A significant part of our
parshah (
Mikeitz -- Genesis
41:1-44:17) is taken up with a pair of dreams dreamt by the king of
Egypt. These dreams are actually recounted not once, but three times:
first we read an account of the dreams themselves; then comes a more
detailed version, as we hear them described by Pharaoh to Joseph; and
then comes Joseph's reply to Pharaoh, in which he offers his
interpretation of the dreams' various components.
And these are but the last in a sequence of dreams detailed by the
Torah in the preceding chapters. Joseph is in Pharaoh's palace
interpreting his dreams because of another set of dreams, dreamt two
years earlier in an Egyptian prison. Back then, Joseph was incarcerated
together with two of Pharaoh's ministers, each of whom had a dream which
Joseph successfully interpreted.
And why was Joseph in that Egyptian pr
ison in the first place? Because eleven years before that, his repeated
retelling of his own two dreams had intensified his brothers' envy of
him, provoking them to sell him into slavery. Indeed, Joseph carries
every detail of his two dreams with him wherever he goes, and they serve
as the basis for his seemingly strange treatment of his brothers and
father many years later, when he is ruler of Egypt and his brothers come
from famine-stricken Canaan to purchase food (see
Nachmanides commentary on Genesis 42:9).
The result of all this dreaming is the Egyptian
galut (exile) -- the first
galut
experienced by the Jewish people and the source of all their subsequent
exiles. The Children of Israel settled in Egypt, where they were later
enslaved by the Egyptians, and where they deteriorated spiritually to
the extent that, in many respects, they came to resemble their
enslavers. When G-d came to redeem them, He had to "take a nation from
the innards of a nation," entering into the bowels of Egypt to extract
His chosen people from the most depraved society on earth.
In the 3,300 years since, we have undergone many more centuries of
galut, as we came under the hegemony of Babylonians and Persians, Greeks and Romans, Christians and Communists. We are still in
galut
today. We may be free, on the whole, of the persecutions and hardships
we experienced in earlier generations, but the Jew is still a stranger
in the world, still deprived of the environment that nurtures his soul
and feeds his aspirations. And
galut in all its guises, our sages tell us, is the outgrowth of our first
galut in Egypt.
Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi explains that
galut was born out of a succession of dreams because
galut
is the ultimate dream. A dream is perception without the discipline of
reason. Here are all the stimuli and experiences we know from real life:
sights and sounds, thoughts and action, exhilaration and dread. Indeed,
everything in a dream is borrowed from our waking lives. But everything
is topsy-turvy, defying all norms of logic and credulity. In a dream, a
tragedy might be a cause for celebration, a parent might be younger
than his child, a cow may jump over the moon.
Galut is a dream: a terrible, irrational fantasy embracing the
globe and spanning millennia. A dream in which crime pays, the good die
young, and G-d's chosen people are slaughtered with impunity. A dream
in which what is right and true is seldom "realistic," and nonentities
such as "ignorance," "death" and "evil" are potent forces in our lives.
The surreality of
galut pervades our spiritual lives as well. Only in
galut can a person arise in the morning, purify himself in a
mikvah,
pray with ecstasy and devotion, study a chapter of Torah, and then
proceed to the office for a business day of connivance and deceit.
"Hypocrisy" is not an adequate description of this phenomenon--in many
cases, his prayer is sincere, and his love and awe of G-d quite real.
But he inhabits the dream-world of
galut, where antitheses coexist and inconsistencies are the norm.
In the real world, such absurdities were impossible. When the Holy
Temple stood in Jerusalem and bathed the world in Divine daylight, no
man with a residue of spiritual impurity (
tumah) could approach
G-d until he had undergone a process of purification. That G-d is the
source of life and that sin (i.e., disconnection from the Divine) is
synonymous with death was no mere conceptual truth, but a fact of life.
In the real world that was, and to which we will awake when the dream of
galut will evaporate, the spiritual laws of reality are as
apparent and as immutable as--indeed more apparent and immutable
than--the physical laws of nature.
However, says the Lubavitcher Rebbe, there is also a positive side to our present-day
hallucinatory existence.
In the real world, a true relationship with G-d can come only in the
context of a life consistently faithful to Him; in the dreamworld of
galut,
the imperfect individual can experience the Divine. In the real world,
only the impeccable soul can enter into the Sanctuary of G-d; in the
dreamworld of
galut, G-d "resides amongst them, in the midst of their impurity."
We daily await the Divine dawn that will dispel the cosmic fantasy
which, for much of our history, has crippled us physically and
spiritually. But in the moments remaining to the dream of
galut,
let us avail ourselves of the unique opportunity to be "hypocritical"
and "inconsistent" in the positive sense: by overreaching our spiritual
capacity, by being and doing more than we are able by any rational
measure of our merit and potential.
