What’s in a Name
Dec 11, 2004 By Matthew Berkowitz | Commentary | Miketz
Names and titles speak to our very essence. This truism becomes all the more clear as we explore Parashat Miketz.
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Remaining Jewish
Dec 23, 2006 By Matthew Berkowitz | Commentary | Miketz
The First Book of Samuel teaches, “just as his name, so too is his essence” (I Samuel 25:25). Such wisdom reflects more than a kernel of truth.
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Why There Is Suffering
Dec 24, 2011 By Charlie Schwartz | Commentary | Text Study | Miketz | Hanukkah
Who among us has not experienced suffering? After all, loss, sadness, and struggle are as much a part of life as joy, happiness, and triumph. This is as apparent in the emotional arc of Joseph and his family in parashat Miketz as it is in life’s experience.
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Miketz—Hanukkah—Thanksgiving
Nov 27, 2013 By Burton L. Visotzky | Commentary | Miketz | Hanukkah
Hanukkah is the original Thanksgiving. While it is true that our ancestors did not eat turkey (a North American bird), they certainly were cooking with oil.
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An Alternative Hero
Dec 19, 2014 By Alisa Braun | Commentary | Miketz
Joseph, not Moses, torn apart
dreams snakes brothers father
sins and returns loves and is silent
wanders between the gleanings of Ephraim and the delight of Manasseh
Joseph knowledge Joseph pain
Joseph summer
The Fortitude of the Jewish Soul
Dec 15, 2001 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Miketz | Hanukkah
This year I will not be celebrating Hanukkah at home. I’m off to Israel on December 6, and will not be back till the seventh day of the festival, just in time to light a full complement of eight candles on the last night in the midst of family. It is hard to capture the beauty of this holiday or any other on your own. Neither synagogue nor prayer begins to exhaust the repertoire of ritual that enlivens the distinctive character of every Jewish holy day. The home is the great aquifer of our Judaism, indispensable but undervalued.
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Revelation or Interpretation?
Dec 30, 2000 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Miketz
The Rabbis tend to curb the revelatory role of dreams. As a vehicle of extrasensory perception, they would contend, dreams tell us more about what’s on our mind than on God’s. In the early third century, R. Yonatan, a first generation Palestinian Amora, delivered an opinion worthy of Freud: “Dreams convey to us only that which we are already thinking about during the day.” He based himself on a careful reading of the experience of Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian conqueror of Jerusalem in 587 B.C.E. According to the book of Daniel, the king, like most of us, had forgotten his dream by the time he awoke. But greatly agitated by its effect, he demanded of the sages of his realm to recover the dream and then interpret it, a task which threw them into consternation. The exiled Jewish courtier, Daniel, however, with God’s help, met the challenge.
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Memory and Reconciliation
Dec 11, 1999 By Ismar Schorsch | Commentary | Miketz
What ought to be the role of memory in our lives is the conundrum that lies at the heart of this week’s parasha. Just how much of our experience is retained by us, or should be? Is mental health better served by remembering or forgetting? How deep must we dredge into the sediment of our minds to retain or regain the ability to function? A recent study of women on welfare, immune to the prescriptions of tough love, showed how many were once the victims of constant child abuse, which left untreated, impaired them for life. They needed to be healed before they could be restored to the work force. In the narrative form the Torah takes up this subject subtly but profoundly.
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