Looking Forward – Parshat Miketz

The Gemara in Pesachim 119a quotes Rav Yehuda in the name of Shmuel, who teaches that through selling all of the produce during the famine in Egypt, Yosef was able to fill the storehouses of Egypt with gold and silver from the entire world, building an immense treasury.

Later on, when the Jews left Egypt, they took all of these riches with them וינצלו את-מצרים. ויצאו ברכוש גדול . Hence, Meshech Chochmah points an additional level of interpretation to Pharaoh’s dream. The fat cows eat away, and the scrawny cows swallow them, and there’s nothing left of all the riches. This is a רמז that all the riches of Egypt was going to be gone, taken by the Bnei Yisrael.

However one can ask, the Pasuk says the dream is repeated twice in order to emphasis the immediacy of the fulfilment, and obviously the Bnei Yisrael’s case was not immediate? The Meshech Chachmah answers that this is true, however there’s one important phrase which is not repeated, ולא נודע כי-באו אל-קרבנה – it was impossible to discern that the scrawny cows had eaten the fat cows. It’s not repeated, as it was hinting to the long term.

There is a lot that we can learn from this idea. One thing we can learn, is that there’s short term and long term, and we must always take the long term into account. Furthermore, even to Yosef, not everything is immediately clear. We see this next week also, when Yosef tells his brothers not to fret over the fact that they sold him, as he was destined to save all of them from famine. He did not say that it would also lead to the fulfilment of the ברית בין הבתרים, with the Bnei Yisrael ending up enslaved in Egypt. Lots of levels of Jewish history resulted from the episode, we just don’t understand all of it whilst it’s happening, often not for a very long time.

B’ezrat Hashem we should all experience good, just like in the time of Chanukah, whose miracles have everlasting benefits for us. So too B’ezrat Hashem our current situation will be opening the great period of Jewish history with ימות המשיח.

Shabbat Shalom and Chanukah Sameach.