This week finds us midway through the saga of Joseph in Miketz, our weekly Torah portion. And what a saga it is! Joseph’s journey is the stuff of great literature, epic drama, even a musical that was, shall we say, a modest success. Joesph began as a callow youth... terribly good looking, more than a little full of himself, the apple of his father Jacob’s eye.
Joseph is also a dreamer. In his younger days he uses the great dreams he had to make himself seem significant and others feel small. But as he grows, he became someone able to use his suffering – able to draw on the darker episodes of his own life to interpret the dreams of others. Once in Egypt, Joseph reaches out and guides the course of his adopted homeland for good. He is essentially a first-generation immigrant, as well as Torah’s first diaspora Jew. More than any year in recent memory, this part of his story echoes in our bones.
How many of us have surveyed the landscape we call home in the past two months and found it unrecognizable? When Jewish college students are afraid to leave their dorm rooms, when their university presidents charged to lead with intellectual and moral clarity can’t name calls for Jewish genocide as the hate speech they are, when a menorah in the public square is desecrated even briefly (and in New Haven yet), we can’t help but wonder what is happening to our homeland. This country we live in and contribute to, that we appreciate for its good and rally to make better… how, as Jews, have we come to be misunderstood and oppressed so publicly and quickly? Many of us thought that part of our story was, if not over, at least veiled. Joseph too must have wondered over the years, even as he rose to great heights in Egypt, where it was he truly belonged. Was he home? Are we?
I believe we are. Conditions are fraught, and experiences we didn’t think twice about a short time ago are deeply anxiety provoking. But like Joseph, our capacity to dream of times more generous and expansive, and to make them real, lives in us too. This present anti-Jewish hatred is not new. We have overcome it before, and we will again-- with unity, and tenacity, with vigilance in one pocket and pride in the other.
The extraordinarily gifted poet Amanda Gorman wrote:
“once we asked,
how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe?
Now we assert,
How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?
We will not march back to what was,
but move to what shall be.”
With the last candles of Chanukah, may this be the light – may this be the dream -- that carries us home.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Gutterman
