Shabbos: The Light We Preserve in Galus
Understanding Shabbos through the lens of Parashas Miketz
This has been a confusing week. On one hand, we saw darkness and hate in a way that rattled us to our very core. On the other hand, we have been lighting up our homes every night with Chanukah candles. We have been living a week of darkness and light. We have been living a week of reality. Reality keeps moving, and we keep moving with it, as hard as that may be.
This is the message of Parashas Miketz. Yosef shows how to preserve light inside darkness without romanticizing the darkness, while Shabbos shows that light can arrive from Above even when nothing down here feels ready for it.
Previously, we learned the idea that the segments of Yaakov’s life where he spent decades living with Lavan, needing to find the light in the darkness. Then he went back to Canaan, a place of light but beset with shadows and lingering darkness, setting a foundation for his children, primarily Yosef and Yehuda. As discussed, Yosef represents the light that survives the darkness, Yehuda represents the darkness that gives birth to light. Together they carry forward the two movements that begin in Yaakov.
The tension gets confusing because the roles seem to cross.
Yosef is meant to be outward facing, and the one who conceals. Yosef goes outward into Egypt, outward into the world and he sustains it. Yosef also learns how to hide the light so it stays alive. He becomes the guardian of light that cannot yet be displayed, because exposed light inside Egypt would have gotten polluted fast.
Yehuda is meant to be inward facing, and the one who reveals. Yehuda protects the inner core, the place where Jewish identity stays sealed and uncompromised. Yehuda also carries the power of emergence, the ability to bring new light out of darkness itself. Where Yosef protects the ohr, Yehuda ultimately brings it into the open.
Yehuda measures reality by what is standing in the forefront right now. Yosef measures reality by what the moment is secretly building toward. Galus itself becomes the proof as it forces the Jewish people into a life that does not behave like normal history, where survival stops looking “logical,” and starts looking like a different set of rules.1
That is why the main theme underneath all of this, especially this week, is Shabbos. Shabbos holds both movements at once. Shabbos protects light by withdrawing from the week, and Shabbos reveals light by arriving anyway, despite the darkness preceding it.
We see this model clearly in our parashah.
Yosef is summoned to Pharaoh to interpret his dreams. Upon doing so, he comes to the realization that his years spent in prison were not for naught, because they led to this very moment. This led him to realize that to interpret Pharaoh’s dreams he has to strip them of all vestiges of imagination and reduce them to necessity. This is a moment marked by the absence of imagination.2
That moment was Yosef’s Shabbos moment, where the choshech met the ohr. Yosef realizes that he lives in a seemingly dissonant world where ohr and choshech sit in the same room, and he carries both without falling apart.
Yosef stops living in “what could be” and starts living in “what must be”. That shift makes him capable of saving lives. Now the viceroy of Egypt, he marries Osnat and he starts a family. Often when we name our children, we name them in honor of a loved one who passed on or in some traditions in honor of a living person we would like to honor. Another equally valid tradition is to name a child after an incident in our lives. One may name their son Shalom during a time of war or a daughter, Bracha, to express appreciation for the new blessing in their lives. Yosef named his children Menashe and Ephraim in this spirit.
Menashe was named after the fact that Hashem had made Yosef forget (nashani) the hardships of his youth3, and now he can focus on the work that needs to be done in preparation for the upcoming famine. To function as the sustainer of life for nations, Yosef must anesthetize himself to memory, to his father’s house, to his spiritual inheritance and to the holiness and yearning for the light of his youth.
Imagination itself becomes dangerous, because longing can paralyze him. Forgetting is the survival strategy that Yosef uses so the mission does not collapse, it allows him to endure. Yosef survives by contracting his inner world, by stepping into a narrowed mode of being, where only what is necessary remains.
Ephraim was named after the fact that Hashem made him successful and fertile in Mitzrayim. This is fruitfulness inside affliction, not the fruitfulness of comfort. It is life wrested from alien soil, continuity preserved in a place that corrodes it. Ephraim names that fragile success: life-giving that occurs inside affliction, not after it. Ephraim represents the ability to preserve something special in a toxic environment.
The same way Yosef stores grain so it does not rot, Yosef stores the Ohr Haganuz. The grain is preserved in storehouses to prevent it from rotting in the open. The ohr also needs to be stored away until the time for its gilui or revelation arrives. It is a tzimtzum, a compression of the ohr, to allow for focus on what is necessary. Yosef learns that exposure can be revelation, but it may also be damaging. He moves from being a Naar to second to the Melech. He sees reality as it is, not as he once imagined it.
Ephraim is not the opposite of Menashe, rather he represents a deeper stage in the contemplative process of Yosef. It seems that Yosef realized with Ephraim that yes, he can forget the ohr of his youth for the necessary present, but the whole purpose of that forgetting is to preserve that ohr. The world still holds darkness, and the light stays protected and kept pure.
Yaakov mentioned Ephraim first as he realized the essential thing is to preserve the ohr.4 While Menashe is important, Ephraim couldn’t be without Menashe. A person cannot grow without first surviving. We cannot shine light outward unless we know how to hold light inside when imagination disappears.
On Shabbos, we realize that the goal is not to deal with the immediate reality which is necessary for survival, but to get to the place we are surviving to reach. Shabbos is when the world stops being interpreted by panic and starts being interpreted by purpose.
What I love about Shabbos is that it comes whether or not we are ready. Shabbos arrives with light that does not negotiate with circumstances. Shabbos arrives no matter how the week preceding it went. Whether we had a week of clarity, confusion, simcha, or grief ,Shabbos still comes. Just as the sun always rises the next morning, Shabbos arrives as a statement that light belongs to the world at its deepest level, even when the world tries to argue.
This Shabbos is also Rosh Chodesh, which adds a second kind of light, the light of return. The moon goes dark and then starts receiving light again, and that rhythm becomes part of how we traverse through history.5 That is why the nusach of Shabbos Mevarchim is the same Hashem who redeemed then can pull the timeline closer again and bring the Geula. There is darkness, but there is always light. There is a dark moon, but it always lights up.6 Shabbos that falls on Rosh Chodesh carries a reinforced holiness that can push light into the coming days.7
This is the deeper idea beneath Chanukah too. If the world can produce darkness that feels permanent, Hashem can produce a Shabbos that makes permanence belong to light. The Ohr HaGanuz will be revealed, and it will push away every form of darkness because it exposes darkness as a passing cover over something deeper.
In a way it seems that Yosef was perhaps trying to create in his children a replica of what was himself (Ephraim) and Yehuda (Menashe). Ephraim and Menashe are not a new model of Yosef and Yehuda. Rather, they represent how Yosef fractures within himself once his imagination and yearning for his fathers house can no longer be sustained intact. He is present with his reality.
Menashe is Yosef’s ability to keep functioning inside galus, to keep the world from collapsing. Ephraim is Yosef’s ability to infuse the darkness of galus with Torah, with a reflection of the ohr. This is not the final ohr that transforms history, because that remains hidden and belongs to Yehuda to bring out. This is the ohr that sustains us through galus, to keep things functioning in the status quo.
This is why Yehoshua comes from Ephraim. Yehoshua did not have a redemptive role, rather he implemented Torah in reality. He conquered Canaan and established the structure necessary for Bnei Yisrael to live there. He completed Moshe’s work, but he did not transform the world. He builds a world that can hold redemption, even if he does not deliver the final redemption. He did not reveal the ultimate ohr, as that was the task of Yehuda. Yehuda cannot do his task unless Yosef first does his. Yehuda descends into darkness to extract new light, and Yosef makes sure we survive long enough to get there.
When the sea split, it split in two phases. First Nachshon from Yehuda jumped in, and then the Aron of Yosef came. The full miracle can only take place when Yosef and Yehuda were together.
