Above the fray

If you are anchored above one does not fall down… a Chasidic saying.
How is it that the great advisors to the mighty Pharaoh, the inner cabinet of the superpower of the time, that none of them had a satisfactory interpretation of his seemingly obvious dream?  Was Joseph’s interpretation so novel?

(Read the entire story here)

There was one detail in Pharaoh’s dream that no one could make sense of.  This was the fact that robust cows stood next to the lean cows before being consumed by the latter.  If indeed they represented two sets of 7 years, why were they standing next to each other?  One set ends and the next begins, they don’t coexist?!

Joseph however understood that black and white thinking is a limitation of our physical reality.  In a transcendent reality, a Divine reality, opposites can coexist.  And so, Joseph looked for the meaning in the seeming contradiction and derived that the cows standing side by side was G-d instructing Pharaoh to prepare during the years of plenty for the lean years.  

Joseph merited this on account of his amazing sacrifice of resisting his master’s wife’s advances.  Joseph is known as a Tzadik, an individual who transcends the realities around himself; not defined or limited by the physical perceptions.

The lesson for us is a powerful one; if we anchor ourselves above, we are empowered to look at the world through a different lens.  We’re starting from the top and looking in, instead of looking from down here trying to figure out what’s up there.  The view from above is brighter and broader.

Happy Chanukah and Good Shabbos!

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