopened. Rebbi Hannina ben Yitchak saw a dream as un-ripened fruit, the unripened fruit of prophecy. Only by explaining the dream could it ripen into a fruit worth eating, a prediction of the future. And as it turns out, most of us are not qualified to interpret dreams accurately, nor should they because a dream, properly interpreted, will come true. Sfarno believed that the knowledge to intepret is a function of b’tselem elohim, of people being made in God’s image. We cannot look God’s truth in the face directly, but because we are made in God’s image, we can channel it through our dreams and see it there.

So in Torah and Talmud, if God wants the interpretation known so the dream isn’t wasted, God may choose someone like Joseph to interpret it correctly. The sages say only competent interpretation creates reality but, as someone who lives in a world of Fox News, Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh, I only wish this were so. Incompetent interpretation creates reality all the time. But I digress, back to Joseph.

I think we can look at the entire story of Joseph as a dream, properly interpreted.

Hinei!
Behold, Joseph dreamed.
And told his dreams to his brothers and father
But he did not interpret those dreams
And if it had ended there
Things might have turned out very differently.
But Jacob the aging Wrestler understood and interpreted
And gave him a striped coat
And so the dreams came true
The story commenced

And one day he saw his brothers again
He was a lord
And they bowed down to him
And he understood,
He had dreamed the story
And it had been explained
The cycle was complete
Basherte
And no need to be bitter
And they embraced. And they wept. And they ate.

And what was it all for?
To save the family from starvation?
To get them to Egypt
so they could become slaves?
so they could escape?
So they could meet God at Sinai?
Or was it just for the story?
It’s a good story.

Rabbi Hannina says the unripened fruit of prophecy is a dream.
And Rebbi Avin says the unripened fruit of heavenly wisdom is Torah.

And I say the unripened fruit of truth is the story.


In English, the word dream speaks about what we do during REM sleep but it also is about what we aspire to for our future, the stories we tell ourselves, personal and communal prophecies. We dream of the past, they dreamt of the future but I suggest that we embrace the ancient sense of dreams and look to our future, and dream of what is to come.

And I wish for us all that we choose our stories and interpret them properly through our words and our actions so they will come true and change the world for the better, and may we all see whatever happens as part of a larger story so we can forgive and not be bitter and weep and embrace and eat, just like our illustrious and probably fictional ancestor, Joseph of Egypt.

Hinei.