By Rabbi Bradley Artson, provided by the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies, for MyJewishLearning.com
Seeing The Bigger Picture
Joseph reminds us that our perspective of reality is limited compared to the ultimate meaning that God perceives.
Remember the Midrash of the blind people and the elephant? Each one touched a different part of the animal and then described the elephant based on their own particular perceptions.
One compared the elephant to a long, powerful tube.
A second portrayed the elephant as an enormous barrel. A third, feeling the elephant’s ears, depicted it as resembling large drapes. Each person described what they knew--accurate as a characterization of part of the elephant, but completely misleading as a representation of the entire animal.
That same discrepancy between individual perception and objective reality recurs every day. All of us view the world through our own eyes, listen to its sounds through our own ears, and analyze what we see and hear through our own blend of personality, culture and training. The world we live with--a filtering of external fact through subjective perception and collective history--is literally one of our own making.
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