MIKEITZ
This parsha (41-44:17), “At the end” is the second of the four parshiot in the Joseph cycle. It begins with Pharoah’s two dreams and Joseph’s successful interpretation of them. This leads to Joseph’s elevation to being Pharoah’s second in command to prepare for the impending drought and lean times. The famine spreads “throughout the whole world” including Canaan, and Jacob sends his sons, except for Benjamin, down to Egypt to buy wheat, and thus begins the famous family reunification drama.
The text builds up the tension leading to reunification through the mechanism of the return of the money to the saddlebags of the brothers. There’s a second trip to Egypt with all the brothers including Benjamin, the placing of Jacob’s goblet into Benjamin’s saddlebags and the arresting of Benjamin as a thief and Judah’s desperate attempt to save Benjamin. The story plays with the familial history of deception, including the theme of hiding stolen things in saddle bags.
The parsha ends with utter uncertainty about what will happen, though of course we have read and heard the end of the story, as had our ancestors for literally thousands of years.
I want to focus on the following themes.
The distinction between myth and historical narrative.
How do you distinguish dreams that accurately foretell the future, from leftover debris from the day?
Delivery systems of vision/mythopoetic identity
Judah’s maturation
One of the most fascinating characteristics of the Hebrew Bible is that it presents myths as if they were history. What do I mean by this? Myths, in my use of the term following Mircea Eliade, a preeminent scholar of the history of religions, are stories about Gods, heroes or revered ancestors. These stories are beyond our human ability to replicate even while we seek to emulate the God, heroes or revered ancestors and thus draw closer to the sacred.
History, on the other hand, is an attempt to recount stories in factual ways to inform us about what happened. Writing history, contrary to our popular image, isn’t simply a recital of facts. Every historian chooses what s/he will include and exclude and tells their stories based on who they are and their own purposes in being an historian. Yet there has been general agreement that you can’t simply ignore inconvenient facts and pretend that they don’t exist (though this agreement is breaking down as we see in our politics). If you are writing about the American Civil War, even if you think Robert E. Lee is the greatest general ever to walk the face of the earth, you still discuss his decision to send Picket’s brigade straight up an open hill into the face of a well prepared, numerically stronger and dug in Union army that led to the destruction of Picket’s force.
But the writer of myth could ignore this inconvenient fact because his/her purpose is not to describe what happened using some kind of general consensus about what is a fact and what is not. No, the mythologist writes, or almost always speaks, to describe how the presence of the sacred unfolds in our profane world and how we imperfect humans might more closely align ourselves with the sacred.
Eliade writes somewhere that myth is truer than history. I take this to mean that myth speaks to us more deeply than history. It connects us to the realm of the sacred or to spirit in a way that mere history can never do. Evaluating a myth by asking how historically accurate it is e.g. was the world really created in six days, is completely missing the point and asking the wrong question. The right question is whether the myth draws us closer to the sacred.
The story we have of Joseph so far looks like history but is actually myth. That is, it looks like we are supposed to take it literally, but we are not.
Why do I think it is myth and not history? Because the story makes no historical sense, though it does make mythological sense. I find it impossible to believe that none of the Pharoah’s religious specialists at court could interpret what seem to me to be two obvious dreams. Not only could they not interpret the dreams, they couldn’t even connect the two dreams to each other. That beggars the imagination. Then there is Joseph’s rapid rise to prominence. What are the chances that this total outsider with no power base at all could instantaneously rise to the second most powerful position in the most powerful empire of its time?
Third, his plan to build up reserves against the coming famine is accepted without any grumbling. Raise your hand if you know about a society that in a time of material plenty tightens its belt and stashes away the surplus because of an unseen potential problem. I don’t know of any, and neither do you.
Further, contrast the way the Joseph story is told with the way the stories of the Judges, Prophets and Kings of Israel are told in Joshua, Judges, Samuel I and II and Kings I and II. Those books are histories, properly speaking, even if they contain things that we think are miracles such as the sun not setting for Joshua or Elijah’s activities against the priests of Baal. The arc of these stories as a whole is perfectly plausible and full of prosaic successes and failures. Not so Joseph.
Why is this important? How does it change our reading of Joseph if we think it is myth and not history? It changes the questions we ask of the text. Here’s an example.
Let’s take Joseph’s interpretation of the Pharoah’s dreams. Instead of asking, for instance, how come none of Pharoah’s magicians could interpret the dreams or if the building of central granaries was a land grab for the throne, we would ask how we can be a channel for the divine to interpret dreams. For that is what Jacob claims he is. This is a much, much, richer question. When the wine steward and the baker complain they have no one to interpret their dreams, Joseph says “Surely God can interpret!” (40:8). When he is brought before the Pharoah having been introduced as the person who interpreted the dreams of the wine steward and the baker, Pharoah says to him “Now I have heard it said of you that for you to hear a dream is to tell it’s meaning.” Joseph replies “Not I! God will see to Pharoah’s welfare.” (41:15-16)
What are the stories or the symbols that link you to the sacred? What’s the connection between the stories or symbols that link you to the sacred and your view of how you can be a channel for the divine?
