Miketz מקץ
Miketz is dominated by two of the great encounters in the Torah. The first is the reversal in Joseph’s fortunes. Forgotten and abandoned in prison, he is brought out to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams, which he does with ease. Having told Pharaoh that the dreams portend eventual drought and famine, he then articulates a solution to the problem. Pharaoh, impressed, appoints Joseph to high office in Egypt, second only to himself.
The second occurs when Joseph’s brothers, driven by famine in Canaan, come to Egypt to buy food. They come before Joseph, but fail to recognise him as their brother, though he recognises them. Joseph, without disclosing his identity, sets in motion a complex scenario, designed to test his brothers, that reaches a climax in the next parasha.
The first two of the following studies look at the subtle interplay between human choice and divine intervention, traced more delicately and deeply in the Joseph story than anywhere else in Tanakh. The third explores the themes of particularity and universality in Judaism, as exemplified in the conversation between Pharoah and Joseph. The fourth sets the meeting between Joseph and his brothers in the context of three other narratives of recognition and non-recognition in Genesis. This turns out to be one of Genesis’s major themes: appearance and reality in human interaction, the difference between who we seem to be and who we are.
These three tensions (freewill vs. providence, particular vs. universal, and appearance vs. reality) lie at the heart of Judaism, and they reach their fullest exposition in the story of Joseph.
Man Proposes, God Disposes
Nowadays we think of Genesis as a book, something we read in our own time, at our own pace, possibly in a single session. Listening to Torah in the synagogue, though, is a different kind of experience, and involves a different relationship to the text. There, the reading is public, not private. The words are sung, not spoken. We encounter the text through the listening ear more than through the seeing eye. And we do so section by section (each called a parasha), in weekly instalments. Genesis is divided into twelve such sections. The point at which Jewish custom makes the break is sometimes significant, and contributes to our understanding of the text.
Rarely is a break more subtle and suggestive than the one between Vayeshev and Miketz. Vayeshev ends with Joseph’s bid for freedom. Having correctly interpreted the chief steward’s dream – that in three days he would be restored to his position – Joseph pleads with him:
“When all goes well with you, remember me and show me kindness; mention me to Pharaoh and get me out of this prison. For I was forcibly carried off from the land of the Hebrews, and even here I have done nothing to deserve being put in a dungeon.” (40:14–15)
The chief steward fails to do so. The last line of Vayeshev underlines the point by repeating it: “The chief steward, however, did not remember Joseph; he forgot him.” On that dispiriting note, Vayeshev ends, and in the days before printing and the widespread availability of books, those who did not know the story had to wait a full week before discovering what happens next. The break is calculated to maximise suspense.
The opening words of Miketz are, “At the end of two full years.” Our suspense, it now turns out, mirrors Joseph’s. We have waited a week; he had to wait two years, his hope of release seemingly dashed. Then something happens to prompt the memory of the chief steward. Pharaoh dreams. Intuitively he senses that the dreams are significant, and he asks his ḥartumim (magicians, interpreters of mysteries) what they mean. Their explanations fail to satisfy him. Only then does the chief steward remember Joseph, who had so accurately interpreted his own dream two years earlier.
Joseph is then taken from jail, washed, dressed and brought before Pharaoh. He interprets the dreams, proposes a solution to the problem they foretell – seven years of famine, after seven years of plenty – and is made viceroy of Egypt, second in authority only to Pharaoh himself. The darkness of the last parasha ends, and from tragedy we move towards a fairy-tale ending.
But the initial impression of this parasha is not the happy conclusion, but the delay: “At the end of two full years.” Joseph sought his freedom and he obtained it – yet he did not obtain it because he sought it. The steward forgot. Joseph had to wait. Something else – Pharaoh’s dreams – had to intervene. There was a break between cause and effect – a break emphasised experientially by the parasha division, forcing us to relive, as it were, something of Joseph’s sense of disappointment, of time passing, of the slow fading of hope. This, it transpires, is more than just a device of style, a way of maintaining the suspense. There is something more substantive at stake, a coded message we must decipher if we are to understand the full depth of the story.
