Dreaming in the Dark: Miketz and the Menora

Parshat Miketz:
Rabbi Dr. Erin Leib Smokler
Dean of Students and Mashgicha Ruchanit, Maharat
Advanced Kollel: Executive Ordination Track Class of 2018

This essay originally appeared in Shema BeKolah, a publication of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance.

Every year we read Parshat Miketz on or around Shabbat Chanukah, consistently drawing together two narratives of unlikely triumph: Joseph’s rise to power in Egypt and the Maccabbean rise to power in Hellenized ancient Israel. The connections between these stories run deep and help to illuminate a core dimension of the holiday of light.

Parshat Miketz famously opens with an account of Pharaoh’s dreams. In the first, seven fat, full, healthy cows are happily grazing in the reeds. Along come seven other cows—ugly, skinny, and sickly—and consume them completely. In the second dream, seven ears of healthy grain are growing on one strong stalk. Another seven ears then spring up, thin and scorched by the wind. Once again, the underdog wins, and the meager ears devour the hefty ones.

Agitated by these unnatural images, Pharaoh calls upon all of the magicians and wise men in his land to decipher for him their meaning. When they fail, Joseph is called out of captivity to accomplish the difficult task.

As psychoanalytic theory teaches, the way we recount our dreams often discloses more than dreams themselves. What we choose to accent, what we add or subtract, speaks volumes about our unconscious desires or struggles. Freud famously said, "[W]hatever the dreamer tells us, must count as his dream." So let us pay close attention to the way that Pharaoh retells his nighttime tales to Joseph.

The content of the images remains largely the same, but their descriptions get substantially more colorful. The skinny cows go from being “ugly and gaunt”—"רעות מראה ודקות בשר"—to “scrawny, ill-formed, and emaciated—never had I seen their likes for ugliness in all the land of Egypt,” says Pharaoh (Bereishit 41:19). The seven ears of grain go from being just “thin and scorched” to “shriveled” ("צנומות") as well (Bereishit 41:23). The greatest departure, however, between image and narrative—between the dreams as they were and the dreams as they are recounted—comes in Pharaoh’s grotesque telling of cows consuming cows. In contrast to the matter-of-fact event described in the dream itself (Bereishit 41:4), Pharaoh presents the following account:

Even with food in their sunken stomachs, says Pharaoh, no change could be detected in these sickly cows. They were stuck in their condition of malnourishment, no matter how much they consumed. This horror, this image of immitigable misery, of irreversible pain even in the face of plenty, is what stirred Pharaoh from his sleep. An unpleasant dream had become a surreal nightmare.

Like a good psychoanalyst, Joseph’s interpretation of the dreams follows from his patient’s account of them. Asserting that both dreams convey the same message—"חלום אחד הוא"—he determines that Egypt will experience seven years of fat and fullness followed by seven years of famine and hunger. But the key interpretive move, I think, is less the description of what will be, and more the description of how it will be experienced. In Joseph’s telling, the objective facts of שבע and רעב, of abundance and depletion, will yield to a terrifying subjective, inner reality. After the seven years of plenty, he says,

This is the real curse of the coming famine: Not the loss of the food; not even the anxiety of starvation. Those too would be devastations, no doubt. The greatest challenge would be the curse of forgetfulness, the blinding of hopelessness. Seven full years of satiety will be obliterated in the consciousness of the Egyptian people the very instant trouble hits. "ולא יודע השבע בארץ מפני הרעב ההוא--And [they] will not be able to tell that there was plenty in the land because of that famine afterward." Pain, alas, has a terribly sad way of erasing memory. Overwhelmed by present suffering, one often forgets that it was once otherwise and that it might again be. Countervailing experiences simply disappear. As Rashi points out, this is the dire, decoded meaning of Pharaoh’s bovine nightmare of "ותבאנה אל קרבנה ולא נודע כי באו אל קרבנה--[T]hey were taken into their bellies and you could not tell that they had come into their bellies" (Genesis 41:21). When circumstances feel hard enough, one can take in a heavy dose of nourishment and still find oneself starving.

Joseph truly understood, through Pharaoh’s retelling of his dreams, what the challenge of the Egyptian people would be, and he met it head on. He proposed a preemptive strike, not only against famine, but against hopelessness itself. During the seven years of plenty, he suggested, food should be collected and stored under Pharaoh’s authority, not to be touched until such time as it is necessary. When the famine hits, there will thereby be sustenance at the ready. Prepare for the crisis, and you will avoid it, Joseph seems to indicate. Insist upon the solution even before the onset of the problem. Most importantly, inject a reminder of past glory into present suffering and you will safeguard rosy memory. You will recall what was, accept what is, and perhaps conjure hope for what might yet be. Remnants of plenty will enable people to imagine its future possibility.

With “reserves” to rely on, neither the people nor their spirits will crumble with the help of Joseph’s plan.

Midrash Rabbah (89:1) on the opening line of our parsha--"ויהי מקץ שנתיים ימים"--hears resonances of the verse from Job 28:3, "קץ שם לחשך," God puts boundaries on, or an end to, darkness. The Midrash continues, "זמן נתן לעולם כמה שנים יעשה באפלה". Roughly translated: Some years are given to the world to linger in shadows, but know that there is an end.

The story of Miketz is the story of the end of Joseph’s darkness. Years after being thrown into a pit, he now rises to power. He has traversed the shadows. From the scorn generated by his own early dreams to the triumph generated by his interpretation of Pharaoh’s, the divinely-orchestrated circle closes, and he emerges as second-in-command over the Egyptian empire. But it is also the story of Joseph’s own assertion of “קץ שם לחשך”. Before the darkness even descends, he puts its end in place. He establishes a “פקדון,” a reserve of hope, to stave off the stings of starvation and to assure the people that light and life will return, even when memory fades, even when it is hardest to see.
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This is also the message and the imperative of Chanukah. For eight days, during the darkest part of the year and during the darkest part of the night, we light candles. As one thinker, quoted in Itturei Torah, says so beautifully, commenting on the halakhic prescription to light the menorah after sunset:

When the world seems shrouded in shadows and overwhelmed by uncertainty; when heaviness and fear lurk; when the days grow short and the nights long, and the memories of sunnier times abate, we are called to create light—joyfully and publicly. Instead of yielding to the erasure of those sweet memories, on Chanukah we are charged to audaciously assert, precisely when it is most difficult to assert, that an end to the darkness will come.

Indeed, it will always come. With the help of a reserve of light, a glimmer of the glory of times past, the shadows will pass, our tradition teaches. "קץ שם לחשך". There are built-in limits to all darkness, this holiday reminds us, if we are willing, like Joseph, to actively and preemptively seek light.