The One They Didn't Recognize

We came to Israel for Chanukah. We had been planning it for a few short weeks — to be fair, it was basically last minute. But still. We were so anticipating the hanukiyot in the Old City. The light reflecting off the stone. The whole thing. Then a travel bug dropped us both, and here we are in an apartment near Levinsky Market in Tel Aviv, drinking tea, watching the sun go down on the fourth night of Chanukah through a window that faces a street where nobody appears to be lighting anything.

Levinsky Market is magnificent. It is also, by any standard, not the Old City of Jerusalem. The spice stalls are incredible. The falafel are transcendent.

The visible Jewish ritual observance? Approximately zero. Even though there's a shul a few steps away.

We dragged ourselves outside for maybe twenty minutes, though they felt like hours — fresh air, legs moving, some attempt at participating in the holiday — and came back empty-handed. No public hanukiyot. No singing. No doughnuts being handed to strangers. Just a very good, very secular neighborhood doing what it does on a normal night.

This is not a complaint. It is, however, a setup.

The parsha this Shabbat is Miketz — "at the end" — and it falls, as it almost always does, on Shabbat Chanukah. The collision is not accidental.

Miketz is the parsha of hiddenness. Joseph, sold into slavery by his brothers, thrown into an Egyptian prison, is now the second most powerful man in the ancient world.

He has an Egyptian name. An Egyptian wife. Egyptian clothes. He speaks Egyptian to the officials who report to him.

When his brothers show up in Egypt, desperate and hungry, they bow before him and they do not have the faintest idea who he is.

וַיַּכֵּ֥ר יוֹסֵ֖ף אֶת־אֶחָ֑יו וְהֵ֖ם לֹ֥א הִכִּרֻֽהוּ׃

For though Joseph recognized his brothers, they did not recognize him.

— Bereishit 42:8

The Hebrew is sharper than the English. Vayaker — he recognized. Lo hikiruhu — they did not recognize him. Same root, twice. The verb for knowing someone by sight, flipped. Joseph sees them and knows. They see him and see only the Egyptian viceroy.

This is what Egypt does. Egypt takes Joseph and covers him. New name — Zaphenath-paneah. New wife — the daughter of a priest of On. New language, new clothes, new title. Pharaoh promoted and dressed him in a country until nobody could tell what was underneath.

But Joseph knew. He always knew. When his sons were born, he told the world exactly who he was — not in Egyptian, but in Hebrew. He named them in the language of his father.

וְאֵ֛ת שֵׁ֥ם הַשֵּׁנִ֖י קָרָ֣א אֶפְרָ֑יִם כִּֽי־הִפְרַ֥נִי אֱלֹהִ֖ים בְּאֶ֥רֶץ עׇנְיִֽי׃

And the second he named Ephraim, meaning, “God has made me fertile in the land of my affliction.”

— Bereishit 41:52

The land of my affliction. Not "my new home." Not "the land of my success."

Joseph is running the economy of the known world and he names his son a reminder that this place — for all its power, for all its plenty — is still exile. The fertility is real. The affliction is also real. Both live in the same name.

Chanukah sits on top of Miketz this week, and the resonance is hard to miss.

The Chanukah story is also about hiddenness. The Greeks didn't try to destroy the Jews the way Egypt or Babylon did. They tried to cover them. Hellenize them. Give them new names, new philosophies, new gods that looked civilized and reasonable.

The Temple wasn't burned — it was defiled. Burning is an ending. Defilement is a covering. The building is still there; the holiness is buried.

And then someone finds a jug of oil. Sealed, hidden, stamped with the seal of the High Priest. One day's supply, not enough for the eight days needed to press new oil. It burns anyway.

This week, Israel and Egypt signed the largest energy deal in Israel's history — $35 billion in natural gas flowing from the Leviathan field to Cairo.

When Bibi announced it, he reached for the obvious metaphor: "We have brought another jug of oil to the nation of Israel."

The irony is better than the line. Israel, selling energy to Egypt.

The country Joseph once sustained is now buying fuel from the country Joseph's descendants built. The gas is under the Mediterranean, invisible, buried deep in rock — and it turns out to be worth a fortune.

Hidden things have a way of surfacing in this story.

Back in the apartment near Levinsky, I made the bracha and lit the chanukiyah we brought with us and candles we bought at Shuk HaCarmel. Four candles plus the shamash.

No Old City stone walls. No crowds. No photographer's Chanukah. Just two sick Jews in a Tel Aviv apartment, keeping the mitzvah of pirsumei nisa — publicizing the miracle — to a street that probably wasn't watching.

Joseph's brothers saw an Egyptian official. They missed what was right in front of them.

The Greeks saw a provincial temple. They missed what was sealed inside it.

I spent a day disappointed about not being in Jerusalem for Chanukah and missed the fact that we were lighting candles in Israel. In Israel! The land Joseph dreamed about but never returned to, the land the Maccabees fought to keep, the land we get to walk into with our passports and our suitcases and our head colds, like it's the most ordinary thing in the world.

It is not the most ordinary thing in the world.

The oil in the Temple wasn't impressive. One small jug. Sealed, overlooked, insufficient. It didn't matter. The miracle was that it was there at all, and that someone bothered to look.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham