The Jewish People as Narrative Violation

On Social Courage, Dream Interpretation, and Staying Open

“Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.” (Max Weber, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism)

After two years’ time, Pharaoh dreamed that he was standing by the Nile, when out of the Nile there came up seven cows, handsome and sturdy, and they grazed in the reed grass. But presently, seven other cows came up from the Nile close behind them, ugly and gaunt, and stood beside the cows on the bank of the Nile; and the ugly gaunt cows ate up the seven handsome sturdy cows. And Pharaoh awoke. He fell asleep and dreamed a second time: Seven ears of grain, solid and healthy, grew on a single stalk. But close behind them sprouted seven ears, thin and scorched by the east wind. And the thin ears swallowed up the seven solid and full ears. Then Pharaoh awoke: it was a dream! Next morning, his spirit was agitated, and he sent for all the magician-priests of Egypt, and all its sages; and Pharaoh told them his dreams, but none could interpret them for Pharaoh. The chief cupbearer then spoke up and said to Pharaoh, “I must make mention today of my offenses…(Genesis 41:1-9)

Every week I try to read a little bit from a compendium of Hasidic commentaries called Iturei Torah; many gems in there, like reading a book of tweets. I stumbled upon a teaching by the Chochma Im Nachalah (never heard of him before) which argues that the Egyptian sorcerers couldn’t interpret Pharaoh’s dream because they were stumped by its unnaturalness, the little cows eating fat cows doesn’t happen in real life. It was too absurd an image it broke the model—like a prompt engineer that gets an error notification from ChatGPT. The wise men of Egypt know how to interpret fat cows eating grass or lean cows eating grass, but not lean cows eating fat cows. Ditto, cows eating wheat, but wheat eating wheat?

Thus, Joseph’s interpretive prowess goes beyond the science of dream interpretation to a deeper place. All the professionals fail to interpret Pharaoh’s dream because their parameters are limited. Joseph, the outsider, is not bogged down by the Egyptian way of doing dream interpretation, which adheres to strict rule. The Egyptians understand derech Ha-Tevah, the natural order, but not derech Ha-Adam, the existential order. They are STEM without humanism, or as Max Weber put it, they are “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.”

Michael Eisenberg adds color by hypothesizing: “It is possible that the magician-priests were concerned with their jobs and did not suggest determined action or put forth some sort of prediction to which they could be held accountable out of fear for their positions in the event that they were wrong. Joseph, on the other hand, understood that one must take initiative in the face of uncertainty and impending chaos.”

There are a few lessons in the teaching of the Chochma Im Nachalah. One, it shows how imaginative Joseph was, that his dream interpretation was more art than science. Two, it shows that Egyptian hubris comes down to nature worship. The Jewish people are a “narrative violation.” This point will be key in the Exodus story, and it is key to this day. What other small nation manages to defeat its enemies, and outlast them, against all odds? Whether it’s the story of David and Goliath, or the story of the Maccabees vs. Greeks, the Jewish people are like the small cows that eat the large ones. It’s not simply a story of the “underdog,” but of the “undercow.”

From the perspective of ordinary consciousness, the existence of the Jewish people isn’t just an unlikely possibility, but an absurd one. Just as cows don’t eat other cows, and grain doesn’t eat other grain, it makes no sense to speak about a chosen people that has survived every imaginable catastrophe with its identity and sense of purpose in tact. We might even go further: Jewish thriving is counter-cyclical. We rise from prison at the precise moment when Pharaoh cannot sleep. The failure of the magicians is Joseph’s opportunity. It is the inflection point where commoditized and professionalized knowledge yields before prophetic knowledge, creative knowledge, religious knowledge, lived knowledge, intuitive knowledge. The MBA hire works when everything is fine and can run on auto-pilot; but the Joseph hire is who you want when things aren’t working and the problems are—to use a favored Silicon valley expression—“wicked.” Joseph is the cultural seed of the “Start-up Nation,” in which credentialism pales before hustle, risk aversion bows to decisiveness, and “best practice” script following surrenders to dream-logic. As in almost every hero story, salvation comes from the people marked down to zero, cast into exile, and scapegoated for society’s ills.

You can’t be a narrative violation unless you can first understand the possibility of one; and that begins by seeing the limits of one’s “natural attitude.” The Egyptians worship the Nile, underwriting their economy by predicting its regular flows. By contrast, the Jewish people eventually make their way to Canaan, where, with God’s help, they make the barren desert bloom. The wise men of Egypt were great at spreadsheets, building unassailable models based on the most cutting-edge equations, but their basic assumptions were off. The unique success of the Jewish people as a people that has lasted for thousands of years—a people that has outperformed the “market”—rests not on pursuing the obvious and predictable path, but the path that is a standard deviation above normal. Where the Egyptian chartumim teach that this path is nonsense, and thus can’t imagine their own weakness, a tiny enslaved people realizes the profound strength of their apparently minor position. The people that has been thrown in the pit and put in prison is the people you want when the winds change. They are the ones who can teach the hard-won lessons of resilience, adaptability, creative problem solving, and realistic faith.

