Miketz: Dreams & Destiny

One of the quiet gifts of Torah is that, as readers, we are given the long arc. We are allowed to see dreams come true.

In Parashat Miketz, Joseph’s early dreams finally materialize. Years after they shattered a family, years after betrayal, imprisonment, and disappearance, the brothers arrive in Egypt and bow before him. The dream happens, but not triumphantly or cleanly. They bow because they are hungry. Survival, not submission, brings them to their knees.

And the Torah withholds the moment we expect most. There is no verse where Joseph thinks, So this is it. My dream came true. No internal monologue. No vindication. He is busy managing crisis, feeding people, governing a fragile world. The silence invites a deeply human question: do we ever recognize when we are standing inside something we once imagined?

Many of us carry ten-year visions, fifteen-year visions. Then life intervenes. Detours, trauma, responsibilities we never anticipated. Sometimes we arrive somewhere meaningful and never pause long enough to notice.

This is not only personal. It is communal.

As a people, we carry dreams, fears, intuitions, and warnings across generations. Some we hope are relics of the past. And then history presses back in. As the frequency of antisemitic acts continues to rise, as tragic acts occur across the Jewish world, that question feels unavoidable: were those fears excessive, or were they signals we did not want to heed?

Here is where my theology draws a clear line. I do not believe dreams have to come true. I do not believe suffering is retroactively justified. And I cannot live inside “everything happens for a reason.” That language is too neat, too dismissive of pain, too quick to absolve chaos.

But intervention matters. Reflection matters. Meaning is not embedded. Meaning is extracted.

Joseph’s dreams do not force reality into compliance. They function like a compass, not a map. They do not tell him what will happen. They help him recognize where he is when things do happen. That is why I return to this idea again and again: Jews do not waste tragedy.

After the fire, my son asked a question that stopped me cold. “What if we built a time machine? Could we go back and stop it?” So I offered him a different question. Imagine a button. If you push it, you go back to the morning of the fire and prevent it. But if you push it, every experience, relationship, lesson, act of love and rebuilding since then disappears.

My wife would push the button immediately, I don't blame her. I couldn’t bring myself to hit the button. Not because I am at peace with the tragedy, but because I could not bring myself to waste the tragedy, and the work being done since, the views, memories, relationships we have forged since, they are the blessing in response to tragedy. My son similarly hesitated with this. 

That is the unbearable Jewish tension. Would you erase the trauma, knowing what it produced, or honor what grew from it even as you grieve what was lost?

And here is the complicated truth we have to say carefully. Some of the deepest tragedies in Jewish history have also become the places from which Jews learned to shine light outward: the insistence on memory, the commitment to education, the building of community, the moral clarity to stand up for others. That does not mean those tragedies were necessary or holy. It means we chose what came after them.

That is not destiny. That is responsibility.

Joseph almost weaponizes his power. He almost turns fulfillment into vengeance. But he stops. He chooses restraint. He feeds instead of punishes. That is the move Miketz demands of us.

Dreams fulfilled are not endpoints. They are obligations. And Hanukkah refuses to let this remain theoretical. Light must be public. Courage must be visible. Meaning must become action.

Dreams do not justify the past. They orient the future. And perhaps the most Jewish question is never why did this happen, but now that it has, who are we called to be?

That is the internal dialogue the Torah leaves for us to write. And that is where holiness begins.