Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Hello, my friends, and welcome back to this week's episode of the Practical Parasha Podcast. This is Rabbi Shlomo Cohen and I hope you are well. I'm sure you missed me last week, missed the episode, but I thought it would be best to take a break for one week to reinvigorate myself, to jump right back into it this week. So here I am, Parshas Miketz, and it's also Shabbos Chanukah.
[00:00:29] Um, and we'll talk about a little bit later the connection maybe between Parshas Miketz and Chanukah.
[00:00:36] And it just happens that Parshas Miketz always falls out or pretty much always falls out on Shabbos Chanukah. So there definitely is a connection there. Nothing is by coincidence.
[00:00:49] And maybe we'll talk about that a little bit later.
[00:00:52] Before we begin, as always, if you have any questions, comments, would just like to say hello to. Wish me a happy Hanukkah, a Freilache Chanukah, or however you say it in your language. Wherever you may be, please feel free to send me an email.
[00:01:08] Rabbi Shlomokon. K o h nmail.com I'd love to hear from you just to get a quick overview of the Parsha, especially since last week, you know, I missed it this week.
[00:01:22] We begin in the middle of a storyline.
[00:01:26] Now, Yosef, One of the 12 sons of Yaakov, of Jacob, is sold by his brothers and sent down to Egypt.
[00:01:38] And in Egypt, Yosef is framed by his master's wife, Potiphar, and is sent to prison.
[00:01:50] And in this week's Parsha, the Parsha starts off with the dreams of Paro. Paro has these dreams and none of his advisors are able to give him a satisfactory, you know, interpretation of the dreams that he has.
[00:02:12] He has dreams of these, uh, bushes of wheat, the fat bushes of wheat, and the, you know, the scrawny bushes of wheat.
[00:02:23] And the scrawny ones devour the more full bushels.
[00:02:30] And Simile has another dream where seven cows, seven big healthy looking cows, and then seven scrawny cows. And the seven scrawny cows devour or consume the big fat cows and they look the same.
[00:02:48] And no one gave him an interpretation until the cupbearer, the master of the butler, the royal butler of Paro, tells him that there was this Hebrew boy who interpreted, uh, a dream for me when I was in prison.
[00:03:04] And Paro calls him out of prison and Yosef interprets the dream of Paro and he explains to him about the seven years of plenty and the Seven years of famine, they're going to strike Egypt. And he doesn't just do that. He gives Paro some practical advice on to how he should handle these seven years of plenty and these seven years of famine, that he should use the seven years of plenty to sort of invest to get ready for the seven years of famine.
[00:03:37] And he says, you should appoint somebody. And Paro says, you know what? I want to appoint you to be in charge of that. And he rises up from being in prison, no one even knowing he's there, to becoming the Viceroy of Egypt.
[00:03:53] Yosef implements Paro's plan. The Parsha tells us how he marries and has children, his sons, Menashe and Ephraim.
[00:04:01] And then the Parsha goes into the actual famine that happens. The dreams of Pharaoh and how Yosef interprets them start to play out.
[00:04:13] And everyone in the civilized world, there's this famine going on. They all have to come down to Egypt to get food, because Egypt is the only place right now where there is food available for people. And Yaakov and his sons, who are in a distant land, they're not in Mitsrayim, they're in Eretzkinan. Yaakov also needs food for his family, so he sends his sons to Egypt, but he doesn't send his youngest son, Binyamin, who's the brother of Yosef, the full brother of Yosef, from the same mother, Rachel.
[00:04:47] And he sends the his sons to Mitsrayim, to Egypt to get food, to get provisions for his family.
[00:04:56] The brothers go down to Egypt. And actually the commentaries tell us that they also had a side mission of trying to find Yosef.
[00:05:05] The Parsha tells us how they go down to Egypt and Yosef, right away he suspects them of being spies, meaning Yosef recognizes them, but they don't recognize him.
[00:05:18] He accuses them of being spies. And the Parsha ensues with this dialogue between the brothers and Yosef, how he takes um Shim' on and he puts him into prison and he tells him to bring back Binyamin, if your story is true. And that's where the Parsha leaves us.
[00:05:39] So the first idea I want to talk about today is this connection between Parsha's Miketz, which is this week's Parsha, and Shabbos Chanukah.
[00:05:52] Now, the first thing that I think that comes to my mind, or one thing that comes to my mind is an idea I heard today about Yosef Hatzadik. About Yosef.
