Mikketz
After years in prison, Joseph is brought to Pharaoh to interpret his dreams. He tells Pharaoh that seven years of plenty will be followed by seven years of famine, and how to deal with this, and Pharaoh appoints him viceroy of Egypt. Joseph’s brothers come to Egypt to buy food, don’t recognise Joseph, and are accused of treachery and imprisoned. When Joseph forces them to bring his youngest brother, Benjamin, to Egypt, Joseph plants his silver cup in his sack, leading to a final confrontation.
Hephzibah Anderson
Hephzibah Anderson is a UK-based journalist and broadcaster who will be presenting at this year's Limmud Conference. She writes regularly for the Observer and Bloomberg, can be heard talking books on BBC Five Live's Up All Night, and is the author of the memoir Chastened.
Mikketz almost always coincides with Chanukah, and it echoes the festival in its themes as well as in its moral complexity. Following on from the cliffhanger ending of Vayeshev, the parasha picks up Joseph’s story after years in prison. Remember that it was his dreams and the jealousy they inspired in his brothers that landed him there in the first place? Well, they are about to prove his get-out-of-jail-free card.
Summoned to interpret the Pharaoh’s troubling night visions, he correctly predicts that seven years of plenty will be followed by seven years of famine. But knowing isn’t enough: having glimpsed the future, he also advises on how to avoid its calamities by setting aside sufficient grain reserves. This is how he winds up as viceroy, Pharoah’s right-hand man and the second most powerful individual in Egypt.
If you are unable to use it wisely, a gift can be a curse, but Joseph has come a long way since his envious brothers left him for dead in a pit, stripped of his famous coat. As well as being able to peer into the future, he has learnt how to place himself in it.
But what of his family, his doting father and his scheming brothers? When they come to Egypt to buy grain they do not recognize Joseph, yet he knows them. To help them realise their wrongs, he first accuses them of being spies and has them imprisoned. Next he tells them that they may buy grain, but only if they return with Benjamin, the younger brother of whom they speak so much. It's then that Joseph plants a silver cup in Benjamin's sack, bringing about one final confrontation.
This is a story about faith and mastering what’s given to you, about realizing that even if the future is written in a divine hand, it remains up to you to determine what role you will play in it. Above all, it's about finding a way back to those who have betrayed you, about making some kind of peace, however uneasy, with the family to which you will always belong. None of this is easy, and along the way, Joseph is as challenged by doling out punishment as he was by finding himself on its receiving end.
The Chanukah tale is just as tangled. Beyond the dreidels and sweet songs, the chocolate gelt and the miracle of the oil lamp, is a story fraught with ironies. Essentially, it commemorates a Jewish civil war, a conflict in which bad things were done by the good, and good by the bad, in which the very notion of who is a Jew was called into question as the Maccabees pitted themselves against the assimilated Hellenists.
Joseph's experiences in Egypt key directly in to this. Despite his success and commitment to that nation, he never forgets his own faith and identity. But it is on the level of moving on from family betrayal – of patching up, if not fully healing, the wounds caused by internal strife – that it best compliments a festival whose lessons are more nuanced, and thus more rewarding, than we tend to recall.
Another Voice - Helena Miller
Dr Helena Miller is Director of Research and Evaluation, UJIA
"If you will it, it is not a dream". This often quoted phrase of Theodor Herzl resonates with this week’s sedra. Our biblical commentators emphasize that Joseph was not merely an interpreter of dreams, he was also a man of action, establishing a careful plan to deal with the seven years of plenty and seven years of famine. He developed workable outcomes to address the challenges outlined in dreams.
In the UK this year, the practical outcome of a dream will finally come to fruition. For the first time in the UK, we will have a cross-communal, pluralist Jewish secondary school. In September 2010, one hundred and eighty eleven year olds will enter JCoSS, the Jewish Community Secondary School. This project has been the dream of a few since 2001. It has been interpreted and re-interpreted, developed and concretized, into reality.
Like Joseph, hard work and tenacity has paid off – JCoSS will be proud to take its place beside the existing State-funded Jewish secondary schools in the UK. Unlike Joseph, the years of famine – of enormously challenging times to make this project happen – preceded what will be years of plenty, when a unique school will provide an excellent education for a wide range of Jewish young people.