Rude Awakenings
Most of us don’t dream like Joseph – we dream like Pharaoh.
Instead of technicolor dreams of glory, our sleep is disturbed by the possibility of what comes after the glory, when the good luck runs out. Pharaoh doesn’t just dream sweet dreams of the good years; he watches the bad years ambush the good from behind and devour them whole.[1]
This kind of thinking is endemic to my profession. I practice primary-care medicine. My job is to problem-solve with people who come to me when they are ill. If people come when they are actually well, I need to anticipate all the ways in which they might get sick and try to intervene before they reach that point. I have the unenviable task of reminding people that they are aging. Sometimes it’s even my responsibility to have long conversations with people who aren’t yet sick – about how they want to handle dying. No matter how good things are, they are bound to get worse. Is it any wonder I identify with Pharaoh?
Psalm 91 has a name for these kinds of dreams: pahad laila, night terrors.[2] Medicine knows about night terrors also – toddlers get them, waking up in the middle of the night screaming inexplicably, inconsolably, without any clear idea why. In the morning, they remember nothing. If only the adults were so lucky. Our worries stay with us; our night terrors are well-articulated.
The Torah refers to that startling awake with the word vayyikatz – the same root word as the name of the parsha, Miketz – at the end. Is waking up simply the end of the time of sleep? Or is the end of a period of time, in this case the “two years” referred to in the beginning of the parsha, a kind of rude awakening?
I am a bearer of rude awakenings. Smoking is killing you. Sugar is the reason your vision is all blurry. Your dog is the reason you can’t breathe (that one hurts me as much as it does you, I promise). And human existence sometimes seems to be one long rude awakening.
In Genesis 25, we read, “These are the chronicles of Isaac.” What do those chronicles contain? Famine, infertility, sibling rivalry, and blindness. That sounds like Tuesday in my office. In Genesis 37, we read that Jacob, after fleeing a murderous brother, living with an uncle who invented the bait-and-switch, and wrestling with an angel in the dark, finally settles down in Canaan. But he makes the mistake of settling down by doing the Hebrew verb vayeshev.
“When the Torah commences a paragraph with the word vayeshev, what follows is some kind of disaster,” according to the Da’at Zekenim.[3] Vayeshev means “settled down,” but Da’at Zekenim suggests that it implies a very unsettled sort of settling. Within a few verses, his favorite son, Joseph, has let his ego get the better of him and goaded his brothers into first attempting to murder him, then starve him to death, and finally sell him into slavery, which is where we find him in this parsha.
Pharaoh’s rude awakenings from his dreams happen as part of another rude awakening – the ketz, the awakening, from two years of seeming tranquil bliss for his butler. After being thrown in the slammer for spilling wine on Pharaoh’s best white-with-gold-lame suit, the butler eventually gets out and regains his former station. Back in his “dream” job, he forgets about the dream weaver, Joseph, who told him this would happen. At least, until Pharaoh is so rudely awakened.
Try though we might to live under a rock, or in a fantasy world, life has a way of doing that. World affairs, local crises, and personal tragedies know where we live and how to find us, and no amount of insulating ourselves can keep us protected from the disaster that follows forever.
How are we supposed to face these crises, these calamities, that stare us in the face in the middle of the night? Especially when, like Pharaoh, we come to realize that we are going to need to do so with inadequate resources, with reserves – financial, material, and emotional – that are all but spent? Like Joseph says, of course. Gather up whatever you can save and set it aside, and it will be enough to get you through.
He’s his father’s son. In Genesis 32:11, just before wrestling with the mysterious stranger, having fled Laban, separated from his family for their protection, and anticipating an all-out battle with Esau the next day, Jacob pours out his heart to God. But he doesn’t complain, or cry in despair. He gushes with gratitude: “I am unworthy of all the kindness and truth that you have shown your servant.” The next day, having proven himself, he tells Esau, “I have everything.”[4] Everything I need, that is.
I’d never thought of this until this year, but it’s not for nothing that this parsha always falls during Hanukkah. Joseph teaches Pharaoh to stretch whatever he can save from the good years to cover the bad ones. 1500 years later, a single cruse of oil salvaged from the Temple stretches until new oil can be pressed and brought in. 2200 years after that, I try to keep people well and heal people who are sick by stretching medical resources as far as they can co. The system rewards my kind of medical practice at the lowest possible rate, doesn’t produce enough new providers like me to replace the ones who keep leaving the profession, and doesn’t give a damn that the patients barely have the means to live on, let alone afford the care they really need (if they can access it all; see the previous complaint).
Years after Pharaoh’s dream, when Yosef is carrying out the plan he describes to Pharaoh just after his release from prison, we see the people of Egypt sinking ever deeper in debt – even bondage – to support the aid that Yosef doles out to them[5]. A modern person suffocated by medical debt can certainly relate. Yet as the Egyptians say, “You have saved our lives! We are grateful to my lord, and we shall be serfs to [Pharaoh.]” Even at that tremendous cost, marshaling every asset they have, it is worth it to them.
Maybe I am unworthy of the kindness and truth God has shown me – I hear from my students and my patients how much less I might have to work with had I entered the medical profession in another country. I do have everything I need – I have colleagues who still care as much as I do, and the goodwill of people whose support I depend on.
There is no shortage of things that keep me up at night and haunt me during the day. Will my patients be safe as they go through their daily lives? Will the funds we depend on to do our work still be there? Will I still have life-saving vaccines to administer to my patients in a year? Will a new worldwide plague take off and catch us sleeping in yet another rude awakening?
Or might things get better – through a small miracle, or a change of heart (which amounts to the same thing sometimes)? We often daydream about such things – and the Hebrew for daydreaming is holem b’hakitz, a dream which gets ended abruptly, from which we are rudely awakened when we don’t want to be. The same nightmares that ruin our sleep at night are the harsh realities that ruin our daydreams.
Nevertheless, I think I’ve saved up just enough oil to keep the flame burning. The cracks and breaks of the last tragedies have made me stronger, strong enough to wrestle with whatever challenges come my way. The wisdom of those who came before has given me the ability to read those confusing nighttime messages and make sense of them – sometimes. And my patients who have been prevented from “settling down” by far worse disasters than anything I’ve ever experienced have shown me that there is a way out – even if the way out is through.
[1] Genesis 41:1-7
[2] Psalm 91:5
[3] Da’at Zekenim on Numbers 25:1.
[4] Genesis 33:11.
[5] Genesis 47:13-26.
