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Parshat Miketz: How Outside the Box Thinking Can Lead to Salvation
A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.
“Experts are often wrong — but rarely in doubt.” On the evening of October 15, 1987, Michael Fish went on BBC television to do what he had done reliably for years: give the weather forecast.
Before signing off, he added a few words of reassurance. Earlier that day, he told viewers, a woman had rung the BBC saying she had heard there was a hurricane on the way. “Well, if you’re watching,” Fish said with calm authority, “don’t worry, there isn’t.”
A few hours later, the Great Storm of 1987 tore through southern England, with winds exceeding 120 miles an hour. Eighteen people were killed. Fifteen million trees were uprooted. Roofs disappeared, power lines collapsed, and entire landscapes were altered overnight.
It was the Jewish festival of Shemini Atzeret, marking the end of Sukkot, and hundreds of sukkahs were caught up in the chaos, blown down and destroyed.
In the town of Sevenoaks, Kent, six of the seven famous oak trees that gave the place its name were ripped out of the ground. The town, it should be noted, was not subsequently renamed Oneoak. Instead, with its identity so closely tied to multiple oaks, Sevenoaks replanted seven new ones — so that today, Sevenoaks actually has eight oak trees.
Michael Fish, it is also worth noting, kept his job.
The financial crash of 2008 followed a similar script. For years beforehand, economists, regulators, and financial institutions spoke confidently about risk being “priced in” and markets being fundamentally sound. Complex models reassured everyone that the system was stable, even resilient.
And then, almost overnight, it wasn’t. Banks collapsed, markets froze, pensions evaporated, and ordinary people paid a terrible price.
In the countless Congressional hearings and post-mortems that followed, an uncomfortable truth emerged: the warning signs had been visible for some time. Housing prices had become detached from reality. Subprime mortgages were being packaged into investment products that were anything but safe. Leverage was out of control, and incentives rewarded recklessness rather than restraint.
But the prevailing assumptions were so entrenched that few within the system were willing — or able — to see where the patterns were leading.
Closer to home, and far more devastating, was October 7, 2023. Israel’s intelligence agencies and the IDF are widely regarded as among the most sophisticated military and intelligence establishments in the world, staffed by brilliant analysts with unparalleled access to data, surveillance, and human intelligence.
And yet, the attack — which resulted in wholesale slaughter, rape, destruction, and kidnappings — came as a profound shock.
In the weeks and months that followed, it emerged that Hamas’ preparations had not been invisible. There were signals: training exercises, intercepted communications, and anomalies that, in retrospect, now seem glaring.
But they were filtered through assumptions about deterrence, capability, and intent — assumptions that dulled their significance. The unthinkable was discounted precisely because it was unthinkable.
What links all these failures — and many others throughout history — is not a lack of information, talent, or effort. In each case, the data existed, the signs were there, and the patterns were discernible.
What was missing was not expertise, but the ability to step back from the details, challenge prevailing assumptions, and recognize what the information was really pointing toward. The experts were using familiar methods to analyze the evidence, but no one was assembling the full picture.
And this is precisely the failure that lies at the heart of the opening section of Parshat Miketz. Pharaoh is disturbed by two vivid dreams and acts as any leader facing uncertainty would: he calls on his ancient think tank of experts.
Egypt’s seasoned magicians and dream interpreters are brought before him, a group akin to today’s specialized advisory committees, with a long track record of success, grounded in a deep familiarity with the symbolic language of dreams. According to the Midrash, they do not sit in baffled silence but offer interpretations that are clever, confident, and internally coherent. And yet, for all their sophistication, they fail to satisfy Pharaoh.
Pharaoh’s dreams themselves are not especially obscure. In the first, he sees seven healthy, well-fed cows emerge from the Nile, only to be swallowed whole by seven gaunt, famished cows that remain just as emaciated after consuming them. In the second, seven full, robust ears of grain are consumed by seven thin, scorched ears–and once again, the weaker do not benefit from swallowing the stronger.
The imagery is unsettling but not incomprehensible, and the parallels between the two dreams are obvious. The experts in Pharaoh’s court duly get to work, analyzing the symbols and offering a range of plausible explanations. But for all their ingenuity and proficiency, they fail to grasp what Pharaoh senses instinctively: these dreams are not puzzles to be decoded, but warnings demanding a response.
So who will decode the dreams? At that moment, Pharaoh’s chief butler remembers that his own dream–and that of the royal baker–had been interpreted some two years earlier by a young Hebrew slave when they were all together in prison. “Get Joseph,” he tells Pharaoh.
