Perceptions, Parashas Mikeitz-Chanukah, Issue #2077 - By Rabbi Pinchas Winston
I have mentioned several times in the past that when Yosef, as Viceroy of Egypt, accused his brothers of being meraglim—spies, it was a coded message. Each of the Hebrew letters—Mem-Raish-Gimmel-Lamed-Yud-Mem—stood for a different word, the coded message being: M’Immi Rachel genavtem, l’Midianim Yishmael mechartem—from my mother Rachel you stole me; to Midianites, Arabs you sold me. Not bad, eh?
And the brothers were supposed to figure that out off the bat? They had just gotten down to Egypt and it was the first thing to go wrong. That the man standing before them dressed and acting Egyptian and wielding so much power was Yosef was the last thing they could have imagined at that point. So what was the point of Yosef’s encoded message?
It wasn’t for that moment. It was for later, after they had gone through enough to make them start to question what was really going on, which they began to do once they found their money in their sacks on their way back home. Until that time, they were still in their own world and only asked the questions they wanted to. Freaking them out with weird events forced them to start asking questions they didn’t want to.
After all, “necessity is the mother of invention.” Why invent something new when the old works well enough? It’s only once people suffer for reasons they can’t figure out that they go looking for answers, answers that often lead to other questions and then other answers.
And not just for things that are currently happening, or will in the future, but also retroactively. The brain has a remarkable way of doing that, of taking new information and using it to solve old puzzles, sometimes even unconsciously. When Yosef accused his brothers of being spies, he was planting the seeds of future revelations.
Still, even if the brothers had begun to suspect that the Viceroy was Yosef, a big leap of faith to begin with, breaking the world meraglim down into six separate words that told the tale of his sale and enslavement was an even bigger leap. It would have been like figuring out the winning number of a lottery in advance using mathematics. It might be possible, but the odds are heavily against being right, even for the smartest person in the world.
But you can’t believe how many things you enjoy in life whose discovery had similar odds. Some were just the result of trial and error, lots of trial and error. Others were discovered more quickly because of some “lucky” circumstance. But since we don’t believe in luck at all, because everything is a function of Divine Providence, we have to assume that God decided to give the discoverer a break by speeding up the right result.
It works the same with insights as well. If I had a dollar for every time an insight came to me because of some unplanned circumstance, I could almost retire. I’m talking about getting the idea for a parsha sheet or an entire book because I happened to be thinking about something at a bus stop while a bus went by with an advertisement on the side. The advertisement had nothing to do with the idea I was thinking about, but seeing it at exactly the same time I was thinking about an idea somehow led to a new insight.
Yosef had known that if he got his brothers started, they would ask the questions, maybe even do a little teshuvah and warrant the necessary Divine Providence to work out the puzzle. In fact, one of the best ways to know if you’re going in the right direction in life is how God helps you connect the dots in whatever you’re doing right. Somehow life, history, a book, a person, or even the most unusual thing will make some impression on you to move your thinking in the right direction.
Because knowledge is just light, Divine light. But being holy, it can only flow to people according to their level of holiness. The more fitting a vessel is spiritually speaking, the greater and more insightful the light will be. The higher a person ascends spiritually, the higher the spiritual light they can access will be.
This is what it means that the Ohr HaGanuz, the Primordial Light that God hid on Day One of Creation from the evil history, can be found in the thirty-six Ner Shel Chanukah. Obviously, it is not a physical thing, but a spiritual one, not something seen with the physical eye but the mind’s eye. And the thing about the mind’s eye is that it opens only as wide as a person’s heart does for truth.
Countless times throughout history, people have come to know far more knowledge than they actually learned, more sophisticated knowledge than they should have been able to. We don’t notice it much in our own lives because most people never try to know or understand much more than they need to in order to get by in life. So God says, “If they don’t want to know, why should I tell them?”
Want to know, so God will tell you…and you will be more than amazed by what He has to say. A freilechen Chanukah.
Thirtysix.org
Rabbi Pinchas Winston
Chanukah Sameach
