The Teenage Dreamer

When I was 26 years old, I found myself sitting, along with my little sister, across the table from someone I'd been fighting with for years. This was a person I had wholeheartedly believed was on the opposite side of an epic battle between good and evil.

I had been until very recently a zealous member of the Westboro Baptist Church, known around the world for our condemnation of everyone who wasn’t part of our community.

And this man across the table — his name was David. And I’d been certain that he was evil.

He was a well-known Jewish blogger and, since he had rejected Jesus, I knew he was going to hell. For years, I told him so — on Twitter, by email, and later in person, where I would protest events where he was speaking. One of the signs I held read, simply: YOU’RE GOING TO HELL. Meanwhile, my sister’s said, a little more colorfully: YOUR RABBI IS A WHORE.

But then, in what remains the most difficult decision I have ever had to make in my life, I left the church, alongside my sister. I left knowing my family — who’d been my entire world, who I loved so much, who I still love so much — would cut us off, forever.

We didn’t know where to go or what to do with our lives. But David, despite all the vile things I had said to him and about him, invited us into his community. He fed us, he hugged us, and invited us to sit down with him at his table, where — with all we had in us — we wept.

We had left the Westboro Baptist Church because we had come to believe that the church was wrong about many things — that we had been wrong about many things, that we had been needlessly cruel, belligerent — and we wept because of what it cost us to leave: The siblings who had been our best friends. The parents with seemingly boundless energy. The mom who would greet me with a huge smile and a “Hi, doll!” singing 70s love songs to us while she made breakfast. The father who’d scooped us into his arms as children, zooming us around the house for a helicopter ride that landed in our beds, where he would perform nighttime stories like one-man plays.

And now, sitting with David, we mourned that we would be cut off from them for the rest of our days. Left in a world we had spent our whole lives antagonizing. What hope was there for people like us? I felt like I was stepping into an abyss. We had betrayed our family and everyone we cared about. We had forsaken every principle that our parents had dedicated their lives to teaching us. The sense of loss was so profound I couldn’t breathe.

But our new friend had a different view of what my sister and I had just done.

“You left out of principle,” David said, “pretty much the same principles you were raised with. And your departure was both a rejection and an affirmation of everything you were taught. You are your parents’ children.”

“In a way,” he said, “leaving Westboro Baptist Church was the most Westboro Baptist Church thing you could have done. They’re the ones who taught you to stand up for what you believe in, no matter what it costs you. They taught you that. They just never imagined you’d be standing up to them.”

It shocked me — in the most hopeful way — to hear those words. I was still filled with uncertainty and grief and doubt. But David gave me the first inkling that, in spite of all we’d lost, there were still aspects of our old lives — beautiful, important, valuable ones — that we could keep.

It’s been over a decade since I sat at that table, but I’ve never stopped exploring that idea: When it comes to my past — to that place, to those people, to the lessons I learned from them — what exactly can I keep? What traditions and family routines can I give to my two young children? What do I tell them about that life?

But lately, another question has come into focus for me: What about the Bible?

It was the backbone of my life for so long. My family gathered together every day, for as far back as I can remember, to read its stories aloud together. We used the King James Bible — the 17th century version with the old-timey phrasing that sounded like music to me. We memorized its verses. We modeled our every action and belief on what we believed it demanded. Its characters were our heroes and our villains. Its lessons were our wisdom.

I also just loved it.

And yet, it’s that same book — and my family's very rigid, very sincere beliefs about that book — that is the source of our estrangement, and my deepest heartache.

I also share many of the objections that have led others away from their churches in droves over the past century. People who dislike intolerance, who are skeptical of the authority claimed by religious institutions that have abused it. People who resist being told in absolute terms how to live, what to believe, and who to be.

And even though I’m not a Christian in the traditional sense — not a believer in that way — in spite of myself, I can’t seem to give up the Bible. Its language and ideas and stories are so deeply embedded in my psyche that they still come to me, unbidden, all the time, as I make my way through life.

I have a daughter now, a little girl, 7 years old and full of questions — about the world and about life and about me and my past and my family, who she doesn’t know — and when I reach for the words to answer her questions, I find that so many of the ideas come directly from the Bible. A source of grief for me, yes, but also strength. It’s a book that has given me understanding and insight about what people are capable of — these figures who embody both moral goodness and depravity — a framework for reckoning with the human condition.