If we want to put it in the language of contemporary business strategy, we can say that the Egyptian advisors fall prey to the “Innovator’s Dilemma.” Since their dream interpretation has worked for them and led to their professional success, why should they learn a different way? Why should they question their assumptions? After all, the enterprise value of Egypt is much larger than any other civilization. Joseph, a prisoner, and a stand-in for the Jewish people at large, has nothing to lose, not even status, and so is free to take Pharaoh’s dreams on their own terms. He is free to see the precariousness of the dominant civilization and to be unphased by its temporary grandeur.

There is another character in the story who appreciates the narrative violation occurring before his very eyes, namely, the cupbearer, the sar hamashkim. If we look closely, we’ll find that a normal person might have just kept quiet. Why get involved in Pharaoh’s affairs? After all, it isn’t your job to advise the Pharaoh on whom to consult, let alone a prisoner of whom he’s never heard. The sar hamashkim puts his neck out for Joseph. Now, of course he is grateful to Joseph for having predicted his success, but it is still a risk on his part. Why does he do it? If not for this lowly unnamed cupbearer, Joseph would still be in prison. He, too, is a hero, a “righteous gentile” (Ger Zedek).

The cupbearer sees the narrative violation unfolding before his own eyes and realizes the Providence in it. The experience is so profound—the serendipity so overwhelming—that he can no longer do what any ordinary, rational actor would do. He is possessed by elevated perception, by conviction. Note that the cupbearer must tell Pharaoh his own story as a set-up for describing Joseph. He risks reminding Pharaoh of his past and putting Pharaoh in a bad mood. He takes on reputational risk not just by nominating Joseph as an advisor, but by reminding Pharaoh that he himself once erred so egregiously as to be put in prison. The cup-bearer’s social courage stands in contrast to the Chartumim and is itself a kind of narrative violation. Think about it for a moment: the entire fate of both Egypt and Israel rests on the cupbearer’s words. An “extra” in the play drives the action. This isn’t supposed to happen. And yet it happens all the time. Some gain their share in the World to Come over a lifetime, others in a single moment. The cupbearer’s lifetime of failures are small in comparison to his single moment of value creation. Many of us want to be helpful and impactful, and so exert a great amount of effort trying to achieve our goals. But there’s something to be said for the humility of recognizing that we may only get a couple decisions in life that truly move the needle. The rest is noise, or distraction, or preparation, or practice.

Hanukkah’s focal teaching—a small light in the dark, a small canister of oil that lasts just long enough to exceed expectation—is the centrality of the peripheral, the profundity of the marginal, the agency of the victim. Of course, we can think of the miracle of Hanukkah in classical terms of divine intervention; but it’s also a story of the cupbearer, the power of a small people making small moves that ends up having cosmic impact. The lean cows, the lean wheat, connotes famine on a plain reading, but it also connotes the the secret power and insight of the outcast, the imaginative greatness that allows one to be “fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.”

Part of opening up the imagination involves seeing the hand of the divine in what others might call mere coincidence. Rabbi Akiva regarded every letter of the Torah as “omnisignificant.” All details are like canisters of oil, containing and expressing the potential energy needed to keep lit the constant flame of Jewish life. The serendipity of my encounter with a text that provoked this d’var Torah is itself part of the d’var Torah. The form expresses the content, just as Joseph’s hermeneutic suggests that nothing in life is random. How do we wake up to the life-changing opportunity in front of us, overcoming our own tendency to think like professional magicians rather than curious amateurs, newly released from prison? How do we cultivate the ability to seize on narrative violations and to become them ourselves? How do we become not just underdogs, but undercows? And how do we ensure that we are not just imaginative and contrarian but also right and helpful? These are the questions posed to us by Joseph and by Hanukkah. We will all have to come up with our own answers.

But one thing is clear, the reality of antisemitism is also a boon. Having been hated over the years by Pagans, Christians, and Muslims (and loved by them), having been hated by the political left and the right (and loved by them), having been scorned by both Bishop and King (and loved by them), having been objects of hatred for assimilating and not assimilating (and being loved for it), having been hated on theological, racial, political, economic, cultural, and other grounds (and been loved on those same grounds), having been chastised for being either too secular or not secular enough (and been loved for it), we should know better than to tether ourselves to any one ideology. When we do this we become like the Chartumim; we become professionals. Rather, stay open like Joseph. Make unlikely friends and alliances as needed, as Joseph did with the cupbearer, but embrace the reality that we are perpetual outsiders and that we operate on a chessboard far more complex and multi-colored than the headlines can capture.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Urim Sameach,

Zohar Atkins

Etz Hasadeh

P.S.—If you enjoyed this, you may enjoy my conversation with Daniel Boyarin

You may also enjoy the Lightning Podcast and our Daily Meditations.