Joseph is languishing in prison. Then, at the beginning of this week’s parashah, a sequence of events takes place, leading to the most rapid, radical change of fortune in the Bible. Pharaoh has two dreams that trouble his spirit. None of his priestly retinue can decode the dreams in a way that satisfies him. Pharaoh’s butler remembers Joseph. Hurriedly he is taken from prison, given a wash and change of clothes, and brought before the ruler.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks sheds great clarification on this story: “That is the narrative on the surface. One apparently insignificant detail, however, stands out. Pharaoh has had not one dream but two: one about cows, the other about ears of grain. Joseph explains that they are the same dream, conveying the same message through different images. Why then were there two? This is his explanation: That Pharaoh has dreamed this twice means that G-d is firmly resolved on this plan, and very soon He will put it into effect. (Genesis 41:32)
At first sight, this looks like just another piece of information. Understood in the full context of the Joseph narrative, however, it changes our entire understanding of events. For it was not Pharaoh alone who had two dreams with the same structure. So too did Joseph at the very beginning of the story: one about sheaves of wheat, the other about the sun, moon and stars… It is only in retrospect that we understand the story of our life.
Later events explain earlier ones. At the time, neither Joseph nor his brothers could know that his dreams were a form of prophecy: that he was indeed destined for greatness and that every misfortune he suffered had a part to play in their coming true. At first reading, the Joseph story reads like a series of random happenings. Only later, looking back, do we see that each event was part of a precise, providential plan to lead a young man from a family of nomadic shepherds to become second-in-command of Egypt. This is a truth not about Joseph alone but about us also.
We live our lives poised between a known past and an unknown future. Between them lies a present in which we make our choices. We decide between alternatives. Ahead of us are several diverging paths, and it is up to us which we follow. Only looking back does our life take on the character of a story. Only many years later do we realise which choices were fateful, and which irrelevant. Things which seemed small at the time turn out to be decisive. Matters that once seemed important prove in retrospect to have been trivial.
Seen from the perspective of the present, a life can appear to be a random sequence of disconnected events. It takes the passage of time for us to be able to look back and see the route we have taken, and the right and wrong turnings on the way.’..It is then, with hindsight, that we begin to see how providence has guided our steps, leading us to where G-d needs us to be. That is one meaning of the phrase spoken by G-d to Moses: “Then I shall take away My hand, and you will see My back, but My face cannot not be seen.” (Exodus 33: 23) Only looking back do we see G-d’s providence interwoven with our life, never looking forward (“My face cannot not be seen”). How subtly and deftly this point is made in the story of Joseph – the supreme example of a life in which human action and Divine intervention are inextricably entwined. It is all there in the verse about the doubling of Pharaoh’s dream.
By delaying this information until later in Joseph’s life, the Torah shows us how a later event can force us to re-interpret an earlier one, teaching us the difference between two time perspectives: the present, and the understanding that only hindsight can bring to the past. It does so not by expounding complex philosophical propositions, but by the art of story-telling – a far simpler and more powerful way of conveying a difficult truth. These two time perspectives are embodied, in Judaism, in two different literatures. Through halakhah, we learn to make choices in the present. Through aggadah we strive to understand the past. Together, these two ways of thinking constitute the twin hemispheres of the Jewish brain. We are free. But we are also characters in a Divinely scripted drama. We choose, but we are also chosen. The Jewish imagination lives in the tension between these two frames of reference: between freedom and providence, our decisions and G-d’s plan.”
~Devorah Abenhaim
