In this week's parsha, Yosef is freed from prison to interpret Pharaoh's dreams. All the sorcerers and all the necromancers in all the land couldn't put Pharaoh's mind at ease after his troubling visions. Says Rashi, Joseph had a good reputation for being able to hear and understand dreams. Even more than that, Yosef could understand Pharaoh's fears -- the anxieties of the ruler of the most powerful kingdom in the world. Pharaoh, says the Ishbitzer, could only appreciate an interpretation that "worked for him." Once we accept one interpretation, one specific perspective to explain the world, we become trapped in that frame of mind. Dream (chalom) has the same root has bread (lechem). Like with a dream, eating (and therefore, existence) is completely dependent upon the way we view it. Is it merely a pragmatic exercise in refueling, or is eating a way to bring God into a seemingly simple act? Yosef was connected to truth… once I have that, it's a lot easier to find in-roads to understand the world outside of myslef. God is everywhere, from Aleph to Tet (the 1st and last letters in the Hebrew alphabet). Once I start to feel that, then I can start to find the truth (emet) in everything (for "emet" beings with an aleph and ends with a tet, thus encompassing the whole alphabet).
My Grandfather Shmuel ben Sara was put in the hospital this week. He's been battling colon cancer for months now, and he's got another round of treatments in front of him. When he and my Ga, Esther, were moving to Florida, I was going through the incredible collection of memories stored in their basement and I came across a box filled with letters written during WWII. They'd just gotten married when he was drafted, so all of that newlywed affection was there in those letters. Nurturing their love and their family, despite the chaos of the war and the pain of being apart, seems incredible to me.
We never know whether or not our dreams will ever crystallize into reality, but to stop dreaming is absurd. Yosef was a dreamer, an idealist who never feared going out on a limb (or down in a pit) to pursue his dream. And because of that holy chutzpah (brazenness), he was granted the gift of interpretation: the ability to seek out truth where it lives and communicate it. Truth, says our teacher Nechama Nadborny, isn't a goal, but a consciousness. This consciousness lit a flame which continued to burn for us, even through our enslavement in Egypt: say Chazal (our Sages), we never forgot our language, our dress, or our names. We never acquiesced to popular "interpretation," and we passed on our perspective - our tiny sliver of God's perspective - to our children.
As the Chanuka candles wane, take a look up in the night sky at the new light shining upon our path…the moon. This Wednesday was the first day of the month of Tevet. On the tenth of the month, the Babylonians began their siege of Jerusalem… there is darkness in the air, and it's getting so cold. But that cold doesn't have to become MY perspective. Even if I'm freezing my tuchus off, I want to be on fire on the inside. I want to live passionately. I want to plant seeds and grow, despite the frozen ground. When my Papa was stationed in Egypt, I'm sure he never thought that someday he'd have a son who'd have a son in Israel. But here I am, thanks to him, celebrating the tenacity of our tradition with its impossible perspective and its incredible potential for new interpretations that will bring down the light for which we're all waiting.