This is one of the most searching moments in the Targum. After interpreting the dream, Joseph adds a request. The Aramaic frames it with a quiet rebuke: Joseph, leaving his higher trust and retaining confidence in a man, said to the chief butler, But be thou mindful of me when it shall be well with thee, and act kindly by me, and remember me before Pharoh and obtain my deliverance from this prison house (Genesis 40:14).
Pseudo-Jonathan, redacted in the Land of Israel in the early common era, is doing something the Torah itself only hints at. The biblical text reports Joseph's request without comment. The Targum inserts a theological judgment: Joseph left his higher trust and retained confidence in a man. In other words — for a single sentence, Joseph leaned on a butler instead of on God.
The Sages are uncomfortable with this verse. Bereshit Rabbah 89 preserves a teaching that for the two extra years Joseph spent in prison (Genesis 41:1), the cause was precisely this moment. Two years of lost liberty, one for each time Joseph said remember me... remember me.
This is a hard reading. Is it not reasonable for a prisoner who has been unjustly held to ask a powerful man for a word at court? Of course. The midrash does not say it was a sin. The midrash says it was a decrease in trust — a small step back from the posture of absolute reliance on heaven that had carried Joseph through Potiphar's house and the prison itself.
The Targum is threading a difficult needle. It does not say human action is forbidden; it says that a soul as tightly woven to God as Joseph's carries a higher standard. When you have been the kind of man whose Word of the Lord was his Helper (Genesis 39:23), asking a human to remember you registers as a tiny wobble in the weave.
The takeaway is humbling. The great righteous are not measured by the same ruler as the rest of us. What looks like ordinary wisdom in most lives is, in theirs, a small turning away. The standard is not fair, but it is the standard the tradition sets. Joseph's two extra years were not punishment in the small sense. They were heaven's patient way of restoring him to the place from which the Word of the Lord would, in due time, bring him out alone.