Vayeshev – Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This

I had a disturbing dream the other night.  Upon awaking, I thought it best not to share the details with my wife.  Why upset her (too)?  As the Mussar giant Reb Israel Salanter said,

At least one scientist has cautioned us not to share the contents of our dreams with others.  Professor Jim Davies writes that “most dreams are negative” [anyway], and uniquely emotional to the dreamer in ways that cannot be appreciated by others.^[1]  His conclusion (which is also the subtitle of his article) is that dreams “are really meaningful to you but not to anybody else.”

Not everyone agrees.  Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung created a cottage industry out of dream interpretations.  They, of course, were not the first to see that dreams were a window into the soul.  Millennia of classical Jewish thought has taught us that dreams are God’s way of giving us a cloudy glimpse into the possible.

Joseph did not have the benefit of reading Freud’s “The Interpretation of Dreams”.  Nor did he have the ability to google “should I tell my estranged bothers about my amazing dreams”.  Still, he surely should have known that revealing his egocentric dreams would not endear him to his brothers.  After all, they already detested him, as the Torah notes:

Rashi comments that to their credit, the brothers were not two-faced; they didn’t/couldn’t/wouldn’t pretend to like Joseph.  I’m not so sure that it is indeed preferable to show one’s contempt but, in any event, this open hostility does add nuance to our question.  Why did Yoseph poke them with dreams that implied that he – the youngest (except for Benyamin) – would lord over them.  Could he have possibly envisioned a different reaction from the one he got:

Moreover, having antagonized them with his smug dreams, why in the world did Yoseph not learn from his mistake?  Instead, he compounded the mistake soon afterwards:

An answer is offered by the Sforno.  A few verses earlier the Torah describes Yoseph as the seventeen-year-old shepheard, but in addition to giving us his chronological age, Yoseph is also described as a נַ֗עַר, a lad.  This leads the Sforno to teach us that Yoseph was a bit of a tattle-tale and braggart:

Sforno notes that Yoseph demonstrated immaturity by relating his dreams to his brothers.  Sforno applies the concept known as Occam’s Razor – the simplest solution tends to be the right one.  He may have been smart, but Yospeh was a smart aleck.

The Or HaChayim takes a 180 degree turn and posits that Yoseph’s intention was not the product of youthful indiscretion but rather great maturity in that he wanted לקרב הלבבות יחד, to draw his brothers’ hearts nearer to him.

How did he intend to accomplish this?  The Or HaChayim notes a famous gemarah (Berachot 55b) that teaches that

Dreams, according to the Talmud, become prophetically ‘true’ only when they are articulated, interpreted, understood and embraced.  To drive this point home, the Talmud there teaches us that there are twenty-four possible outcomes of a dream, each one as viable and ‘correct’ as the next.  There is a “Heisenberg uncertainty” quality to a dream.

In other words, dreams are not prose or even poetry.  They are neither indiscriminate firings of neurons nor the mind’s attempt to make sense of yesterday.  Rather, dreams are the paints and brushes placed into the hands of an artists.  The interpreter traces, sketches and engraves his portrait using the raw materials supplied by the dreamer.  His finished canvas is as different as the self-portraits of Rembrandt and Picasso.

Yoseph was a gifted artist with many talents, the greatest of which was the ability to glimpse the possible.  He desperately wanted to paint a beautiful, loving, mosaic for his brothers.  In fact, knowing that they were predisposed to seeing only ugliness in him, Yoseph literally begs them to listen to him:

We are not told how Yoseph would have interpreted his own dreams to assuage his brothers’ contempt for him because they cut him off and quickly offered their own interpretation.  This had the effect of cementing the dream’s outcome and thus turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy:

Yoseph tried yet again with another dream, hoping to offer an interpretation that would be pleasing and healing.  Unfortunately, the brothers were not any more receptive this time around, and the die was cast.

Some years later, while sitting in a dark prison cell, Yospeh is once again afforded the opportunity to interpret dreams.  Yoseph again begs that he be allowed to interpret the dream and thus set the future events in motion (Breishit 40:8):

But time has clearly taken its toll on him and Yoseph has matured enough to admit out loud that any talent he may have is a gift from God.  With this combination of self-assurance and humility, the fellow prisoners – and later Pharaoh – are willing to hear him out.

Shabbat Shalom!

[1] See, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-you-shouldnt-tell-people-about-your-dreams/