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Parshat Miketz (Genesis 41:1-44:17)
4th of Tevet, 5761

When we read a text (or, for that matter, watch a movie, listen to a piece of music, or view a painting), we bring some set of premises and presumptions into play. We also pull up particular techniques to enhance and explain the nature of our experience of the object.

Clearly this is quite true with what we read: we read a pulp novel quite differently than a magazine article, and a piece of journalism differently than a textbook. Because reading is so ubiquitous, we resurrect those techniques easily and unconsciously. The same is true for music. For example we listen to "classical" music differently than golden-oldies or, heaven forfend, contemporary pop music. Some of that of course pertains to the setting. Listening to the radio in our car is different than attending to music in a concert hall, or creating a numinous sense in a worship space.

Some of the assumptions we make when we read a text are fairly obvious. Is the text serious or fun, does it affect our lives, are we gaining specific detailed information that we need to apply? When it comes to our holy texts, we make more self-conscious assumptions: Is the text directly divine, divinely-inspired, human-created, flawed in its transition or not?

But we also make more subtle, quiet assumptions that affect the way we read the text. For example, do we know (or remember) the end of the story as we read it? Should we know the story as we read it, or should we conveniently forget?

In the amusing romantic comedy with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, "You've Got Mail", an exchange between Ryan and Hanks is set up about Ryan's reading habits. She has previously, indirectly, informed Hanks that she reads Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" every other year or so. Now, as she comments on the book, she claims she cannot remember whether the two protagonists, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, get together or not. Well, obviously she knows the plot of the book (they do), but she purposefully doesn't remember. The excitement of the story, on one level, is the surprise for the reader as the plot unfolds.

Those kind of "reading for pleasure" skills are common to most of us. I suspect we all have our favorite books, and, when we re-read them, we very much want to know what is going to happen next. We savor the surprise, even as we objectively know the story.

The question is: are those the reading-cum-story skills that we should bring to reading Torah text?

We could ask what the authors of these stories want us to get out of them-and whether surprise as such is one element. But we could also ask if the authors would want us to attend to the stories, the texts, in a different manner.

Suppose, in this week's portion, Miketz, that we suspend our surprise. In other words, we know what is going to happen. An argument could be made that is how these texts were traditionally read: Not only do we know what is going to happen next, we know, fully and consciously, how the story is going to turn out altogether. Coming to the text that way lets us have a very different read. When we read or study the parsha, we refer not only to the events that happen previously, but shall also happen subsequently.

All this is preliminary, but necessary. Consider the following. In Miketz, at the end of the two years of Yosef's imprisonment, Pharaoh has his dreams. His court magicians are unable to interpret them for him. Told of Yosef by the chief cupbearer who had been in prison with him "Pharaoh sent and had Yosef called.// They hurriedly brought him out of the pit;// He shaved, changed his clothes and came before Pharaoh.// Pharaoh said to Yosef: I have dreamt a dream, and there is no interpreter for it!// But I have heard it said of you// that you but need to hear a dream in order to interpret it!// Yosef answered Pharaoh, saying:// Not I!// G-d will answer what is for Pharaoh's welfare." (Genesis 41:14-16, Fox translation.)

Three times in Chumash Pharaoh appears. The first when Avraham and Sarah sojourn in Egypt (Genesis 12:10-20), the second in the Joseph novella (Genesis 39-50), and the last when Moshe Rabbenu delivers Am Israel out of oppression (Exodus 1-15). We are not given any details about these pharaohs. A major scholarly industry tries to figure out who and when these Pharaohs were, but that really has no great bearing on the tale directly. The point of Torah is not history, but morality and rigorous monotheism. What is important is that the most powerful political figure of the ancient Near East is repeatedly confounded by the Infinite G-d, knowledge of Whom is carried by what would otherwise be an insignificant people.

Thus, Yosef, languishing in prison, is pulled abruptly out of the hole (literally, "min-habor"), rushed to be cleaned up, and presented to Pharaoh. Just think what kind of nonsense that is, from a factual perspective. When does the equivalent of the most powerful man in the world (read the President of the United States) just call up some despised prisoner, who is effectively a foreign national and ex-slave, to counsel him?

Who is Pharaoh? We don't know, but we can tease out some characteristics that are consistent in each of the Pharaonic incidents: Fearful, impulsive, unilateral. What is being set up for the modern reader here, and what the traditionalist reader knows from multiple exposure to the text, is that Pharaoh embodies the conflict between Jewish monotheism and idolatry. Pharaoh acts as if he believes he is god-like, and yet is consistently being confronted and dumbfounded by the fact that he really doesn't know anything. He doesn't know that Sarah is Avraham's wife, he cannot understand his own dreams, he cannot see that his resistance to Moshe's appeals are not only futile, but dangerous. We know that. We know that because we know the story-we know that the G-d of Israel, leading Yosef and leading Moshe will conquer the Pharaoh of Egypt.

By knowing that already, we now read the rest of the story of Yosef's rise to power in Egypt with a different sort of confidence. The absurd improbability of Pharaoh turning the management of his empire over to Yosef on the strength of one dream interpretation is as stunning as Pharaoh's inability to foresee the catastrophe his rejection of Moshe's entreaties will bring. It is all of an ideological piece: Pharaoh is set up, and Pharaoh falls. In His indirect way, G-d has set up the whole game. Pharaoh, thinking himself master, will be enslaved by his own self-idolatry.

We are not directed to hate this Pharaoh. He even seems to be a kind of a nice guy, although he is fundamentally wrong here. Wrong in how he views himself in relation of the world, and, much more importantly, wrong in how he views himself in relation to G-d. We are to know this before we read the story. We're not to be surprised that Yosef was so exalted in rank by Pharaoh's seemingly thoughtless impulsiveness. Rather we are to be amused at how Pharaoh walks into the wall, as it were. That is to say, if we are reading this section a second time (or third or fourth), we can read it as a joke, as an almost-slapstick sequence. If we read it straight, if we are reading as if we are reading for a first time, however, we'll get caught up in the action, and more likely than not miss the humor.

So, who's the joke on? All of us: Yosef, the reader, Pharaoh. It is only Pharaoh who doesn't get it. He's the pompous one those buttons have to be burst.

But he isn't the only one who needs to learn a lesson through some subtle humor. How did Yosef get in trouble? His father gave him the robe, which was later "proof" of his death. Potiphar's wife grabbed and held on to his garment when Yosef ran from her seductions. Pharaoh's jailers rush Yosef out to dress him for his appearance before Pharaoh. Finally, dressed in fine linen, Yosef takes his position as Pharaoh's second-in-command. Yosef is not what he wears, and the joke is that Yosef takes a full 13 years or so, from his captivity to his liberation, to figure it out.

Perhaps we too need to be careful about what garments we choose to wear, and how we wear them.

May our prayers for peace in our Holy Eretz Israel be answered quickly, and in our time.

Shabbat Shalom

Dennis Gura