Of Butler(s) and Baker(s)

Parshat Vayeshev

by Rabbi Avi Billet

After discovering questions that never bothered me before, and using certain learning skills acquired in classes taught by the late Rabbi Mordechai Breuer, a new approach to the tale of the dreams Yosef interprets at the end of our parsha became apparent. Wonderfully, some of these ideas are also shared by Abravanel and Alshikh (and others) – both of whose interpretations of chapter 40 are essential.

                

When the Torah describes for us the circumstances surrounding Pharaoh’s sending his servants into prison, the verses become inexplicably repetitive.

1.       The king of Egypt’s butler and the baker sin to their master, the king of Egypt.

2.       Pharaoh gets angry at his two officers: the officer of the butlers, and the officer of the bakers.

3.       He placed them in the holding cell (mishmar) of the officer of butchers, to the prison (beit hasohar) where Yosef is imprisoned.

4.       The officer of butchers appointed Yosef [to be] with them, and he served them, while they spent days [yamim] in the holding cell [mishmar]

5.       The two of them dreamed a dream, each his own dream, and each his interpretation, the butler and the baker of the king of Egypt, who are imprisoned in the prison (beit hasohar).

6.       Yosef came to them in the morning and saw they were perturbed.

7.       And he asked the officers of Pharaoh, that were with him in the holding cell (mishmar) of the house of his master saying, “Why are your faces so upset today?”

The most notable changes in the text from verse to verse are a. the difference between referring to the singular baker and butler (verses 1,5) and the “officers over many” (verses 2,7), b. the sin (verse 1) vs. Pharaoh’s anger (verse 2), c. the location of imprisonment – a beit hasohar (2^nd half of 3, 5) vs. a mishmar (1^st half of 3, 4, 7), d. the nature of the prison location – beit hasohar is where Yosef was at the end of chapter 39, while the mishmar seems to be a private prison in the house of the officer of butchers – Yosef’s former master, e. those who work for the king of Egypt (verses 1,5) vs. those who have a relationship with Pharaoh (verses 2,7).

                

I am unfamiliar with Rabbi Breuer’s teachings on this chapter. But I would imagine his either saying there are two aspects (shtei bechinot) to what is going on here or two different strings of action. If two aspects – one is on the micro level in terms of what happened to two specific workers, while the macro is the significance for the future of the nation of Israel, when Yosef, who is destined to be king, approaches people who are light years ahead of him politically, but who will be serving him (if they survive) within a short time.

                

If there are two different strings of action, there is a single butler and a single baker, each from a full team of butlers and bakers, who sinned in some manner against the king. They are thrown into a prison for political prisoners, one from which there is theoretically no escape. Their overseers, officers, are also punished (after all, they bear responsibility for the flaws of their underlings), but are sent to a minimum security place called a mishmar. Because the mishmar is in Yosef’s master’s home, and because the officers were high ranking, the officer of butchers wants them to be pampered while in prison, so he takes Yosef out of the inescapable jail (beit hasohar) in order to be in the minimum security place (mishmar) from which cases are heard and people are given a chance at being reinstated to their former positions.

                

There are certainly commentators who will suggest this whole exercise is a waste of time because the butler and the baker are the same persons as the Officer of the Butlers and the Officer of the Bakers.

                

And yet a careful study of the verses does leave one wondering why there is so much repetition. Was Yosef wrong, and therefore punished by God, on account of asking the Officer of Butlers to remember him to Pharaoh? Or was his request reasonable, and the Officer of Butlers forgot (as people often do) in the heat of the moment? Was the timing perhaps not right for Yosef to get out of prison? Had he gone out then, what options would have been before him? To work for Potiphar (not great, on numerous levels), to work for someone else (also not great), to go home (??? – what makes him think Pharaoh would ever send him home?). All options would have played against his getting a direct audience with Pharaoh and being subsequently appointed as viceroy. And remember that the main reason he gets that audience is because the officer of Butlers remembers him to Pharaoh.

                

Whether there are two aspects to the tale, or two strings of action, the consideration that Yosef did everything correctly and that he was not a victim of circumstance any more than he was a tool in God’s Divine Plan needs revisiting. We don’t necessarily know why Yosef is thrown in a pit by his brothers and later into a prison-pit. But all of his adventures were meant to harden him and train him to be capable of rising to the position of viceroy when he was ready.

This is the story of our people. Sometimes we look at events in our lives, and they don’t make sense. Or on our own micro level, they are difficult to comprehend. But if we can recall that we are all pieces of a much more macro image of the story of the Jewish people, perhaps we can sense that our lives matter, and that all the pitfalls and trials we undergo are cogs in the great wheel that will ultimately make our people ready to embrace the Final Redemption.