Monday, December 10, 2012

"I dreamed a dream" - Dvar Torah: Vayeshev


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.