Joseph begins his interpretation of Pharoah’s dreams by saying “Pharoah’s dreams are one and the same. God has told Pharoah what he is about to do.” (41:25) How do we know that these dreams are truly from God and not just some wish fulfillment or nightmare or insignificance come from our day to day lives into our dreamtime? Joseph concludes the interpretation “As for Pharoah having had the same dream twice; it means that the matter has been determined by God and that God will soon carry it out.” (41:32)
This reminds me of a lesson I learned from Michael Harner in shamanic soul retrieval. How do you know that an animal is really a power animal for you? It has to appear three times. Once or twice does not count. I have no idea why three sightings is the magic number, just as I have no idea why two is the magic number for dreams here. And note that the dreams in the Joseph story occurs in twos and each pair of dreams are remarkably similar to each other. Joseph has two dreams where his brothers are bowing down to him (37:5-11), there are 2 dreams he interprets in prison (40:9-19), and the Pharoah has two dreams. (41:1-7); the brothers also bow down to Joseph twice in the family drama.
How do we verify that something is true for us? One way is for elders/authorities who have been through it to vouch that you have had a true vision. Think of the recounting of the vision quest in Native American societies to tribal elders, or answers to Zen Koans being presented to the Roshi (master) in one on one interviews. It’s also akin to the right of any Rabbi to confer smicha (ordination) on someone else. Another way is what phenomenologist and psychologist Eugene Gendlin calls “felt sense”, a bodily sensation that something is true. Tradition can also be a sense of validation and I’m sure there are others.
So how you know what’s true? What kind of rules, if any do you have?
Joseph develops a delivery system that fulfills his mythopoetic identity. Joseph is given the mythopoetic identity by Pharoah of Zaphenath-paneah which means something like “God speaks, he lives” or “Creator of life” or “He who explains what is hidden” (Rashi). (41:45) This is a mythopoetic name, following Plotkin, (see Journey to Soul Initiation), like Jacob becoming Israel, Godwrestler; it isn’t an occupational name like Smith, Miller or Schneider (which means tailor). The name describes (or attempts to) who Joseph is at his deepest level.
As we have seen looking at Jacob, the question after being granted a mythopoetic identity is how to make this identity manifest in the world. Plotkin calls this developing a delivery system. It is an arduous task to figure out how to embody that name once you return to your home from your wandering; this is a task at which Jacob apparently fails to even attempt. But Joseph is given the delivery system as part of his interpretation of Pharoah’s dream and lays it out in three short verses (41:33-36). This is the system of putting grain by in the years of plenty against the years of famine to follow. Joseph is going to be a creator of life by saving people from dying in a famine by storing grain from the surplus of the seven fat years and thus not having people die from starvation. That’s the delivery system. Amazingly clear. Speaking for my own struggles in developing and implementing a delivery system, the ease with which Joseph does this is mind boggling.
Do you have any sense of your true identity such as a sacred name? What’s you sense of your true purpose, of why you were born in this body at this time? How do you manifest that true identity or true purpose—i.e. what is your delivery system?
Judah’s maturation is a parallel narrative in the Joseph story. Judah is the fourth son of Leah. The first three sons are named in the context of her bitterness that she is not the preferred wife (29:32-4) and then she decided to praise the divine when her fourth son was born and named him Judah, from the Hebrew for praise (odeh). So he already reflects a shift in his mother’s attitude towards her children and her life.
Judah’s next appearance in the text is in chapter 37 when he is responsible for Joseph winding up in Egypt. Joseph has been thrown into the pit in the wilderness, and some of his brothers simply want to kill him. (37:20). Reuven saves him from being killed and the text says in order to bring him back to Jacob. But Judah has a different idea, which is to sell him as a slave and he persuades his brothers to go along with this plan because they will profit from it—they sell Joseph for 20 weights of silver (37:26-28). Joseph, as we will see later, believes that Egypt is part of the divine plan for his life, so Judah should plausibly be seen as someone furthering the divine plan, rather than just someone out for money. We then see Judah in the story with his daughter in law Tamar that we discussed last week where he does an otherwise unprecedented thing in the Biblical narrative—he admits he is wrong and a woman is right.
Judah plays a decisive role again in our parsha in saving the family. First, he is the son who stands up to Jacob and insists that Benjamin accompany them back to Egypt to get grain, as Joseph (who is not yet recognized by his brothers), has insisted. (43:3-11) This is after Reuven, the oldest, has unsuccessfully attempted to persuade Jacob of the same thing (42:37-38) and the next oldest two have said nothing. Then he functions as the spokesperson for the brothers after Benjamin has been caught with Joseph’s silver cup in his saddle bags (this is part of Joseph’s drama with them). Judah gives a really long and heartfelt speech at the very beginning of the next parsha attempting to persuade Joseph to accept him as a replacement for Benjamin to be Joseph’s slave. This pleading leads to Joseph’s revelation of himself to his brothers (45:3)
I think, and it has been my experience, that maturation is often some kind of mysterious congruence of a person being ready to mature and then circumstances calling that maturation forth. Physical maturation may be largely a given, but emotional/spiritual maturation is not. Think of some of the highlights of your own maturation process. Were there external circumstances that pushed you forward? Had you done at least some of the necessary work beforehand? Did you feel utterly unprepared and were you actually unprepared?
QUESTIONS
What are the stories or the symbols that link you to the sacred? What’s the connection between the stories or symbols that link you to the sacred and your view of how you can be a channel for the divine?
How do you know what’s true? What kind of rules, if any do you have?
Do you have any sense of your true identity such as a sacred name? What’s you sense of your true purpose, of why you were born in this body at this time? How do you manifest that true identity or true purpose—i.e. what is your delivery system?
Think of some of the highlights of your own maturation process. Were there external circumstances that pushed you forward? Had you done at least some of the necessary work beforehand? Did you feel utterly unprepared and were you actually unprepared?
