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Torah Portion -
Miketz
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Written by anonymous avriech
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Pharoah has 2 dreams (the cows and the sheaves), and can't find anyone who'll provide the correct interpratation (sometimes you know when something doesn't fit). Finally, Yosef is summoned from prison and interprets the dreams correctly (7 yrs plenty, 7 yrs famine). But what was his big chiddush (innovation) that the other dream-readers didn't manage to get to? That both dreams were telling Pharoah the same message; 'it was one dream' (41;25 & 26). Why couldn't Pharoah's dream-readers come up with that part; why did they all assume that the 2 dreams were the same message? One approach
is that Egypt's entire ideology was to live in impurity and to break the world down into many parts, denying the control of One G-D; even if they had concepts of gods, they were many (eg the Nile, Pharoah,) and the gods were there to serve them, not visa versa. Therefore, in a society centred around breaking things up from One Source into many parts, it's no wonder that they could not connect the dreams and say that they were revealing one combined message. It took a Jew, whose whole essence is to be a living testimony to the fact that all the disparate parts of the world are connected through its One Source, Hashem, to come up with the idea that the two dreams were one message. And that's what we do in the Shema; testify to HaShem's Oneness (the two big letters spell 'eid;' witness) so let's concentrate intently during it for that's who we are.
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