Joseph is hastily summoned, shaved, and brought before the king. But why would Joseph have an edge over the experts? What was his secret? The Torah never spells it out explicitly, but the answer is not difficult to discern.
Joseph succeeds where the experts fail because he approaches the dreams in an entirely different way. The magicians of Egypt focus on the imagery, on what each cow or ear of grain might symbolize.
Joseph steps back and looks for structure. He notices that the dream is repeated, which tells him it is certain. He sees the symmetry of seven followed by seven, and abundance followed by collapse. Most importantly, he recognizes urgency.
This is not so much dream interpretation as it is pattern recognition. And clearly Joseph is not interested in impressing Pharaoh with his brilliance; he is far more interested in preparing Egypt for what is about to come.
A striking insight offered by the Izhbitzer Rebbe, Rav Mordechai Yosef Leiner, sharpens this point even further. Repetition, he explains, signals that events have already moved from possibility to determination. When something appears just once, it remains fluid, subject to change and human choice. But when it happens twice, the process is already in motion.
That is why Joseph tells Pharaoh that the matter has been firmly decided by God and is imminent. The dreams are not symbolic riddles; they are revelations of a reality already unfolding. Egypt no longer has the luxury of asking what the dreams mean. The only meaningful question left is how to respond.
So many modern experts, for all their intelligence and sophistication, end up resembling the soothsayers of ancient Egypt more than Joseph. They are not foolish, and they are not careless. But they are trained to work within established frameworks, to refine existing models, and to interpret data in ways that confirm prevailing assumptions. When reality begins to shift, those habits become liabilities.
Joseph represents a different kind of wisdom. He is willing to question the framework itself, to notice when repetition signals momentum, and to understand that clarity imposes responsibility. The challenge Miketz leaves us with is not whether we respect expertise, but whether we are prepared to move beyond it — to step back, see the pattern, and act before the storm is already upon us.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Gene Shalit, a mensch with a personality as big as his mustache, turns 100
The television entertainment personality Gene Shalit, who celebrated his centenary on March 25, semaphored a Jewish appearance for decades to viewers of NBC’s early morning gabfest The Today Show.
With his Jew-fro hairstyle that fascinated celebrity interviewees and his abundant mustache that outdid Groucho Marx’s mere greasepaint simulacrum, Shalit was one of a kind. Born in New York City in 1926, he clearly aimed to be recognizable even through half-opened bleary eyes of half-asleep viewers. And audible too. Shalit’s precise pronunciation, always at a vigorous decibel level, sought to be comprehensible even during voiceovers. The Canadian comedian Eugene Levy, transfixed by this persona, imitated him on SCTV roaring at high decibel levels.
In one skit, Levy embodied Shalit with haimish affection, hawking a remedy for a migraine presumably caused by his own bellowing. In another, Levy spoofed Hollywood celebrities who were notorious fressers at local restaurants, including the American Jewish actress Shelley Winters (born Shirley Schrift). In still another lampoon, Levy-as-Shalit danced and also kibitzed with the late Catherine O’Hara as the Jewish gossip columnist Rona Barrett (born Burstein).
Shalit apparently kvelled at the notion that he was prominent enough in media culture to be affectionately kidded like other Jewish noteworthies Levy imitated, including Howard Cosell, Henry Kissinger, Menachem Begin, Milton Berle, Judd Hirsch, Jack Carter, James Caan, Lorne Greene, Norman Mailer and Neil Sedaka.
Years later, Levy recalled that when the SCTV comedy troupe was invited to appear on The Today Show, before the segment was filmed, chairs were arranged so that Catherine O’Hara was seated next to Shalit. Suddenly Shalit exclaimed: “Wait a minute, shouldn’t the person who [imitates] me be sitting beside me?” Another Jewish comedian, Jon Lovitz, would likewise attempt to imitate Shalit on Saturday Night Live, but without the zest of Levy’s indelible incarnation.
Shalit once told showbiz reporter Eileen Prose that at first, his looks limited him to radio jobs in more conventional times for TV talent. By the more liberated late 1960s, when long hair and a hirsute upper lip were more common, he was hired as quasi-permanent house Jew on The Today Show. Although his mustache fit the counterculture in the mode of Jewish activist Jerry Rubin’s, Shalit as an aspiring journalist may have grown his facial hair more in tribute to earlier literati like the playwright William Saroyan or the eminent humorist Mark Twain.
At times, Shalit’s appearance could be clown-like or cartoonish, so it was natural that characters inspired by him would appear on animated series such as SpongeBob SquarePants and Family Guy as well as The Muppet Show.
