We all know the story of the coat, but sometimes we forget about the dreams that really kicked things off.

The second dream is the real kicker. Joseph dreams that the sun, the moon, and eleven stars bowed down before him. Can you imagine the chutzpah it took to even tell anyone that?

He, of course, tells his father Jacob. And Jacob, initially, is…well, thrilled! Perhaps a little too thrilled. The text is telling us Jacob "was rejoiced over it, for he understood its meaning properly." According to Legends of the Jews, Ginzberg's comprehensive collection of rabbinic lore, Jacob thought he had it all figured out.

He believed that he was represented by the sun. Now, why the sun? Well, the Midrash (specifically, Ginzberg tells us it's from a source called Sefer ha-Yashar) says that God himself had called Jacob "the sun" when he spent a night on the holy site of the Temple Mount. God supposedly said to the angels, "The sun has come!" A pretty significant endorsement, right?

Then the moon, in Jacob's interpretation, stood for Joseph’s mother, Rachel. And the stars? Obvious! They stood for Joseph's eleven brothers. The righteous are compared to stars in many places in Jewish tradition, so this tracks.

Jacob was so sure of his interpretation, so convinced that this dream was a prophecy, that he even began to believe he would live to see the resurrection of the dead. Why? Because Rachel was already gone. For her to bow down in Joseph’s dream meant she would have to return to the earth.

But here’s the thing: Jacob was wrong. Big time. The text gently chides him, saying "He went astray there…" The moon didn’t represent Rachel, Joseph’s biological mother. It represented Bilhah, his foster mother, who had raised him.

Why does this matter? Well, it highlights the complexities of family, of destiny, and of interpreting the divine. It's a reminder that even the most learned among us, even patriarchs like Jacob, can misread the signs. Maybe because they want to see something so badly they jump to conclusions.

Think about it: how often do we interpret events, dreams, or even just conversations through the lens of our own desires and expectations? Perhaps Jacob's initial joy blinded him to the true meaning. It's a humbling thought, isn't it? That even in moments of apparent clarity, we might be seeing only what we want to see. And perhaps that's the real lesson embedded in Joseph's dream – a reminder to look beyond our immediate assumptions, and to seek a deeper, more nuanced understanding of the world around us.