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“At the end of two years’ time, Pharaoh had a dream”; it was a bad dream, followed by another bad dream, boding ill for himself and his people.  Luckily for him, his chief cupbearer remembered the wisdom of an imprisoned slave, and Joseph came out of the dark pit, into light, back to life. By interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams to bring about salvation in the face of a looming, long-term drought, Joseph was given a powerful position in the Pharaoh’s court.  This set the scene for his reunification with his brothers, and set the scene his father Jacob.

As impressive as his abilities to interpret a frightening situation and to find a solution, more significant was his conscious decision to empathize with and forgive his brothers, those who had thrown him into a pit and sold him to the Ishmaelites, those who had sinned by lying to their father Jacob that his beloved son Joseph was dead.

 

Even today, we are amazed by Joseph’s attitude to his brothers; we are impressed by Yehuda’s maturity, and his return (t’shuva) to the path of responsibility, as he pledges to Jacob that Benjamin will be safe upon their return to Egypt. “Teshuva” does not mean repentance, but rather a choice, as Maimonides says:  T’shuvah has occurred when a person, confronted with the opportunity to commit a transgression anew, refrains from doing so—not out of fear of being caught or failure of strength—because of newfound strength to find the proper path of action for the future.

 

The newfound empathy of Joseph to his brothers, in spite of their painful history, and Yehuda’s concern for his father’s well-being, teach us a lesson today.  It is so easy to hold on to anger for wrongs done to us, to want to punish those who do not fit into our neat package of our world-view.  How we wish that someone could magically solve our nightmares, so that we too could awaken from our bad dreams!  We fear for our lives, and don’t know how to dialogue with our enemies; we oppress, for fear of being oppressed ourselves; we have no empathy for those disadvantaged who are weak.

Perhaps if we could develop our collective sense of empathy, we would not be destroying the Beduin town of El Akariv for the seventh time; we would not need rallies to protest physical, emotional and verbal violence against women; we would not have to contemplate building a detention center for Africans fleeing for their lives.

 

As we celebrate Chanukah, the festival of lights, the rededication to “Torat Haim”, to the moral values inherent in our heritage, we fight the darkness of ignorance, of prejudice and fear of others unlike ourselves.  As much as we commemorate the battle to preserve the legacies of our tradition under threat of succumbing to a pagan ethic which placed human material needs at the center rather than a commitment to preserve the dignity of humanity in all its diversity, we must also fight today to make sure that the heritage we hold dear will light up the path toward defending human rights in our midst.

 

Shabbat Shalom