Dream / Interpretation

From Joseph the Dreamer to Joseph the Interpreter

Once Joseph had a dream which he told to his brothers; and they hated him even more (vayosifu od sno oto). (Genesis 37:5)

וַיַּחֲלֹ֤ם יוֹסֵף֙ חֲל֔וֹם וַיַּגֵּ֖ד לְאֶחָ֑יו וַיּוֹסִ֥פוּ ע֖וֹד שְׂנֹ֥א אֹתֽוֹ

And [Jacob] dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it…Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is present in this place, and I did not know it!” (Genesis 28:12-16)

God does not reveal the Ten Commandments in a dream. God does not tell Noah to build an ark in a dream. God does not tell Abraham to leave his father’s land in a dream. Founding acts of revelation tend to be direct and unequivocal. God tells Abraham and Sarah that they will have a child. God tells Abraham about Sodom and Gemorrah. There is little ambiguity. But Jacob’s foundational religious experience occurs in a dream, and the liminal logic of the dream continues through his son, Joseph.

אֵ֣לֶּה ׀ תֹּלְד֣וֹת יַעֲקֹ֗ב יוֹסֵ֞ף

These are the generations of Jacob, Joseph…(Genesis 37:2). Rashi suggests Jacob and Joseph resemble one another, but what if the resemblance is more than physical? What if Jacob’s dotage for his son turns on their shared propensity for dreaming? Joseph is the child of Jacob’s “old age” (ben z’kunim)—what does this mean? Perhaps it means that Joseph’s religious sensibility matches his father’s. Joseph is 17, but he’s an old soul, a precocious lad. To understand the story of Joseph, the Torah hints, we need to understand his connection to Jacob, the quintessential dreamer.

Jacob is too clever and cunning for direct religious experience. Thus, the dream is a compromise. All rational people dream, and they can dismiss their dreams as just the babble of the unconscious. So dreaming has a plausible deniability to it. One can see God in a dream without receiving a diagnosis. Only vivid daydreaming raises eyebrows. Jacob’s conclusion when he wakes up from the dream tells us that he takes his dream seriously, but also that he now recognizes he was walking around half-asleep. Jacob, who prided himself on having the upper hand, is deceived. Just as he will wake up to find Leah instead of Rachel by his side, he wakes up to discover “God was in this place and I didn’t know it.” God himself has done a number on him. Jacob walks around feeling self-reliant only to realize that he is a vulnerable dependent. The Nietzschean over-man sees angels in a dream and is brought down a peg. The compromise Jacob makes as a result is a vow— “If God protects me…” The vow helps him regain control while also admitting he is not in control. The dream shakes him up. But it shakes him up in proportion to his rational faculty. The dream never asks him to do anything. It’s just a vision. There is no command.

Dreaming is religious experience lite. It’s also different from other forms of revelation in that its meaning is non-obvious. The question is what do you do with a dream. How do you interpret it? Jacob interprets his own dream in a meta-way as a revelation of the present absence of God—but the image of angels going up and down a ladder is not expounded in the text itself. It is left to speculation. Likewise, Joseph shares his dreams with his brothers, but he does not tell them what the dreams mean. It is his brothers who supply the interpretation: “Do you mean to reign over us? Do you mean to rule over us?” And they hated him even more for his talk about his dreams. But Joseph neither confirms nor denies. He dreamed another dream and told it to his brothers, saying, “Look, I have had another dream: And this time, the sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me.” Again, it is the others who jump to interpret. And when he told it to his father and brothers, his father berated him. “What,” he said to him, “is this dream you have dreamed? Are we to come, I and your mother and your brothers, and bow low to you to the ground?”

Joseph starts off a dreamer, not a dream interpreter. Ironically, it is the interpretation of his dream—by others—that leads to its fulfillment in the real world. It is the interpretation that makes it true. This is a Talmudic principle as well: the meaning of a dream is how it is deciphered; it does not lie in the dream itself. The sharing of the dream and the working out of the dream in the world, the integration of the unconscious into the conscious, this is what counts.

When Joseph descends to Egypt he graduates from dreamer of his own dreams to dream interpreter of Pharaoh’s. His rise to power results not from the power of his own dream, but from his capacity to interpret someone else’s. The Torah suggests a principle of intersubjectivity here: it is easier to interpret others than to interpret oneself. Joseph is vulnerable when he shares his dream, and so is Pharaoh. But the critical difference is found in the response. In one, Joseph’s sharing leads to hatred. In Pharaoh’s it leads to collaboration.

We are entering into a future of greater technological breakthrough, particularly in AI, which can spit out dreams in seconds. But the power is not in the AI messaging but in how we use it, respond to it, understand it. Joseph shares a dream and is hated, but it is the hatred that proves the dream and makes it self-fulfilling.

Joseph is hated for a cluster of reasons by his brothers just as he is beloved for the same reasons by his father. Joseph is the child of Rachel, who is beautiful. Leah, who is hated, produces children who hate, in turn. But beauty is evanescent and illusory.

Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain (sheker hachein v’hevel hayofi), but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised. (Proverbs 31:30)

Rachel’s beauty is like a dream. Likewise, Joseph’s (Midrashim abound attesting to his good looks). The question is what you do with the beauty. Does it lead to the right interpretation or does it become its own intoxicant. Does it strengthen devotion or does it become an idol? Isaac loves Esau for being a hunter and Jacob loves Rachel and Joseph for their looks. Both are problematic—they are conditional and superficial. A dream enchants. Maturity comes to those who rise above enchantment.

Still, Joseph’s beauty, and his dreaminess do save. The hatred of the brothers for Joseph parallels a divided future Kingdom of Israel and beyond, in which some are drawn to beauty and some drawn against it. Some are drawn to aesthetics and some to ethics. Some are drawn to dreams and others to rules. Hannuka, which contains the word chein (beauty) commemorates a culture war between Jew and Greek, but also between Judah and Joseph (a proto-Hellenizer). The deeper meaning of Hannuka is that we need both. Religion can’t be opposed to beauty nor can it be captive to it. The brothers must acknowledge the dream without being threatened by it, just as we must acknowledge beauty without mistaking it for holiness. Still, beauty is a key ingredient in the endeavor to make the world better. We need Joseph and his dreams, and we need the light of Chanukka, to brighten our darkness. But in the end it is the interpretation, the response, and the relationship that matter. Neither hatred of the spectacular nor vain absorption in it will do. “In dreams begin responsibility.”

Shabbat Shalom and Chanukka Sameach,

Zohar Atkins

Etz Hasadeh

P.S. Delighted to share my conversation with Leon Kass about Genesis.

Join me on Threadable as we gloss Genesis together.

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