[00:06:05] This Parsha tells us about the attributes of Yosef, not just Attributes how he dealt with his brothers. And the commentaries tell us that Yosef was doing this to his brothers to test them, to see if they really were sincere in their repentance for selling him, for selling Yosef down to Mitzrayim, and that they got rid of that trait of envy, because maybe when they sold him, maybe they had all their calculations how they thought they were doing the right thing, but the real reason why they sold him was that there was this envy, that there was underlying their feeling. It was sort of causing them to be blinded. And I've talked about this in the previous year's podcast, but the parsha really focuses on how Yosef deals with his brothers. And as always, this. He's the central, um, I shouldn't say character. He's the central person in this week's Parsha.
[00:07:01] Now, I heard this idea from Rabbi Leibowitz, and he says that if you look at Yosef Atzadik, about Joseph, there's something very, um, that sticks out to us about Yosef. There's many things, but one thing specifically.
[00:07:17] Yosef was a person who didn't necessarily care what others thought of him. And I'm going to bring this out very clearly.
[00:07:28] You know, most of us, or, uh, maybe we know people, there's different types of people. You have people that like to please others.
[00:07:36] They're people pleasers. They'll do whatever it takes to make people like them, to be liked, to make people happy.
[00:07:44] And that could mean that sometimes they'll do things that are maybe against their principles, or they'll break their rules of what they believe in in order that people should like them, people should be happy with them.
[00:07:59] You know, then you have other, uh, people that, on the other extreme of that, that they won't. They don't care if people like them or don't like them. To them, it's about doing what's right. It's about doing what's right, and that's all that matters. And probably there's people, most of us are in the middle, that we want to do what's right, but at the same time, we want to make others happy as well.
[00:08:23] Now, Yosef was a person who didn't care what others thought of him.
[00:08:29] To him, everything was about truth, was about doing what was right.
[00:08:36] And even if it was going to mean people being upset with him, people, um, it's going to cause him to end up in prison, which happened, didn't make a difference. It was all about truth. And if you think about it for a second, you Know the story of yosef.
[00:08:56] He had this dream that he told his brothers. He had a dream and he told it to his brothers.
[00:09:02] Maybe he shouldn't have told a dream to his brothers, but to him, you know, he didn't think. Maybe you could think to yourself, like, he didn't think that his brother's gonna be angry at him if he tells him a dream that he sees a dream of all them bowing down to him.
[00:09:18] Of course he knew that. But the truth is that since he had a prophecy, he had to say the prophecy. And the prophecy was that his brothers are going to bow down to him. It's not about his brothers liking him or not. It's about what's the right thing to do.
[00:09:29] That's why he did it. Think about yosef and the episode with Potiphar, with his master's wife. She tried to seduce him, seduce him, seduce him every day, day in, day out.
[00:09:42] And, you know, he's almost about to give in, and he holds back. He doesn't give in to himself. And he could think to himself, potiphar was a powerful person.
[00:09:51] This woman could make or break him, but yet he didn't care.
[00:09:57] Doesn't make a difference what she's going to do to me. I have to do what's right. I have to stand true to my values. And that's what happened. Yosef held himself back. He didn't give in to himself.
[00:10:09] He didn't become seduced by the wife of potiphar, and it caused him to end up in prison.
[00:10:16] And similarly, we see throughout this week's parsha as well, with the brothers yosef, you would think to yourself that as soon as yosef would see his brothers, you know, he would want to embrace, he would want to reveal himself maybe, and sort of maybe chastise them for what they did to him. But that wasn't important to him. It was important to him of making sure that the sin that they had done was rectified.
[00:10:42] And he had to sort of put them through that, even if it was painful to him. Right. We know the parsha tells us in next week's parsha that he had to tell everyone to leave because he couldn't hold back anymore.
[00:10:57] It was too much for him. So this whole process, even if it was hurting him, even, he still had to do it because it was the right thing to do.
[00:11:05] Now the question is, what does this have to do with Hanukkah? And I think that the answer to that is very obvious because hanukkah is a holiday which I think one of the lessons of Hanukkah is a lesson for us for standing up for what's correct, even when it's not popular.
[00:11:27] Think of the Maccabim, the Maccabees. During the time that they lived, most of the Jewish people were Hellenized.
[00:11:39] They fell prey to the culture of the Greeks. They thought they were enlightened. And it was only a minority of the people that were still clinging true to Torah values.
[00:11:50] And it was them who stood up and started this battle against the Greeks and with it caused a mass movement of teshuvah, of returning of the Jewish nation to what they're supposed to be doing.
[00:12:05] But you could think for a second, you know, maybe if they would have thought to themselves, we're not going to be popular, um, or no one's going to like us. And they probably weren't liked in the beginning. People were saying, what are you doing? This is the right way. This is the enlightened way. You know, it's time to modernize. And the Makkabim, they didn't care what other people told them.
