To Counsel is to Create
The Migration of Spirit from Genesis 1 to Genesis 41
Next morning, his spirit was agitated (vayitpaem rucho), 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. (Genesis 41:8)
The earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and the spirit of God (ruach Elohim) sweeping over the water… (Genesis 1:2)
And Pharaoh said to his courtiers, “Could we find another like him—a man with the divine spirit (ruach Elohim)?” (Genesis 41:38)
The word ruach (spirit) courses through this week’s Torah reading, Miketz. Pharaoh awakes with a bad spirit. Meanwhile, Joseph is said to have a divine spirit (ruach Elohim) when he successfully placates the agitated ruler by interpreting his dreams. The first time we encounter a divine spirit is in Genesis 1: the spirit of God hovers over the face of the deep. The second time the divine spirit appears is here in Pharaoh’s remarks about Joseph, which serve as the basis for Joseph’s promotion from slave and prisoner to proxy sovereign.
In the whole of Tanakh the divine spirit is common. Bezalel, the chief architect of the Mishkan (Tabernacle) is said to have it. Isaiah is said to have it. Daniel, who, like Joseph, interprets the dream of an agitated imperial ruler, is possessed by the ruach Elohim. David soothes King Saul’s divine spirit—which is taken to be a kind of melancholy—with his lyre. Balaam, the mercenary prophet, is said to have the ruach Elohim. Thus, it seems to be a marker of prophecy, something like inspiration. Wisdom and knowledge may be cultivated or learned through experience, but the ruach Elohim is a gift more than it is a skill. And yet because Joseph is the first to have it he is the paradigm of all subsequent cases. What connects the ruach Elohim of the Creation story to the one we encounter in the Joseph saga?
Here are some possibilities:
The Torah seeks to make a parallel between the act of prophecy or divinely inspired counsel and the Creation of the world.
Prophecy draws on that which is universal and natural rather than particular and exceptional, hence, Elohim and not YHWH. The ruach Elohim is a spirit of judgment and discernment rather than mercy (ruach Hashem), emphasizing that even when the solution is commendable it will come with some hard truths and difficult outcomes (Joseph’s plan ends up indebting the Egyptian population, arguably creating a backlash that leads to a scapegoating of the Israelites at the beginning of Exodus).
God the Creator is to the ruach Elohim of Genesis 1:2 as the human sovereign is to the guide. It’s ambiguous who has more power. Technically, Joseph only rules in virtue of the the authority he is granted—and yet the Pharaoh is vulnerable and needs Joseph to wield his signet ring. Could it be that God, likewise, can only create the world with the help of a ruach Elohim, even if, at the same time the ruach Elohim can only technically rule with the imprimatur of Elohim? Is it better to be God or spirit of God? Sovereign or advisor? Wrong question. The point is that the principle of Creation is dyadic and dialectical, requiring differing perspectives.
The prophet/guide must be a student of Creation. To give good guidance, balancing the needs of Pharaoh and his court with the fundamentals of the situation (a famine is coming), one must understand the nature of the universe, both its physics and its metaphysics.
The spirit of God is also a form of hinting at transcendence, less full-blown than outright divine intervention. The spirit of God that works through Joseph shows us readers that we can be channels of the divine. It is a sign of what theologians call “process theology” (an idea championed by thinkers ranging from Hegel and Rav Kook to Alfred North Whitehead)—the notion that creation and revelation are ongoing and work themselves through human actions and human history. Creation is not once upon a time, but renewed in Joseph’s saving of Egypt, and through his success, his own family.
Spirit, from which we can now derive terms like “spirituality” and “spiritual, but not religious,” comes to its own in the Joseph story, which is a story in which the protagonist gives credit to God, but in which God Godself does not act. Joseph’s story, closing out Genesis, takes us away from the spectacular God of Genesis 1 to the subtle divine spirit of dream interpretation and wise counsel. We don’t need to form human life from clay or place heavenly bodies in the sky or separate heaven and earth to be creators—Joseph’s acuity in knowing how to save, how to organize, and how to invest through good times and bad makes him a Creator, too.
Not coincidentally, we read the story of Joseph during Hannukah, which is a Joseph-like holiday relative to others. It’s a story less of God directly intervening, as happens in the Exodus, but of the spirit of God that animates our hope and that keeps our flame going even in times of doubt and difficulty. The spirit of God is both exceptional and banal. It is the spirit of life which all possess, and yet it is a specific awareness that comes only to a few. For most of the time we do not notice our daily breath as a spirit of God, nor do we see ourselves as living in history, empowered with the capacity to wield God’s signet ring and act on God’s behalf. But when we do come to this awareness, we follow the path of Joseph, Bezalel, Daniel, and all those Biblical characters who understood that kingship without insight is impotent. Bad dreams come for everyone, even emperors. Only those who have the spirit of God, appreciate the spirit of life, and understand the spirit of history, can soothe them.
Shabbat Shalom and Happy Chanukkah,
Zohar Atkins
It's instructive to take this interpretation the other direction: what can dreams, and the interpretation of dreams, tell us about creation?
Going back to Genesis - it's speech that creates, but of course, speech is impossible without ruach/air (anthropomorphically). Further, the creation of a thing is simultaneously annihilation of other things: I can only speak one word at a time, and by speaking, I choose what to bring forth into the world, and also, what *not* to bring forth.
So ruach can be thought of as pure potentiality, all of the possible things that can be made manifest via speech. Ruach hovers over the waters as potentiality hovers over the chaos. (If this whole analogy is starting to sound like wavefunction collapse and the translation from the quantum realm to the classical, I don't think that's accidental).
Our modern understanding of dreams is that they're without meaning in and of themselves; the images of a dream emerge from the random firing of neurons, which our narrative function desperately attempts to convert into a story. Using the language above, the images of a dream are as the waters of chaos, with potentiality hovering over; the interpretation is the creation of meaning out of the chaos.
All of this exploration yields two observations on the nature of prophecy:
* the prophet, like the interpreter of dreams, steps in to speak/create when we are unable to do so ourselves. Typically our own selves narrate the random images of our dreams, but when we are unable to do so, we need a third party to construct the interpretation for us
* the prophet, being filled with ruach, is also able to perceive a greater range of "potentiality". Looking at the world, the prophet sees beyond the clear contingent paths, and instead sees the entire range of what could be. It's from this potentiality that the prophet can call for everything from teshuva to tzedakah, as the deficiencies of what "is" stand in stark contrast to what "could be" (even if what could be is highly unlikely, probabilistically)
Could one read Qohelet 11:1, "Shalach lachmeicha al p'nei hamayim", as likening the spirit of generosity-- the spirit that casts bread "upon the face of the waters" in the long term expectation of a return-- to the ruach Elohim?