Famous interviewees like Peter Sellers were plainly at ease with Shalit’s persona. A conversation filmed shortly before Sellers’ untimely death was cordial, with the sometimes tetchy actor on his best behavior, acknowledging Shalit as a fellow entertainer. And with Mel Brooks in 1987, Shalit looked to be in paradise.
A warm-hearted empathizer and enthusiast, Shalit was more suited to promoting films than criticizing them. In 1989, a tzimmes occurred when a memo drafted by Bryant Gumbel, a Today Show colleague, deemed Shalit a “specialist in gushing over actors and directors” and added that Shalit’s interviews “aren’t very good.” To his credit, Shalit minimized the controversy, telling The Los Angeles Times that Gumbel’s disses were “not big whacks.”
“Listen, I’ve been interviewing people on the show for 17 years,” Shalit said. “I must be doing something right.”
Part of his inspiration was a sincere appreciation for humor, Jewish and otherwise. His 1987 anthology, Laughing Matters featured contributions by Jewish wits such as Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perelman, Woody Allen, Fran Lebowitz, Samuel Hoffenstein, Philip Roth, Mel Brooks, George S. Kaufman, Milt Gross, Arthur Kober, Leo Rosten, Allan Sherman, Max Shulman, Calvin Trillin, Rube Goldberg, Sam Gross, Roz Chast, B. Kliban, Robert Mankoff, J. B. Handelsman, Jules Feiffer and George Burns. The volume was dedicated to, among others, the Jewish screenwriter Samson Raphaelson, who was Shalit’s instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
His visceral reaction to Jewish parody was such that during one commuter train ride, Shalit admitted in a preface, Perelman’s story “No Starch in the Dhoti, S’il Vous Plait” caused a conductor to lean down with concern, stating: “A passenger says you’re crying.” To which Shalit retorted, choking and rubbing away tears: “I’m laughing.”
The subliminal message of Shalit’s book was that without Jews, America would have distinctly fewer tears of laughter. And he regretted not being able to include funny Jews like Jack Benny and Ed Wynn whose performances could not be transferred to the printed page.
Shalit also reviewed books for years. Sticking firmly to the content of cultural products with a few brief hints of value judgment, Shalit seemed to have neither the time nor presumably the inclination to subject new items to analysis of Freudian intensity. He clearly preferred boosting things to panning them, and when a film displeased Shalit, he could be uncomfortable saying so.
One occasion when Shalit raised hackles was his response on The Today Show to the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain. Shalit described one of the gay characters as a “sexual predator.” The LGBTQ media group GLAAD objected to Shalit’s characterization as a homophobic stereotype. Shalit’s son Peter wrote an open letter to GLAAD, identifying himself as a gay physician with a Seattle practice helping the gay community. Peter Shalit admitted that his father “did not get” the film in question, but was “not a homophobe.” He might have added that his father had even included an excerpt from Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy in the aforementioned humor collection.
Shalit followed up with his own apology, stating in a mensch-like way that he did not intend to cast “aspersions on anyone in the gay community or on the community itself.” When Shalit finally retired from broadcasting at age 84, with the Yiddish-inflected declaration: “It’s enough, already,” he left behind admiring viewers and decades of bonhomie as one of morning television’s most genial protagonists.
Mazel tov, Gene Shalit. Biz hundert un tsvantsik (May you live until 120)!
The post Gene Shalit, a mensch with a personality as big as his mustache, turns 100 appeared first on The Forward.
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How a song about the food chain became a Seder mainstay
I’m almost positive I heard about the old lady who swallowed a fly before the father who bought a goat for two zuzim.
This occurred to me a few years ago while riding in my sister’s minivan. My niece was in her car seat fidgeting with a toy that plays a catalogue of public domain children’s songs. But unlike the version I’d grown up hearing, where the old lady’s ravenous habit of devouring ever-larger animals is met with the prognostic shrug of “perhaps she’ll die,” the refrain was changed to the more kid-friendly “oh me oh my.”
The Seder tune “Chad Gadya,” which involves a quite similar conceit, has no such timidity when it comes to the ravages of death.
Jack Black once described it as the “original heavy metal song” for the way it progresses along the chain of life from a little goat bought for two zuzim, to the cat who ate the goat, to the dog who bit the cat, all the way up to the angel of death. (“Very Black Sabbath.”)
It is pretty metal — in a kosher Kidz Bop, tot Shabbat kinda way. But why we sing it should, in Jewish circles, be as popular a seasonal question as what a bunny with a clutch of eggs has to do with Jesus’ resurrection. (Some Haggadot explain the greater significance of “Chad Gadya;” my Maxwell House does not.)
Dating the song or rooting out its precise origins is not easy.
