From the Pit to the Palace, From Bondi to Jerusalem |
Parashat Miketz opens with a deceptively simple phrase: “Vayehi miketz shenatayim yamim”, “It was at the end of two years.” Two years of silence. Two years of forgotten promises. Two years in which Yosef sits in a pit of uncertainty, abandoned not only by those who wronged him, but by the one man who might have helped him escape it.
And then, suddenly, everything changes.
Pharaoh dreams. Yosef is summoned. The pit becomes a palace. The prisoner becomes a leader. Not gradually, not incrementally, but in one breathtaking reversal.
Chanukah arrives each year at precisely this moment in the Torah, and not by accident.
Miketz and Chanukah are both about what happens when darkness overstays its welcome, and is then shattered not by brute force, but by clarity, courage, and identity.
This year, that contrast feels painfully sharp.
Because while the Jewish story tells us that light ultimately breaks through, Jewish life in the Diaspora increasingly feels like it is stuck in Yosef’s pit, waiting, exposed, unsure who will remember us when things go wrong.
Bondi and Manchester are not just place names. They are symbols.
Bondi, where Jews gathered for safety and celebration, only to be reminded how thin that safety can be. Manchester, where the holiest day of the year was grotesquely violated, where now synagogues resemble fortresses, and where the oldest Jewish communities in........