Sidrah
Parashah of the week: Mikketz
”Pharaoh awoke: and see, it was a dream!” Genesis 41:7
December 14, 2023 12:28
”Pharaoh awoke: and see, it was a dream!” Genesis 41:7
December 14, 2023 12:28We have all experienced them: dreams that are so vivid and unsettling, that it takes a moment to realise that what we experienced in our sleep was not real, but only a dream.
In the Torah dreams are never just the unfathomable workings of our own brains. Throughout antiquity and right through the Middle Ages dreams have been regarded as divine messages, which, prone to be muddled up by our limited human intellect on the one hand and our vivid imagination on the other, need interpretating.
It is therefore not surprising that Pharaoh asked his scholars for an explanation. What is surprising however, is that they were incapable of giving one.
How could they not interpret them whereas Joseph did it with such ease? In Joseph’s family everyone seemed able to interpret dreams naturally. When young Joseph told his brothers his own vivid dreams, they knew immediately what they meant, as they admonishingly asked: “Do you mean to reign over us?”
The delightful irony of the Jospeh story is of course that in the brothers’ attempt to get rid of Jospeh and his obnoxious dreams, they assisted in making them come true.
His brothers scornfully called him “that dreamer” (ba’al ha-chalomot halazeh). However, it wasn’t his own dreams, but his ability to interpret other people's dreams which eventually caused Jospeh’s ambitions to be fulfilled.
As a youthful dreamer he appeared thoroughly self-obsessed; unaware of the antipathy he caused among his brothers or even the depth of their hatred for him. But through his misadventures and suffering he learned to take note of others.
Forced to serve others, he learned to listen to their dreams and helped realise them.
The difference between Jospeh’s interpretation and those of Pharaoh’s advisers is that he did not just interpret the dreams, he also offered achievable solutions to change the future predicted in the dreams.
Instead of fatalistically presenting the probable outcome of the dreams as a fait accompli, Jospeh devised a rescue plan. Joseph the dreamer was no longer dreaming his own grandiose dreams – nor indeed was his dream of the same sort as Pharaoh’s; instead his dream was a vision of survival and a future for all those in the region.
That surely is a dream worth pursuing and a lesson for us all.