By Elliot Gross

Good day my fellow socialists of Homonym Drawer. Today, I'm going to be blabbering about parashat Vayeshev, in which Joseph receives his technicolor coat and has a few dreams. If you want to know more about the parasha, here is Wikipedia, or you can watch the movie Joseph: King of Dreams, or you could go get tickets to see Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Coat of Dreams (I cannot vouch for the biblical accuracy of the latter two).

I wanted to focus on the fact that G-d is clearly with Joseph and sending Joseph dreams in which all of his brothers bow down to him (slash his brothers' wheat sheaves bow down to his wheat sheaf), causing the brothers to get angry and nearly kill him but end up throwing him into a pit, selling him to slavers, telling his parents that he died, and making it so he never ever sees his mother again. How can G-d treat us so differently to the point where people become so jealous of each other that they plot to kill their own brother over a few dreams? I believe that this story is meant to tell us that we should not be angry at Joseph. Yes, it can be infuriating hearing someone talk about how they had a dream where people were bowing to them, but why be mad at them? Joseph had no control over the fact that G-d chose him over his brothers, yet his brothers punish him. I think that this story is trying to get us to question who we should be angry at when things are unfair. The logical character to be upset at in this story is G-d, because G-d is the one who chose Joseph over everyone else.

To apply this to a modern day situation like capitalism: it often becomes easy to make rich people, beneficiaries of the economy, out to be evil. But they are not necessarily so. They were thrust into a system in which they had no control over, the only difference is that they are on the other side. Joseph doesn't renounce his gift from G-d until after he was punished, and why would he? before being sold into slavery, there was no downside to what he had.

Just like how people who are wealthy cannot see why a good reason to give up their money. Getting angry at someone because life favors them over you is not logical. The point of this portion is to say, get angry at what put someone above you. Connecting this to what happened to Eric Garner, Mike Brown, or countless other people who are black, no one should be angry at white people as a race, we should be angry at what has put all of us into this situation. It makes no sense to punish Joseph, so instead we should be angry at what put him above everyone else. And then change it.