Miketz moves Joseph from the dungeon to the palace by way of dream interpretation. Joseph, forgotten by the cupbearer who “did not think of him and forgot him,” waits two more years until Pharaoh’s double dream pulls him up. This time Joseph names the Source: “God will answer,” then reads the seven fat years and seven lean years and proposes a plan. We wrestle with the brilliance and the danger of that plan, the grammar of vayehi as a signal of darkness, and how a Hebrew prince of exile names his sons—Menashe and Ephraim—in a way that can mean forgetting, indebtedness, and fruitfulness in a hard land. At the close, Joseph stages a moral stress test for his brothers through Benjamin, and the story stops on a cliff: recognition will wait. Read on Hanukkah, Miketz asks how light and policy, providence and prudence, meet in the dark.

We explore:
• “God can interpret; tell me”: why Joseph’s God-talk disappears in prison, then returns before Pharaoh
• Vayehi and exile: the Hebrew tense flip and why dreams emerge in darkness
• Seven and seven: wise preparation or dangerous centralization, and what comes of empowering a regime in crisis
• “Ganov gunavti me’eretz ha’ivrim”: “land of the Hebrews” as an older memory of place, not just a family
• Menashe and Ephraim: forgetting vs obligation, and raising Jewish children at the heart of empire
• Why Joseph does not summon Jacob: self-conception, succession, and the double-path of diaspora and homeland
• The test of Benjamin: recreating the past to measure teshuva in the present
• Hanukkah resonance: policy in famine, light in winter, Joseph as the holiday’s unexpected guest

Parshat Miketz 5786
Torah: Genesis 41:1–44:17 | Haftarah: Zechariah 2:14–4:7 (Hanukkah)
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