And I find myself compelled to revisit these pages and search for answers:

Which parts belong to the life I left behind, and which parts carry a wisdom I never want to lose?

And of course while I understand the ways in which my story is unique to me, I also know that we have all been handed a history — by our families, our communities, our countries — that we did not choose. And each of us must decide what to carry forward and what to leave behind. And this grappling with the past? That is universal.

One of my favorite things about the Bible is that it is full of characters, of all kinds. Sometimes an entire life is reduced to a single scene: like the young man who falls asleep during an extra-long sermon and — since he happens to be sitting in a third-story window — falls out and dies, and is miraculously brought back to life by the preacher who then goes right back to talking until dawn.

(Eutychus is the name of the kid who falls out the window, by the way. And this story is all we know about him.)

But then there are characters like Joseph — a man whose life story unfolds in vivid detail across many chapters, with a lot of depth and nuance and color. We witness him from youth to old age, through these incredible plot twists, through triumph and anguish. And he is a person who, even though he has much cause for despair throughout his life, somehow never seems to succumb to it. Never seems to become warped by the unjust suffering he is subjected to first and foremost by people who should have been his protectors — his family — but who become his abusers instead.

So. Joseph. His story is found in the very first book of the Bible, Genesis. It comes at the very end of that book, and it tells the story of how one family — this family that will become the nation of Israel — comes to be living in Egypt. And that matters because the next book of the Bible — Exodus — is the story of their descendants being enslaved in Egypt, and eventually led out of there by Moses in this grand narrative: the ten plagues, the parting of the Red Sea — which is a story that a lot of people are at least vaguely familiar with.

So Joseph’s story is the bridge: he explains how this family came to be in Egypt. And Moses explains how they got out.

And just to help orient us in time a little bit, this was the world of the ancient Near East — nearly 4,000 years ago, in the Bronze Age. This was more than a thousand years before Plato and democracy in Athens — more than 1,500 years before the Roman Empire.

In Joseph’s time, people tended to live close to the land: herding sheep and goats, tending small plots of grain. But there were also cities by then — ancient ones, some of them a thousand years old.

Over the course of Joseph’s story, he goes from being one of those animal herders, living in a small village, to an accidental leader in a great city.

But to really understand the story of Joseph, you have to begin with the family that he’s born into — a family that is full of strife. Joseph’s father is the patriarch Jacob, and Joseph is one of twelve sons. And those twelve sons come from four different women — most importantly, from two sisters who are locked in a long, painful rivalry.

How two sisters come to be married to the same man is its own drama-filled story that maybe we’ll dive into another time. But what’s important to know now is that Jacob only marries the older sister, Leah, because he’s tricked into it. He doesn’t love her — he loves Rachel, the younger sister who is strikingly beautiful. But as the years go by, it’s Leah who gives birth to son after son after son, while the beloved Rachel remains barren, unable to conceive. And this is a source of great suffering for her. At one point she cries out to her husband, “Give me children or else I die.” Her anguish is visible and humiliating.

And then finally after Jacob has ten sons already, the Bible says that God has mercy on Rachel, and causes her to bear a son. And that son is Joseph. His father, Jacob, is thrilled about this boy and makes no attempt to hide it. He loves Joseph more than all of his other sons and even gives him a special garment, this “coat of many colors” that is an unmistakable sign of his favoritism.

Now, you may have heard of this coat. It’s probably among the more well-known coats in coat history. It has inspired a hit broadway musical and is featured in songs by artists like Dolly Parton. In this story it’s meant to be a symbol of a father’s love for his son.

But for Joseph’s brothers? This coat is a reminder of their visceral hatred of him.

And then, when Joseph is seventeen, he makes it worse when he tells his brothers about this dream that he has.

It’s good to remember that at this time and place in history, society gave great weight to dreams. They were widely believed to be messages from the divine world. It was a time when — as we’ll learn later in the story — a simple dream could impact the future of a whole civilization.

