Boulder Aish Kodesh

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds” – Albert Einstein

What Einstein did not tell us is whether the great spirit and the mediocre mind are in the same body.

In Parshat Vayeshev, the Torah shifts its focus toward a young Yosef, vain and self-righteous, infuriating his brothers to the point where they are ready to kill him. And yet he is known as a tzaddik (Rashi 37:25).

Yosef, at this young age, is caught between who he is and who he will be. His dreams seem to indicate that he is destined for greatness, but the Torah records several things he did wrong, justifying to a degree the brothers’ anger. And yet, in that very gap between who we are and who we will be lies our destiny. And the ‘mistakes’ we make along the way are often necessary to ensure that our destiny will be fulfilled.

Yosef is a dreamer. Societies tend, in general, to ostracize the dreamer – the one who imagines a shift of paradigm, a rearrangement of priorities or beliefs, a redistribution of power. My thoughts gravitate to Copernicus, who claimed that the sun was in fact the center of the universe. This was tantamount to heresy at the time. He was forced to recant. It later became obvious that the sun was the center of the universe.

The dreamer often finds him or herself fighting against people’s desire to retain the status quo. The status quo works for what it works for. People get accustomed to their specific place on the map of society, be it lofty or not, and to expect people to change their position, for better or worse, often feels like an uphill battle. Or a battle to the death.

But, often, the dreamer is partly to blame. Often the dreamer presents in such a way as to unnecessarily scare people off – like in Yosef’s case. Though what he was presenting – a new family configuration with him at the center, though he was not even close to the first born, thus upsetting the balance of the family where no one was at the center, and forcing the issue of favorite mother/favorite son to the center of family consciousness – would never be popular per se, we might have had a different story if it had been presented with humility and consideration.

But, then again, that great spirit is usually too excited about what he or she has got to say to think about how it will sound. A great spirit needs a great mind to go with it and do great public relations work.

As Hanukkah approaches, we find the story of dreamers – people who dream about not being oppressed, about being allowed to observe Shabbat, brit milah, learn Torah, and the like. And their message was a thorn in the side of many Jews who didn’t want to rock the boat for any number of reasons. And they pushed through, and it was ugly in some ways, and beautiful in others. And it is not clear whether a good PR person would have helped. But this is the shape that destiny often takes: great ideas and the great battles that ensue because of them. And it is the ideas as well as the battles that ensue that shape who we are.