The royal butler and the royal baker were distressed by their inability to understand their dreams on their own. But we may ask, what was so original and brilliant about the interpretation offered by Yosef? Could the butler not have understood on his own that “Pharaoh’s goblet was in my hand, and I took the grapes and pressed them into Pharaoh’s goblet, AND GAVE THE GOBLET INTO PHARAOH’S HAND” (40:11) meant that, as Yosef informs him, “Pharaoh will lift up your head and restore you to your position AND YOU SHALL GIVE PHARAOH’S GOBLET INTO HIS HAND, as in the beginning, when you would give him to drink”? After all, the dream describes precisely what is supposed to happen, without any parables or metaphors! Indeed, that is what really transpires: “He restored the chief butler to his butlership, AND HE GAVE THE GOBLET INTO PHARAOH’S HAND.”
It seems that the great mystery of the butler’s dream lay in its introduction: “Behold, there was a vine before me, and the vine had three tendrils, and it was as though it was budding, its blossoms came forth, and its clusters offered ripe grapes.” The fact that a vine features in the dream of the chief butler obviously comes as no surprise, but what is the meaning of the three tendrils?
Yosef interprets this aspect, too: “Yosef said to him, This is its interpretation: the three tendrils are three days.” How did Yosef know this?
Rav Amnon Bazak explains: ‘Until now, the dreams have been explainable in a logical manner, so it is reasonable to assume that here, too, the solution was in front of their eyes. I believe that Yosef was well aware of the fact that in three days’ time Pharaoh would celebrate his birthday and hold a banquet for all his servants. In his wisdom, Yosef put two and two (or three and three) together, positing that the three tendrils meant the three days until this special occasion. Now we can also understand the baker’s behavior. It is patently obvious that his dream – “in the top basket were all kinds of baked foods for Pharaoh, and the birds were eating them from the basket atop my head” – does not bode well. But the baker, too, is stumped by the significance of the “three woven baskets atop my head.” Again, Yosef states without hesitation: “Yosef answered and he said, This is its interpretation: the three baskets are three days.” Yosef gained enormously from this episode. He learned here that the presence of a certain number of items in a dream signifies that many units of time. This knowledge will be useful to him in the future. However, this leaves us with a difficult question. Yosef approaches the butler with a poignant request: “But keep me in mind when it will be good for you, and please show kindness to me, and mention me to Pharaoh, that you may bring me out of this house. For I was stolen from the land of the Hebrews; here, too, I have done nothing that they should put me in the dungeon.” Why, then, at the end of the chapter, do we learn that “the butler did not remember Yosef, and he forgot him”? Rashi quotes Chazal, who teach that Yosef’s request of the butler was improper: “Because Yosef put his faith in him [the butler] to remember him, he ended up being in prison for another two years.” However, on the literal level, it is difficult to understand Yosef’s action as being improper (see Ramban). Is a person then forbidden to act to the best of his abilities in order to save himself from unjustified imprisonment? For this reason, it appears that Yosef’s continued imprisonment resulted solely from the evolution of that wondrous Divine plan that had guided his fate thus far. During the course of the next two years, Yosef came to understand that the time had not yet come for his dreams to be realized. Indeed, what would he have amounted to if the butler had remembered him? Clearly, the future held a greater potential for the realization of his dreams. Prepared by Devorah Abenhaim
