Miketz – summary
Yosef interprets Pharaoh’s dreams of seven fat cows and seven thin cows, predicting seven years of abundance followed by seven years of famine. Pharaoh appoints Yosef as viceroy of Egypt, and Yosef stores grain during the abundant years. When famine strikes, Yosef’s brothers come to Egypt to buy food but don’t recognize him; he tests them by accusing them of being spies, keeping Shimon hostage, and demanding they bring Binyamin. When they return with Binyamin, Yosef frames him as a thief by planting his goblet in Binyamin’s sack, setting up the ultimate test of whether his brothers will abandon Binyamin as they once abandoned him.
This is also Shabbat of Chanukah, and the beginning of a new month, Tevet, so we read not from one, not from two, but from three scrolls!!!
Miketz – Yosef, God and God’s names
I want to open tonight by saying that Miketz is the first portion I ever learned. So I have a soft spot in my heart for MIketz, and every year I feel like I’m seeing an old friend when I read Miketz.
One of the intersting aspects of Miketz is that when Yosef stands before Pharaoh and interprets his dreams, he consistently uses the name Elohim for God: “Biladi Elohim ya’aneh et shlom Paro’ah” – “God will give Pharaoh a favorable answer” (Genesis 41:16). Not once does he use the Tetragrammaton, the name Havaya that represents God’s infinite mercy and transcendence. This is true throughout the Yosef saga.
This is not accidental. Yosef understood something profound about where he stood and whom he addressed.
Centuries later, when Moshe comes before another Pharaoh with God’s message, that Pharaoh will declare: “Lo yadati et Ad-nai” – “I do not know Ad-nai” (Exodus 5:2), using the Name of Four Letters, Yud and Hey and Vav and hey. Pharaoh knows and recognizes God as Elohim – the God of nature, of power, of judgment and limitation. But Yud Hey Vav and Hey, that is pronounced as Ad-nai or Havaya, is the name that speaks of God’s intimate presence, of transcendence beyond nature, of the One who was, is, and will be – this, Pharaoh cannot know.
Yosef, with the wisdom that makes him worthy to lead, speaks in the language his audience can hear. Elohim is the name associated with din, with judgment, with the forces of nature and governance. It represents God operating through the structures of the world – through cause and effect, through the seven years of plenty and seven years of famine. This is a God Pharaoh can understand: a God of order, of dreams that predict futures, of natural cycles.
But there’s something deeper here about Yosef himself.
Jewish mystical teachings see Yosef as a symbol of the Jewish soul in galut, in exile. The dungeon where he languished for years represents the darkness and constriction of this physical world, where the soul finds itself imprisoned in a body, surrounded by forces that seem to obscure the Divine light. And Pharaoh – not as villain, but as the structure of reality itself – represents those very limitations and difficulties through which we grow.
In Hasidic thought, we learn a paradox: it is specifically through tzimtzum, through divine constriction and concealment, that creation becomes possible. The infinite light had to contract to make space for finite beings. Similarly, it is through the gevurot, the forces of limitation and judgment represented by the name Elohim, that we develop and grow.
Rabbi Abraham Twerski taught a deep lesson about this through the life of a lobster. A lobster is a soft creature living inside a rigid shell. As the lobster grows, that shell becomes confining and uncomfortable. The lobster feels pressure and discomfort. It retreats under a rock for protection, sheds its shell, and grows a new one. Eventually, that shell too becomes uncomfortable, and the process repeats. The stimulus for growth is discomfort – the lobster only grows because it feels constricted.
So too with us. Without resistance, there can be no strength. Without darkness, we cannot learn to seek light. Without the pressure of limitation, we would never shed our old shells and grow into who we are meant to become.
This is the deep wisdom we acknowledge twice daily when we recite the Shema. “Shema Yisrael, Havaya Elokeinu, Havaya Echad” – Hear O Israel, Havaya is our Elohim, Havaya is One. We are declaring that the God of infinite transcendence (Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey) and the God of limitation and constriction (Elohim) are not two separate forces, but One. The very constrictions we experience, the very dificulties, the very gevurot that press against us like the lobster’s shell, are expressions of the same divine love that sustains us, that lovingly calls us to grow. Through recognizing this oneness – that Elohim is Havaya in concealment, that dificulties are love in disguise – we transform our struggles into catalysts for growth.
Yosef in the dungeon is each of us in this world. The descent is necessary for the ascent. Yosef had to go down to the pit, down to Egypt, down to the dungeon, precisely so that he could rise to become the sustainer of life during famine. His personal trials prepared him to save the world. The same thing happens to our souls: we need to descend and experience constrictions in order to grow. Constrictions are always there – it is in our hands how we respond to them. Can we see constrictions as coming from God’s love, from God’s invitation for our souls to grow?
When Yosef speaks of Elohim to Pharaoh, he is acknowledging this truth: we are in a world governed by Elohim-consciousness, by apparent limitation and natural law. But for one who has spiritual vision, we ,arinate in God’s love. Even the strictures and difficulties contain holiness. Even in the dungeon, God is present.
The difference between Yosef and the later Pharaoh of the Exodus is this: Yosef knows that Elohim is not separate from Yud-Hey-Vav and Hey. The God of nature and the God beyond nature are One. Limitation itself comes from infinite compassion. But Pharaoh, locked in his palace of power, can only see the surface – the name Elohim, the forces of control – and mistakes them for ultimate reality.
This is our goal: like Yosef, to recognize the divine even in the constriction, even in the darkness, even in our dificulties. To know that when we speak of Elohim in this world, we are really speaking about Havaya concealed in the garments of nature. The dungeon becomes a place of preparation. Egypt’s challenges become catalysts for growth. And we, like Yosef emerging from prison to palace, discover that the descent was always part of the ascent.
When we feel the pressure of our own confining shells, when life feels constricted and difficult, we can remember both the lobster and Yosef: the discomfort is not punishment but invitation. It’s time to grow. And in that moment of pressure, we proclaim: Echad – it is all One, all divine, all part of the journey from dungeon to palace, from constriction to expansion, from exile to redemption.
May this be a week in which we find ways of coming out of darkness and bringing light to the world, each of us, with the special and specific light of our own growth. Shabbat Shalom