[00:12:25] They stood for the truth, right? Who's going to stand for the, you know, for the values of the Torah? That's what we believe in. It doesn't make a difference what the rest of the world does. We know what's true, and we have to follow it. If we think about ourselves for a moment, if, if we would be in the times of the Greeks, which side would we be on?
[00:12:51] Would we be supporting the Maccabees, or would we be with the enlightened ones of the Greeks? And I think the lesson for us, you know, this ties into Yosef.
[00:13:02] It's a similar lesson, Chanukah Yosef, having the ability within ourselves to stand up for what's right, even if it's going to cause us to be not popular, even if it's going to cause us for people to maybe not like us. Now, obviously, if you do things in the right way, I'm not saying you don't have to steamroll people, but my point is sometimes we have to make a stand for what's true and correct, even if it's going to have repercussions.
[00:13:31] Because if we don't, you know, as the expression goes, if a person has nothing to die for, then what do they have to live for?
[00:13:40] Now, I think this is a very important message that we have to internalize because it's having values, having principles, being firm with our beliefs, not just letting society or the people we're around affect who uh, we are. We should be who we are through and through, and we should do our best to do that. And that's one of the lessons of Hanukkah and one of the connection, I believe, to the story of Yosef Hatzadik in this week's parsha of Parasha's meat gates. The second idea I want to share with you takes us to the beginning of the parsha where Pharaoh calls Yosef out of prison to interpret his dream.
[00:14:24] And Yosef tells Paro about the seven years of plenty and the seven years of famine which are going to afflict the land of Egypt and really the whole world.
[00:14:37] But the, uh, advice or the interpretation that Yosef gives doesn't just stop with interpretation. He continues to give advice to pharaoh onto how to handle the situation.
[00:14:51] And he does it in a very interesting way.
[00:14:54] The parsha reads as va' ata yera Paro ish navam vechochom vayesheeseiu al eretz mitzrayim. It says, now let Paro seek out a discerning and wise man and set him over the land of Egypt. Yasseroretz vichimesh has aretz mitzrayim B' shev Hasnei hasava says, let Paro proceed, and let him appoint overseers in the land, and he shall prepare the land of Egypt during the seven years of abundance.
[00:15:32] And the parasha continues, and let them gather all the food of those approaching the good years. Let them amass fine grain of their paras authority for food in the cities and safeguard it. And the sukim go on to tell us how Yosef gives exact advice on how to Paro should handle the situation of the famine that's going to come.
[00:15:50] Uh, there's an interesting lesson here to be learned from Yosef Hatzadik.
[00:15:55] Now, many times when we have a problem or we see a problem, what do we do?
[00:16:03] We tell, um, maybe the person in charge, or maybe the person who's in charge of the program or the thing and say, you know, there's this and this problem. We're very good at finding problems, but all too often what we don't do is give solutions.
[00:16:20] We just find the problems. Now, the dubu n magid, he explains over here that Yosef, he didn't just give the interpretation to Pharaoh. He gave him the solution as well.
[00:16:31] He gave him a way of how to deal with it.
[00:16:34] And he didn't just, um, give it to him in a way that, you know, giving him advice.
[00:16:44] He gave him the advice in a way that the other advisors of Paro were going to become in agreement to him. He said, let him appoint people to oversee this process. So Yosef knew that when Paro and the advisors would hear this, the advisors would be in agreement to what Yosef had was saying. And this is what, that's what the Parsha tells us, that he gave advice.
[00:17:09] That number one is he gave advice. He gave him an idea of how to handle the situation. And he also gave him, he tailor made it that the advice should be more, you know, easy for people to hear because there would be an opportunity for them to be involved in it. So when the advisors heard that they're going to need to appoint people, they thought to themselves, oh, we should be the people that could be appointed. So we surely should, um, be agreeable to this idea, to this solution.
[00:17:38] And the idea that I think we could get out of this. One of the lessons from Yosef and from the Dubna Magid is that when we come to give advice or we have a suggestion or maybe we want to point something out to somebody. Now obviously you have to do things with sensitivity and you have to be polite.
[00:18:01] But if you have an idea for an organization, for your show, for your job, I think ideas are always great, but sometimes it should come along with the solution as well. You know, pointing out problems is easy, but solutions that go along with it is another step.
[00:18:22] And if I would just add on one more point, coming from my position where I was working as an outreach director running programming, people are very easy to tell you things that are wrong, but not often enough do they offer their help in implementing the ideas that they give you.
[00:18:41] One thing that I try personally to do is that if I have an idea for somebody to improve something, I'll do my best to help or to offer implementation as much as I can to get that idea to the finish line.
