A Tale of Two Dreams – The Importance of Human Effort

“Nothing you have acquired is real unless you worked for it. If you were born a nice guy, the niceness isn’t yours. If you started off not so nice, and now you do a little, that’s Divine.”

– Tzvi Freeman, Be Within Stay Above

“Nothing of real substance comes without work. Our pioneer forebears could never plow a field by turning it over in their minds. They had to put their hands to the plow and walk forward. The work is, by and large, easier now than in earlier times, but the principle is the same. There must be work, and what a great and wonderful privilege it is. . . When pleasure or recreation becomes an end in itself, we are in danger. We are in trouble. We simply cannot expect to refine the substance of character from hunks of pleasures.”

– Gordon Hinckley, Standing For Something

Never having flown before, an old-timer was about to embark on his first such venture. Standing at the check-in counter he queried the ticketing agent: ”Nu, so tell me, how does the plane stay up in the air?”

The Weekly Sedra – Parshas Mikeitz

The Rebbe says:

1. Last week’s Torah portion told us about Yoseph Hatzadik’s (Joseph the righteous’) dreams and the dreams of the cupbearer and baker of Pharaoh, and this week’s Torah portion tells us about Pharaoh’s dreams.

2. The Rebbe now points out that all these dreams were the cause of the exile in Egypt for the Jewish people:

When we think about the story of how the Jewish people were enslaved in Egypt, we will realize that this all happened through dreams; through the dreams of Yoseph Hatzadik, the dreams of the cupbearer and baker of Pharaoh, and the dreams of Pharaoh: