PARSHA - Miketz - Chanuka. Make your dreams a reality!

In this week’s Torah reading Pharaoh the mighty ruler, has two dreams and so he summons Yosef/Joseph from his prison cell and Yosef interprets the dreams to Pharaoh so brilliantly that Pharaoh promotes him to the second most powerful person in Egypt.

Years earlier Yosef himself had dreams that indicated to him that he was destined to become a powerful ruler, and now, through interpreting Pharaoh’s dreams, his own dreams of leadership were actualized. Yosef's dreams came to be when he rises to the occasion and not only interprets Pharaoh’s dream but takes it a step further and offers advice on how to save the Egyptian people from starvation. Advice giving is a bold act, which may have cost him his life. Yet, he made this courageous move in order to achieve his life's goal.

This week we too can take a step forward, with complete faith in our ability, to realize our dreams.
Tonight we begin celebrating Chanukah. Chanukah is a story of a small group of courageous people, the Maccabees, who stood up to their Greek/Assyrian oppressors because they had a dream of a better reality. When they entered the Temple, it lay in ruin and shambles. It had been defiled and vandalized, yet they had a vision, a dream, of rededicating the Temple by kindling the Menorah Lights with pure, untouched oil. Given the circumstances, it would have been understandable had they kindled the menorah with impure oil.

Yet they searched for pure oil and found one tiny cruz. Only because they had sought it, did they find it. Their unwavering trust and belief in the miraculous caused a miracle to occur, and the oil was lit and remained miraculously lit for eight nights.

Had they not moved forward, their dream would have remained just that, a dream.

This week, be courageous, take a bold step forward towards your dream, with complete faith in the possibility of the miraculous.