The Teachings of Parashah Miketz |
Parashah Miketz is not a story of redemption, nor of success. It is a study in transformation under reversal: what happens to a human being when the conditions that shaped them are violently replaced by their opposite. Its question is neither moral nor psychological, but ontological: can a self formed in descent survive ascent without being overwritten—or must it be transformed to endure it?
The parashah opens against the unresolved wound of Vayeshev. Yosef is forgotten—not betrayed again, not attacked, simply erased. This erasure is not dramatic, but it is lethal. To be forgotten while still alive is a form of burial. Yet Miketz does not hurry to repair this injustice. Instead, it introduces time: “at the end of two years.” These years are not punishment; they are calibration. The silence is not empty. Something is being measured. Miketz insists that providence does not act when suffering is loud, but when necessity reaches its exact proportion. Meaning ripens in darkness, and history moves only when the world is ready to receive what has been formed there.
Power enters the narrative through dreams. Pharaoh dreams, but cannot understand what he sees. The Torah draws a sharp line between perception and comprehension. Power can receive images, warnings, and signs, yet lack the inner reader required to translate them into meaning. Dreams without interpretation are noise. Miketz suggests that the failure of empires is not ignorance, but unreadability of the soul. When reality speaks in symbols and no one understands, it is not because meaning is absent, but because the capacity........