The reason is that this is not the first time the Torah uses such a device in the Joseph narrative. Several chapters earlier there is an extremely enigmatic passage at the point where the brothers decide to sell Joseph into slavery:
Then they sat down to a meal. Looking up, they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead with camels laden with spices, balm and myrrh to be taken to Egypt. Then Judah said to his brothers, “What profit is it to us if we kill our brother and cover up his blood? Come, let us sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hands upon him; for he is our brother, our own flesh.” His brothers agreed. Then there passed by Midianite merchants, and they pulled Joseph up out of the pit and sold him for twenty shekels of silver to the Ishmaelites, who brought Joseph to Egypt. (37:25–28)
It is a confusing episode. Who pulled Joseph from the pit? Who sold him to the Ishmaelites? Was it the brothers or the Midianites? The subject, “they,” is ambiguous.
The commentators offered many interpretations. Of these, the simplest is given by Rashbam, who reads it as follows: The brothers, having thrown Joseph into the pit, sat down some distance away to eat. Reuben sneaked back to rescue Joseph, but found the pit empty and cried, “The boy is not! And I, where can I go?" Rashbam points out that the brothers did not calm him by telling him they had sold Joseph. They seem as surprised as he was. It follows that the brothers, having seen the Ishmaelites in the distance, decided to sell Joseph to them, but before they had the chance to do so, a second group of travellers, the Midianites, heard Joseph’s cries, saw the possibility of selling him to the Ishmaelites, and did so.
In other words, the brothers intended to sell Joseph, and Joseph was sold, but not by the brothers. They sought to do the deed, and the deed was done, but not by them.
That is precisely what happened in the case of Joseph’s bid for freedom. He sought to be released from prison, and he was released from prison, but not in the way he planned. Two years had to pass. Some further, unexpected event – Pharaoh’s dreams – had to happen. There is a break between cause and effect, between intention and outcome. The precise parallel between these two passages – the sale of Joseph, and his release from prison – is too marked to be accidental. The Torah is signalling something to the attentive reader.
It is telling us about the nature of divine providence. In both episodes, between intention and outcome, there was an intervention – in the first case, the appearance of the Midianites, in the second, Pharaoh’s dreams. The Torah is giving us a rare glimpse of the workings of providence in individual lives. Nothing in the Joseph story happens by chance – and where an event most looks like chance, that is where divine intervention is most evident in retrospect.
The Joseph story is written to be read at two levels. On the surface it is a story about human beings and their relationships. It is not a happy story. Brothers are prepared to sell their own flesh and blood into slavery. The chief steward, released from prison, immediately forgets his fellow prisoner, failing to intercede on his behalf. People betray people. Dreams are mere dreams. Hopes are destined to be dashed on the rocks of reality. That is the point at which Vayeshev ends.
But as events unfold in Miketz we realise that at a deeper level some other force has been at work all along. God has been monitoring the entire sequence of events, arranging the necessary strategic interventions to ensure that the outcome will be as planned. This is not obvious, as it is, for example, in the story of the Exodus. There the hand of God, in the form of the plagues and the division of the Sea, is manifest. Here it is concealed. It takes reflection and the ability to read beneath the surface to sense it at all. The Joseph story is more than a story about Joseph. It is a story about each of us, and the subtle interweaving of apparent happenstance and divinely-scripted destiny.
We are at best co-authors of our lives. Not realizing it at the time, the very act the brothers did to prevent Joseph’s dreams coming true was the first step in their coming true. As for Joseph, unbeknown to him, his life was part of a larger story – revealed by God to Abraham generations earlier when He told him that his children would suffer slavery in a land not their own.
Sometimes we too catch a glimpse of the workings of fate in our lives. Many times, I have had prayers answered – but never when I expected, nor in the way I imagined. In many cases, the answer came after I had given up hope. Providence exists. In Shakespeare’s words “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will.”1.Hamlet, act V, scene 2, 10–11.
But there is a pause, an intervention, a break in the sequence of cause and effect, which says: things do not happen merely because we wish them, but because they are part of the larger scheme of things.
What Joseph discovered in the hiatus between the two parashot is that, in addition to initiative and enterprise, we also need patience, humility and trust. If our prayers are legitimate, God will answer them, but not necessarily when or how we think He will. That is the meaning of Miketz – “At the end of two full years.” We must do our part; God will do His. Between them there is a gap, not just in time, but in consciousness. We learn that we are not sole masters of our fate. Sometimes it is only after many years that, looking back, we see the pattern in our life, and understand how Providence has shaped our destiny. Miketz is the space we make in our minds for the things not under our control. The name of that space is faith.