Menashe and Ephraim represent two stages in Yosef. Menashe is the compression of the ohr, the forgetting of what was before to focus on the present moment. Ephraim is to infuse into this moment, to influence it positively. He represents the slow emergence of light in a dark world.
Yosef, and his sons Ephraim and Menashe, are preparing the ground for Yehuda to come back. Galus prepares the ground for geula, but is no less important.
Rav Kook explains that Yehuda is the one who fears mixing, because the risk of learning the wrong lessons from the nations is real. He describes Yosef’s path as powerful and also dangerous, because it takes strength to go outward without dissolving. He describes the brothers, led by Yehuda, as seeing the long-term risks of Yosef’s strategy, because they look ahead and picture national failure when identity blurs and there is widespread assimilation.
Yosef becomes the architect of survival in foreign spaces. Yehuda becomes the seed of the final revelation.
Rav Kook also connects this to the difference between Shiloh and the Beis HaMikdash. Shiloh, which sits in Yosef’s territory, carries a certain openness, because holiness spreads wider and people can eat food that is rendered kadosh across a broader visible space. The Beis HaMikdash, rooted in Yehuda and tied to Yerushalayim, gathers holiness into a concentrated center, with boundaries and walls. Yosef spreads while Yehuda concentrates. Yosef is outward, Yehuda is inward, and both serve holiness when each stays true to its mission.
Chanukah was the battleground of this tension. The Yevanim pushed a version of outwardness that turned into assimilation. Rav Kook understands the outwardness of Yosef differently. Yosef wants Bnei Yisrael to serve as teachers, guiding nations toward Hashem, while keeping Jewish identity sealed and intact. The victory of Chanukah comes through Kohanim, through an inner circle of holiness, because the moment demanded a stronger seal. The flask of oil matters because it stayed untouched and pure. The light that went public comes from oil that stayed private.
In a world that can often feel dark, where it seems everything is out in the open, not in a positive way. Chanukah is teaching us that the more hidden and concealed the source of the flame is, the stronger and brighter that it will shine.
Yosef is teaching us that part of being in galus is to conceal the ohr haganuz, and to preserve it, until such time that we let it shine bright. On Chanukah, we get a glimpse of that light from the future that infuses the present. This is also the light of Shabbos. On Shabbos we understand that it may be dark in the galus outside, but there is still that light that we are carrying through the galus until it can be fully revealed. When we protect Shabbos (Shemiras Shabbos) we are doing our part to protect the Ohr HaGanuz. We are tapping into our inner Yosef.
When we give our children a bracha on shabbos to be like Efraim and Menashe, perhaps this is the bracha of galus, we need to preserve the light, we need to be Yosef’s children before we can be Yehuda’s. An interesting thought to consider is that maybe when Mashiach comes the bracha will change.
We currently live in a transition between Yosef and Yehuda, and we also live in a transition between Yehuda and Yosef. We carry inward strength that protects holiness, and we carry outward responsibility that brings Hashem into the wider world. A galus mentality shrinks Jewish life into survival alone, and that compression is not our destiny. Rav Kook8 frames Mashiach ben Yosef less as a single figure and more as a preparatory reality that lays the groundwork for the final geula., where Yosef and Yehuda close the circle and the ohr is fully revealed at last.
May we utilize this special combination of Shabbos Chanuka Rosh Chodesh to tap into the ohr in each of our homes and shine it outward with our good actions to help bring forth the next stages of the final redemption process!
This essay draws on ideas I learned in Rav Tzadok, Rav Kook, Beis Yaakov, Shem MiShmuel, The Beginnings of Desire and my own thoughts.
Peninei HaRe’iyah, Bereishis, Miketz, ‘Etzah Amukah she’b’Chevron,’ pp. 95–96
The Beginnings of Desire, Miketz
Bereishis 41:51
Bereishis 48:20
Pri Tzaddik, Miketz 13
Pri Tzaddik, Miketz 10
Pri Tzaddik, Miketz 12
in his eulogy for Herzl