1.
“Jacob settled in the land where his fathers had sojourned, in the land of Canaan” (Gen. 37:1). How much calm, peace of mind, and security these words convey. Jacob, a man of storms and battles, the one who wrestled with God and with men, has finally reached rest and security. In his tents, there are the voices of children and the laughter of grandchildren. At last, he can rest. And then, suddenly, disaster. His beloved son, the living memory of his only beloved wife, is torn from him, and with him, Jacob’s life is torn apart; he refuses all comfort.
The Book of Genesis teaches humility. Shlomo Yitzchaki, known as the Rashi, writing in the 11th century, echoes a historical truth that applies not only to the private Jacob but also to the nation: “Jacob sought to dwell in peace, but the trouble of Joseph leapt upon him. The righteous seek to dwell in peace; the Holy One says: Is it not enough for the righteous what is prepared for them in the World to Come, that they also seek to dwell in peace in this world?”
2.
And indeed, how many times in our personal and national lives did we think we had reached rest and security, that we had passed an age of struggle, only to find ourselves surprised by yet another round of complications? Our sages taught: “The deeds of the fathers are a sign for the children.” This is not only educational but a sign of our destiny. Jacob is the seal of the patriarchs, the first to be called Israel, and all his children form the family that will become a tribe, and then a nation that will establish a kingdom. The life of the third patriarch is a sign for the life of our people throughout history, up to this very day.
The story of Jacob and Joseph is a tragic model of life on the edge, of walking along a cliff without knowing that the abyss is waiting for us. And we, the survivors of October 7, know very well the enormity of the abyss between the night of that Simchat Torah and the accursed day that followed. In us were fulfilled the words of Alterman in Simchat Aniyim (The Joy of the Poor): “And joy said: No, your destroyer has come, no, your last day has come.” A people whose life is all struggle and whose surroundings are hostile forces must never imagine that we have finally been granted peace.
3.
Jacob’s troubles are not merely personal. Jacob is Israel, the father of a nation destined to enter history with great tumult and to bring a message to the world. In contrast to mythological worldviews in which the gods play with human beings arbitrarily, Scripture expresses a clear position regarding reward and punishment and, above all, regarding how we view reality: the visible events and the hidden ones.
The Book of Genesis teaches us to read history on at least two levels: rational and spiritual. In the words of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook: causal perception and moral perception. Causal perception sees a logical order operating in the material world, with its economic, political, military, and social causes, extending all the way to the human being’s spiritual world. History’s laws can be explained rationally, as one event leads to another.
For roughly 2,500 years, Western philosophy has occupied itself with the logic of cause and effect, nihil est sine ratione, nothing exists without reason. But this rests on a limitation. Logic does not answer everything. We must liberate ourselves from “causal suffocation”, from the strict logic of history, and enter the realm of the historical dream. Here, the “moral perception” operates, in which higher laws govern events beyond what seems reasonable to us. In this view, historical events are not merely a chain of “this is how it happened,” but carry a meta-historical meaning of “this is how it ought to be.”
4.
Human psychology also works on two levels. The primary process of thought takes place in the unconscious, while conscious thought is secondary, although we tend to focus only on it. The truth is that one cannot understand the human being, or humanity, without delving into the hidden layers. Dreams are masks, garments of the primary process clothed in the secondary. Through the dream, the hidden strata break through into consciousness and demand interpretation.
The dreams in Genesis give us a glimpse behind the scenes of history, as if God had torn open a window to show how events truly unfold. The first dream was revealed to the father of the nation in the Covenant between the Pieces (Genessis 15), when he was told that his descendants would go down to a foreign land, become slaves, be swallowed in the Egyptian womb, where the Hebrew embryo would develop until, at the end of a historical process, they would emerge as a nation returning to the land of their fathers. From that moment on, the events of Genesis are directed toward that purpose, a deep current pushing reality forward. As we see, Joseph’s dreams are part of this drama. They foretell what will happen and push events onward: they generate the brothers’ hatred and Joseph’s sale into slavery in Egypt, leading eventually to the family’s descent after him.
5.
So it is also part of the modern history of our people. “A song of ascents: When the Lord restored the return of Zion, we were like dreamers” (Ps. 126:1). What lifted Joseph from the pit was a dream. What lifted our people from the pit of exile and subjugation was the historical dream of the return to Zion. To achieve this, we must rise beyond ordinary rational calculations and read our history through the “moral perception”, which peers into the realm of the dream, into the mighty forces that preserved us in the valley of the shadow of death among nations, and awakened us to emerge from the womb of the nations with great noise and many sacrifices, in order to return to Zion.
A year after he witnessed the humiliation of Alfred Dreyfus, and about a month before his revolutionary book “The Jewish State” was published, Herzl wrote in January 1896 about that very dream: “It is a wondrous thing that we Jews dreamed this royal dream through the long night of our history. And now the day has broken. We need only to wipe the sleep from our eyes, stretch our limbs, and turn the dream into reality. I am no visionary and no prophet, but I admit this: I hope with confidence that a mighty enthusiasm will one day seize the Jewish people.”
6.
We learned another lesson in historical humility from the long night of our exile. It was not in vain that we struggled to restore our spirit to its home. We are an eternal people, and therefore we must read the present with the perspective of eternity. Joseph dreamed dreams of greatness, and as youths do, he was in a hurry to fulfil them. He rushed to tell his brothers: “Listen now to this dream that I dreamed” (Gen. 37:6). Because of his boasting, his brothers hated him even more. He persisted and told further dreams, pushing the end as if to force destiny: “And behold, we were binding sheaves” (Gen. 37:7). How much violence is hidden in that verse (Sheaves are “Alumim” in the Hebrew source, which has similarity to “Alimut”, i.e. violence). The reaction was not long in coming. He nearly died, was thrown into a pit, sold into slavery in a foreign land, and torn from his family. Even there, he tried to hasten the end, begging the chief cupbearer in his prison pit to help secure his release. But the cupbearer forgot. His redemption would not come from him.
What would have happened had Herzl not witnessed the disgrace of Dreyfus? Would he still have founded the Zionist movement? What would have happened if the chief cupbearer had remembered Joseph and brought about his release? Perhaps Joseph would have returned home to Canaan or resumed work in Egypt, but in any case, he would not have been in the prison, “the place where the king’s prisoners are confined” (Gen. 39:20), available for the redeeming summons of Pharaoh. Two more years passed in the Egyptian prison until the dream again rose from the depths of the world’s unconscious to knock on the door of the ruler of the greatest empire of that era, in order to redeem Joseph and fulfil the great vision Abraham had seen in his dream. We need patience. And faith.
