Sweet Dreams (Parshas Vayeshev)

What is your dream? This question, put recently to a group of high school students, needed to be clarified. What did the teacher mean by “your dream”? Did the teacher mean what images popped into the students’ heads when they slept, or was the sought-after answer a far more difficult question of what it was that the students hoped to achieve in their lives? What the teacher wanted doesn’t matter now, but it certainly makes one wonder why it is that the word dream can have such disparate meanings.

From a cynical point of view, one could say that the correlation of the dreams we have and our nighttime reveries are because most of either will never come true. Perhaps, however, the truth is that if we had the bigger picture – the G-d’s eye view, one might say – we might be surprised at how much of both actually do come true, just not necessarily in the way we understand it.

 This week’s parsha, parshas Vayeshev, is full of dreams. There are the obvious dreams that come in sleep: Yosef’s dreams of sheaves of wheat bowing to his grand sheave, Yosef’s dream of the sun and moon and stars bowing to his star, and the dreams of Pharaoh’s butler and baker. (If these are unfamiliar to you, they are written out in the parasha.) There are, however, many of the other types as well. Here are a few:

 1) The Midrashim talk about the very first word of the parasha, vayeishev – and he settled, and how it indicates that Yaakov wanted to settle down in one place and just live out the rest of his days uneventfully. It was his dream to have a mundane, boring, and peaceful upper middle age/old age.

 2)      Yosef was a 17 year old youth who lost his mother, whose only brother was eight years younger, and whose father held him on a pedestal because of his dead mother. As much as Yaakov favored him and gave to him, and even though the Midrash tells us that he often told Yaakov misinterpreted understandings of things he saw his half-brothers were doing, one can only imagine that Yosef wanted to be part the fraternal unity of the other sons. Binyamin was only 9, a mere child, but Yosef was not so significantly younger than Naphtali, Asher, and Zevulun. Yosef dreamed of not being different.

 3)      Potifar’s wife, the woman who framed Yosef and sent him to jail, had dreams of her own. According to the Midrash she believed that her descendants were supposed to be part of Yaakov’s family. In truth, the connection was meant to come through her daughter (adopted, depending on the Midrash), Osnat. Potifar’s wife dreamed of being more than the wife of Paroah’s butcher.

 

When parshas Vayeshev ends, however, the only dreams that have come to any fruition are those of Paraoh’s imprisoned butler and baker. The latter was executed and the former was restored to his position at court, where he blissfully forgot all about Yosef.

Although the narratives of many of the people in Bereishis traverse multiple parshios, Vayeshev is the first parsha that ends on a cliffhanger, meaning that the full narrative arc is not completed. Yaakov’s story until now has been broken into sections – from birth until he leaves his father’s household is one parsha, the following parsha details the next part of his life, when he marries and has children up until he decides to return to the Land of his fathers, and then, again, there is a parsha that covers his return and resettlement into the land. Vayeshev could have been as Yaakov dreamed, a final parsha in which Yaakov grows old and passes on his knowledge and his beliefs to his growing family. Instead, Yaakov moves to the back burner, so to speak, and we begin the story of Yosef…and there are almost no more “neat and tidy” parshios.  Vayeshev and Parshsa Mikeitz that follows are far more intertwined than the parshios that came before them, for it is only in Mikeitz that we understand not only what Yosef’s prophetic sleeping dreams meant (his position to his family in Mitzrayim) but how the heartfelt dreams of people can have a long, and sometimes convoluted, way of coming true. Yaakov’s time in Mitzrayim was a time when he rested, Yosef was included among his brothers eventually, and Yosef married Osnat and they had two sons.

We all dream, both night dreams and “daydreams.” Things happen in our lives, however, that make our hopeful dreams feel impossible. Think how Yosef must have felt when his brothers spoke of killing him, threw him in a pit, and then sold him to passing merchants. Surely he thought there would never be a chance at reconciliation… and he was wrong. It was simply that the path to the dream was a little – a lot - different than expected.

Dreams are important. Dreams keep us moving forward through the world. When stumbling blocks (or even giant mountains) get in the way of our dreams, we just have to do our best to find their essence and give those dreams meaning in our lives. And we have to remember that what we understand of our dreams is not from the G-d’s eye view.

 

Shabbat Shalom.