[00:18:59] I'm not saying it's possible in every scenario, but in many, you have some way of being a help to implement the idea that you want to suggest. It's not just suggesting ideas and pointing out the problems. It's giving solutions and being an active part in solution to help out yourself to show that you have skin of the game to get things done. I think this is what we see from Yosef Atsaddik. From Yosef, he didn't just interpret the dreams of Pharaoh, but he gave Pharaoh a way, uh, and a method, a concrete way on how to solve the dilemma that it was going to face him. And he did it in a way that made it agreeable to everybody, that people would agree with it. You know, he made it. You know, he gave everyone a way to be part of it, to make the solution attainable. And I think that's a lesson for us as well. Don't just be part of the problem, be part of the solution.
[00:19:54] You know, put yourself in it to help solve the problem. Right? And when you do that, I think people are much more agreeable to hearing the suggestion or hearing the critique that you have, if you yourself are willing to. To spend your time to help see something become better.
[00:20:13] The last idea I want to share with you takes us to the interactions that Yosef is having with his brothers.
[00:20:20] Now, Yosef recognizes his brothers, but his brothers do not recognize him.
[00:20:26] And Yosef first accuses them of being spies, and then he says, bring back this brother. You're talking about Binyamin.
[00:20:37] And first, Yaakov is very reluctant. Jacob is reluctant to send his only son from Rochel left that he thinks is left with his other brothers. But Yehuda, Judah convinces Yaakov to send them down to Egypt. And he goes to Egypt. And Yosef greets them very warmly. And the Torah describes to us how Yosef invites them to this feast. And again, he's trying to see. Yosef is trying to see if the brothers still harbor resentment towards, uh, you know, have this envy if they regretted the sin that they made earlier. And the way he wants to see that is that will, you know, the brothers stand up for Benyamin, or will they get jealous when he gives extra affection? Yosef gives extra affection to Benyamin, and the Torah tells us that he gives extra portions to Binyamin.
[00:21:32] Now, if you read the posse, it says something very interesting. Vayisa ma' asos me eis panav alehim va' aterev ma' asas Binyamin Masas kulam chamesh yados vayishtiru vayishkuru. Imo, he had portions that he had been set before him served to them. And Binyamin's portion, Benjamin's portion, was five times as much as the portion of any of them. They drank and became intoxicated with wine. Now, if you look at Rashi, Rashi tells us, vayishkuro, imo, that they became intoxicated, that the brothers, that they drank with Yosef, they became, you know, they drank and the part. And Rashi says, umiyim shemachruhu, from the day that they sold Yosef, they didn't drink wine.
[00:22:25] And Yosef also didn't drink wine till this day.
[00:22:29] Um, and this day they both drink. So it's understandable that Yosef drank wine because now he was rejoicing in his own heart that he's with his brothers. But why did the brothers drink wine? They still were missing Yosef. They didn't know this was Yosef.
[00:22:45] Why were they drinking now?
[00:22:47] And it's brought down from the Yizmach Yisrael that the reason why the brothers were drinking wine is because that they were rejoicing.
[00:23:00] Why were they rejoicing?
[00:23:02] If you look at the posse, the posseq tells us the verse says that Yosef gave five times as much to Binyamin to the rest of the brothers.
[00:23:12] And the brothers, they were happy that they didn't get one bit jealous when Binyamin got extra portions, got extra stuff sent back with him. And we see that Yosef also sent extra back with him. Didn't bother them one bit.
[00:23:29] They were happy now because all these years they were working on this trait of envy that had infected them and caused them to sell Yosef. But now that Binyamin was getting extra and it didn't affect them, they were happy and they rejoiced. And therefore they drank wine. And I think just one lesson that we can take out of this is that we should rejoice in the spiritual successes that we have in our life.
[00:23:54] And it's important. Obviously, we finish something. We finish studying a book, a sefer tractate of Gemara. There's a siam, you make a celebration.
[00:24:04] But it's not just that.
[00:24:06] If you see spiritual improvement within yourself, you're working on a trait, you're working on something. You're trying to become better, and you see progress, even a little bit of progress.
[00:24:16] That should give you a pause and you should think about that. To rejoice, to be happy, to savor the success, you know, um, and do something special, Have a piece of chocolate, buy a candy bar, get that good coffee you wanted to get.
[00:24:31] Because we need to make a big deal about these things, which are really important. I think that's a lesson that we see from the brothers in this week's Parasha. And I think that we should take with ourselves throughout our life, and especially now during the days of Hanukkah, when there's an extra focus and an extra Siyat deshmay, extra help from heaven to attaining our spiritual goals. So with that, I'm gonna finish for today's podcast. I hope you enjoyed. If you have any question, comments, or like to reach out, please feel free to send me an email at Rabbi Shlomo konkohnmail.com have a great day.