As historian Henry Abramson wrote, scholars have noted the song’s similarities to a late Medieval German folk rhyme. While the fact that it is mostly in Aramaic, not the vernacular in Europe in the Middle Ages, suggests an earlier provenance, it is missing from extant Sephardic and Yemenite Haggadot, where one would expect to find texts originating in the language, and the Aramaic itself has many errors.
Abramson reasons that, given the surviving written versions, it was likely adapted sometime in the 14th century from a German children’s rhyme called “The Foreman that Sent Jockel Out,” about an idler named Jockel who a foreman tries to rouse to fieldwork with an escalating series of messengers, ending with a hangman. (Abramson notes the original is characterized by “some Teutonic weirdness,” like a witch sent to subdue a vulture.)
“Chad Gadya” belongs, like its Seder companion “Echad Mi Yodea,” to a genre called “cumulative song,” where verses build with new information a la “12 Days of Christmas.” But “Chad Gadya” stands out for its strangeness and its more oblique message.
Abramson and others see the goat, small and vulnerable, standing in for the Jewish people, and the ensuing parade of antagonists corresponding to historical enemies (Assyrians, Babylonians) and periods of time (Exodus, various conquests), ending with redemption in the Messianic age when the Holy One smites death.
As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote in a commentary for his Haggadah, the song “teaches the great truth of Jewish hope: that though many nations (symbolized by the cat, the dog, and so on) attacked Israel (the goat), each in turn has vanished into oblivion.”
That this truth is conveyed in song, with much banging on the table or animal noises, speaks to the centrality of children in the Passover Seder. And, some think, its inclusion serves a practical purpose: keeping the kids awake through the last leg of a long ritual meal.
My own interpretation is admittedly less lofty. I don’t think of Israel’s tribulations. I do think of the abundance of stray cats in Jerusalem, said to have originated during the British mandate when the city had a rat problem.
And, in the years since my own days as designated Four Questions asker, I’ve been reading “Chad Gadya” into non-Jewish contexts. “The White Cat,” off of Mitski’s new album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, contains a lyric that recalls the song, only altered to be a metaphor for the predations of capitalism.
In it, the speaker says she must work to pay for the cat’s house and “for the bugs who drink my blood/and the birds who eat those bugs/so that white cat can kill the birds.”
These cycles speak across cultures and time because they represent a fundamental rule of nature: There’s always a bigger fish (or cat or dog or stick).
To erase death from the equation, like my niece’s toy does with that hapless, insect-ingesting pensioner, is a concession to today’s sensitivities. That’s not to say “The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” represents anything more homiletic than a choking hazard warning, but in the case of “Chad Gadya,” death is the story, and an end to death is the hope.
“The Haggadah ends with the death of death in eternal life,” Rabbi Sacks concluded his drash on the song, which ends when God strikes down the Angel of Death. “A fitting end for the story of a people dedicated to Moshe’s great command, ‘Choose life.’”
I know it’s a principle of faith all over the Haggadah, but I’m more agnostic as to that Messianic promise and maybe more in the camp of our old lady. My understanding of Jewishness, which accords with Moshe’s command, says life is best lived knowing that — perhaps — we’ll die.
The post How a song about the food chain became a Seder mainstay appeared first on The Forward.
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Katz: ‘Israel’s Goal in Lebanon is to Disarm Hezbollah’
Then-Israeli transportation minister Israel Katz attends the cabinet meeting at the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, Feb. 17, 2019. Katz currently serves as the foreign minister. Photo: Sebastian Scheiner/Pool via REUTERS
i24 News – Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz held a situation assessment Friday with senior military and defense officials, reiterating that the country’s policy in Lebanon remains focused on disarming Hezbollah by military and political means. Katz emphasized that the goal applies “regardless of the Iran issue” and pledged continued protection for Israeli northern communities.
Katz said the Israel Defense Forces are completing ground maneuvers up to the anti-tank line to prevent direct threats to border towns. He outlined plans to demolish houses in villages near the border that serve as Hezbollah outposts, citing previous operations in Rafah and Khan Yunis in Gaza as models.
The Defense Minister added that the IDF will maintain security control over the Litani area and that the return of 600,000 residents of southern Lebanon who had evacuated north will not be permitted until northern communities’ safety is ensured. Katz also reaffirmed that the IDF will continue targeting Hezbollah leaders and operatives across Lebanon, noting that 1,000 terrorists have already been eliminated since the start of the current campaign.
“We promised security to the northern towns, and that is exactly what we will do,” Katz said. He further warned that the IDF will act decisively against rocket fire from Lebanon, stating that Hezbollah “will pay heavy prices.”