Dream-marks
Vayeshev 2012/5773
Rabbi Neil A. Tow©
With Les Miserables on the way, again, toward the silver
screen, I imagine that the songs like “I dreamed a dream” will be back in our
mouths and in our ears. “I dreamed a
dream” is a powerful song with a powerful message, a message of hope with a
reality that hope may be left unfulfilled.
Fantine’s daughter Cosette will one day live a better life, but for the
moment she does not know it and has no reason to expect it.
When Joseph ends up in jail on Potiphar’s estate, I imagine him in the same situation. He was living the life of promise as head
servant in the household, and now he loses his freedom again, now he is thrown into the jail, also called ‘the pit’, again – remember that his brothers toss
him into a pit before they sell him as a slave.
At this point, while he gets notice and responsibility in the jail, his
only potential help – the cupbearer’s good word to Pharaoh – does not happen
and he remains in the ‘pit’. The
cupbearer forgets about him, chooses to forget, in the same way a new Pharaoh
will one day also ‘not know Joseph’.
The future seems to be bleak, and this is the moment where
the parsha ends. A cliff-hanger.
Is the cupbearer behaving in an unethical manner by not
advocating for Joseph who was his fellow prisoner, who shared with the
cupbearer the prophecy that he would return to his post?
Avishai Margalit argues that there is an ethics of
memory. “One’s remembering a person now,” he writes, “is a strong indication
that one cared at the time, at the very least, if not still. If the cupbearer has forgotten Joseph, then
we the readers of the story across the centuries begin to feel that he does not
care for Joseph. And our Jewish thinkers
teach us that the cupbearer does not mention Joseph to Pharaoh at the time, and
so, as time goes by the memory begins to fade as he returns to routine and
Joseph continues to languish in jail.
Let’s give the cupbearer the benefit of the doubt. He is just out of jail and does not want to
ask for something right after he has received Pharaoh’s kind pardon. Can we excuse, though, the forgetfulness
afterwards? – the forgetfulness that he only overcomes when Pharaoh himself is
in need of dream interpretation.
Clearly, dreams in the Joseph stories leave marks both on
the dreamer and those around him. They
dictate fate but not the way that the characters negotiate the events that they
experience along the way. And those
marks that the dreams leave cause the cupbearer and Joseph’s brothers to have
revelations that reflect back their own flaws as well as their teshuvah, their
maturation and newfound awareness of responsibility.
As we get ready to celebrate Chanukah, the Les Miserables
story of protest and a search for a more perfect freedom, the story of a parent
who wishes a better future for his children, echoes for us in the stories of
the Matitayu and his sons, the Maccabees, our ancestors in Israel. They decided to keep the memory-marks of
living under foreign rule in their hearts for inspiration so they would not
forget their connections to their identity.
They believe that the ethics of memory demands a revolutionary response,
that just as God remembers us when we cry out from slavery in Egypt, God will
guide the people of Israel when we, the descendants of the Maccabees, continue
to agitate for freedom, for respect, for the tradition that shapes us and that
we have the privilege to continue to shape.
As the Zionist thinker AD Gordon once said, “Light will
never defeat the darkness until we understand the simple truth, that instead of
fighting the darkness, me must increase the light.”
Tomorrow night when we light the candles, let us look within
to find the strength and courage that are the both the real gifts and the
challenges of Chanukah.
Shabbat Shalom.
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