Three Dreams, One Destiny

 

“Joseph was the great dreamer of the Torah, and his dreams for the most part came true. But not in a way he or anyone else could have anticipated.” - Rabbi Lord  Jonathan Sacks

Dreams are one of the main themes in recent Parashot. Parashat Vayetze narrates Yaakov's dream at Bet-El. This week’s Parashat Vayeshev, recounts two dreams experienced by Yoseph, Yaakov’s favourite son. Before delving further into the significance of these dreams and the connection between them, it is important to understand them in the context of the time and place in which they occurred.

Dreams, in general, have held a consistent and powerful place in human civilization—from politics and prophecy to psychology and art. Across cultures and eras, they were rarely seen as random inner noise; rather, they were treated as messages, omens, or revelations that could redirect nations and reshape lives.

In the Ancient Near East, the cradle of Jewish civilization, dreams were commonly understood as royal legitimation. Mesopotamian rulers recorded nocturnal visions as proof of divine endorsement, elevating the king to semi-divine status and rendering political authority sacred. Egyptian dream manuals, discovered in the Chester Beatty Papyrus, treated dreams as coded celestial messages decipherable by specialists of the court. Their purpose was not moral formation but statecraft, empire stability, and royal self-preservation. 

Against this backdrop, the dreams of Yaakov and Yoseph invert the entire cultural logic. Unlike Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia where dreams enthroned power, in the Torah, dreams serve a purpose. While the ancient world used dreams to elevate man to the gods, the Torah uses dreams to anchor man to G-d. (John Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament, 2006).

Yaakov does not become king by dreaming, nor does Yoseph become divine by interpretation. Instead, their dreams deepen covenantal obligation. We encounter their dreams which, in the words of Sacks, “came true,” yet “not in a way, the dreamers themselves, or anyone else could have anticipated.” (Covenant and Conversation Studies in Spirituality, Mikketz).

The dream that greets Yaakov at Bet-El and the two dreams that shape Yoseph’s destiny, according to some Jewish scholars, are not isolated mystical events but stages of a single unfolding covenant.

Though scholars such as, Rash"i and Sforno do not explicitly connect the dream narratives of father and son (Yaakov’s ladder in Bresheet 28:12-15) and Yoseph’s dreams of the sheaves bowing, in Bresheet 37:7 and the celestial bodies submitting, in 37:9), in any explicit comment, they create a conceptual bridge, indirectly, through one key motif, movement from revelation of choseness to its realization. Yaakov’s vision of the ladder reveals a cosmos in which heaven descends to earth, affirming divine presence, protection, and promise. The sheaves and the celestial bodies, in Yoseph’s dreams, mark not only his personal ascent but the historical movement of Yisrael into exile and eventual redemption. Yaakov dreams of Divine protection “I am with you, I will protect you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land… (Bresheet 28:15).” Yoseph’s dreams set in motion the events that fulfill that protection, physical, economical and spiritual. Yaakov dreams the Covenant, Yoseph dreams its implementation in human history. 

The one place, however, where Rash”i comes close to implicitly linking Yoseph’s dreams to his father’s own ladder experience is found in chapter 37. There (37:11) Yoseph tells his dream to his father. Rash”i notes that Yaakov “guards the matter.” Rash”i  bases his assertion on Midrash Bresheet Rabbah 84:12 which interprets this verse as, “Yaakov waits expectancy to see its fulfillment. In other words, Yaakov who once dreamed of his destiny recognizes a true dream when one is narrated.

Some modern scholars such as Robert Alter (The Art of Biblical Narrative,1981) explicitly connect Yaakov’s dream to Yoseph’s two dreams in our Parashah. He refers to Yaakov’s dream as a vision of space and speaks of a  (spiritual → earthly). Yoseph’s dreams, on the other hand, are a “horizontal axis of human power and family structure” strewn with socio-political symbolism (Yisrael → Nations).

Alter’s terminology is reinforced albeit implicitly, in interpretive trajectory, by Rabbi Sacks. Sacks describes Yaakov’s encounter “vayifga ba’Makom”*(Bresheet 28:11) as a moment of transcendent revelation and covenant renewal, i.e. a “vertical” moment of Divine-human communication.

In his essay, “Three Approaches to Dreams (Miketz” Covenant & Conversation), Sacks notes that in addition to the gift of dreams, the gift of their interpretation, Yoseph was also endowed with the ability to implement them, as we is evident in the next Parashah. There, Sacks sees his dreams as the start of a trajectory of political, economic and social leadership, dreams that lead to action, administration and implementation on earth (Yisrael → nations, horizontal).

The ladder at Bet-El affirms not dominion but a moral and spiritual duty. G-d descends not to enthrone Yaakov but to bind him to mission. Yoseph’s twin dreams of sheaves and stars do not coronate him in the mythic fashion of the Ancient Near East. They conscript him into service—feeding nations, sustaining his family, and ushering Israel into its first experience of exile. 

The three dreams are forged into a single symphony where destiny is spoken, first to the father, and then enacted through the son.

Shabbat Shalom and Channukah Sameach, Am Yisrael and Fellow Jews.

*“He came upon a place,” in Hebrew vayifga ba-makom, also means an unexpected encounter. Later, in rabbinic Hebrew, the word ha-Makom, “the Place,” came to mean “G-d.” Hence in a poetic way the phrase vayifga ba-makom could be read as, “Jacob happened on (had an unexpected encounter with) G-d.”  “How the Light Gets In” (in Covenant & Conversation, Parashat Vayetze)