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In the end, it will all finally make perfect sense By Rabbi Dov Fischer
They say "timing is everything". It certainly is. But sometimes -- often -- life doesn't happen on our schedule
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As this week's Torah Portion begins, two years have passed since the incarcerated Joseph correctly divined the wine steward's dream in prison. Joseph had predicted accurately that the Pharaoh would pardon the steward and return him to his station. All Joseph had asked, in return, was that this Chief Sommelier remember him to the Pharaoh upon his release.
"I'm a Jewish kid sold into slavery," he basically explained. "I don't belong here. I was imprisoned wrongly. You see I'm a good guy. You may be my last chance for a pardon. Please get me out of here." Perhaps he should have added, in Kramer's famous "Seinfeld" line: "I live for merlot."
The wine steward never made any promises to help Joseph. When this fellow did get released, the Torah tells us that he not only failed to remember Joseph but actively forgot him. In time, two years later, as the Pharaoh becomes obsessed with two quirky dreams about thin and fat stalks and cows, the Chief Sommelier then will chime in, perhaps seeking personal advantage, remembering the incarcerated Hebrew dream-diviner.
The Divine brings people into our lives, all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons. And sometimes we neglect to realize that He also is bringing us into their lives. People come in and out for a reason, sometimes only for a minute, a passing dream. Back in the 1960s, all the graduating eighth graders at Brooklyn's Yeshiva Rambam were given "autograph books," and we all perfunctorily signed each others' books with mundane comments. Apparently, I was the only kid who ever asked Troy the Janitor to write something in an autograph book. He was moved and struggled mightily to pen something. As he wrote, he said each word out loud. He barely knew me, but he gave me a blessing that deeply touched and inspired me.
Why did the wine steward come into Joseph's life? Perhaps Joseph needed to sip yet another dose of chastening humility and to encounter another dose of disappointment and failure. Joseph had been too brash all his young life. Maybe because his mother had died so prematurely, while his father's focus was diverted among four sets of children, no parent had emerged to teach him commonsense: You don't tell your siblings that you keep dreaming they are bowing to you. You don't tell them that their stalks bow to you, that they are stars in the sky bowing to you, that you dreamt they all were on a baseball field and Dad was the umpire, and suddenly everyone turned to face your seat behind home plate and bowed to you. And maybe you share your striped coat and stop "telling on them."
Maybe he grew up too self-confident with that special paternal coddling and doting, and those gorgeous good looks. Even after Simon and Levi cast him into a pit, leading to his Egyptian slavery, he soon was back on top, named Chief Aide to Potiphar, the Pharaoh's advisor. It seemed nothing could keep him down. He was a Tzaddik, so righteous that he resisted Potiphar's wife (even as the "shalshelet" cantillation note suggests that he had to wrestle with the temptation), but he apparently needed another round of humility from the Almighty, to perfect his maturing soul. So circumstances sent him to prison, where he met the wine steward. Between Joseph's correct prognostication and his overwhelming charisma, he may have figured that, once again, he rapidly would rise. And then the steward forgot him. Maybe Joseph needed that last jolt of humility, still bottled up in prison, for his life's greatest task yet awaiting him.
It is not hard to understand the wine steward. He had been locked up because, in the ultimate bottle shock, a fly had ended up in the Pharaoh's goblet. No less than Joseph, the steward probably figured that he also did not belong in prison. Upon being freed, he predictably would have resisted asking the Pharaoh a favor like: "Hey, I have a buddy in prison. Would you mind letting my pal out, too?" Only two years later, when the Pharaoh really needed a dream diviner, did the steward perceive that, by suggesting Joseph as royal interpreter, he might get his own points with the Pharaoh. However, the steward had waited too long. He disappears.
Joseph comes before the Pharaoh at the perfect moment, though. Had he arrived when he had hoped, he would have been lounging around the palace uselessly for the next two years, living off the Pharaoh without earning his keep, maybe getting into more trouble. Instead, he arrived at precisely the moment when a good first impression could elevate him to Viceroy status. Thus, he stands before the Pharaoh at age 30, and nine years later — after seven years of plenty and two years of a famine abruptly abbreviated by his father Jacob's arrival in the land — he begins the longest reign in Jewish history, directing the development and evolution of a 70-member family into a nation of millions, isolated in Goshen away from alien Egyptian influences, devoting the next 71 years of his life to leading and overseeing the Jewish people's emergence as a nation ready to endure any challenge, any set back or humiliation, even slavery, en route to its ultimate journey to greatness at Mount Sinai.
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JWR contributor Rabbi Dov Fischer is an adjunct professor of law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and serves as the rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County.
© 2010, Rabbi Dov Fischer
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