In Joseph’s dream, all his brothers are working in the field, bundling wheat. And Joseph’s bundle stands up straight while those of his brothers fall to the ground and bow down to Joseph’s. Now again, Joseph is the eleventh son, all these brothers are older than him. By custom that means he’s presumed to be kind of lesser than them — you presume less inheritance, that sort of thing. So, you can read Joseph sharing this dream as naivete or youthful foolishness or maybe arrogance — we don’t actually know. What matters, though, is that this family has no capacity to hold a dream like this. It only makes his brothers hate him all the more.

Now, not long after the dream, Joseph’s brothers have to travel to another city to feed their father’s animals, and Joseph is sent to check on them.

So he goes, and as his brothers see him approaching wearing that coat, they mock him among themselves: “Behold, this dreamer cometh.” And they decide that they’re going to kill him.

Then, they’re going to throw his lifeless body down into a pit. They’re going to blame his absence on some wild beast overtaking him. You can see how here in this place — far from home, with no one looking over their shoulder — they might think they can just get away with it.

But at the last moment, one brother intervenes — No, don’t kill him. Just throw him into this pit and be done with him. — because he secretly plans to rescue Joseph later and bring him back to their father. The others agree. So when Joseph arrives, they seize him. They strip that colorful coat off of him, and they cast him into this pit. But that planned rescue? It never happens. Because not long after, they see a group of slave traders passing by, which gives one of the brothers an idea: Why kill Joseph, he argues, when we can profit off of him? So they sell Joseph as a slave for twenty pieces of silver, and the slavers take him to Egypt.

Once Joseph is gone, the brothers take that coat of many colors — the symbol of everything they hate about Joseph. They smear it with animal blood. They return home, and they say to their father: We found this. Is this your son’s coat or not? And Jacob buys this story. He weeps and mourns for a long time. He says that he will go to his grave mourning his son.

For all he knows, Joseph is dead. And now his brothers are forever free of him — or so they believe. As for Joseph, he’s suddenly gone from being the favorite son to being betrayed, captured, and enslaved. He is taken from his homeland and brought to Egypt where he’s sold to a rich man named Potiphar — Pharoah’s captain of the guard. But he doesn’t despair. Instead, the Bible says that he serves his master well.

Over the course of weeks and months (and maybe years) Joseph's work and his commitment are rewarded. He becomes his master's confidant and is charged with running all his affairs. The Bible says that he trusts Joseph so implicitly that Potiphar doesn’t even know what he owns or what he possesses, except the food that he’s eating on the plate in front of him.

Everything seems to be going as well as it can go for Joseph until Potiphar’s wife casts her eye upon him. Time and time again, she tries to seduce him. He repeatedly rebuffs her, and he says to her: Listen. My master has put everything that he owns into my hands. And he has not held anything back from me except you. How could I possibly repay him with a betrayal like this? Or to quote the Bible directly: “How then can I do this great wickedness?” But Potiphar’s wife — she wants that wickedness. And she keeps pushing day after day for him to sleep with her. Then one day they are alone in the house together, and this time, she catches him by his garment and demands that he sleep with her. “Lie with me,” she says. He gets away so fast that his garment is still in her hand as he flees — a piece of evidence that she then uses to accuse him of trying to rape her. When Potiphar hears the accusation, he takes his wife at her word, and he throws Joseph into prison.

Joseph’s act of integrity costs him all of the favor he’s worked so hard to earn back. He’s gone from being cast into a pit to being cast into a dungeon.

But the pattern persists.

Because even in prison, Joseph finds a way to prosper. The keeper of the prison notices exactly what Potiphar noticed before him: that Joseph can be relied upon. Soon, Joseph is placed in charge of the other prisoners. The keeper concerns himself with nothing under Joseph’s supervision.

And it’s here — still imprisoned, still unjustly accused, still forgotten — that Joseph begins to interpret dreams.

Two of Pharaoh’s officials come to be jailed alongside him. Each has a troubling dream that he can’t understand. Joseph interprets their dreams correctly, and — exactly as he predicts — one man is executed for his crimes, and the other is restored to his position.

Before that man is released, Joseph asks for one thing: that he be remembered. That his name be mentioned to Pharaoh. That someone finally speak the truth of what happened to him: stolen out of the land of the Hebrews, sold into slavery, and unjustly imprisoned in a dungeon, having done nothing to deserve this treatment.

The man agrees. But once he’s restored to Pharaoh’s house, he forgets Joseph entirely.

Two full years pass, and Joseph remains in prison all that time until Pharaoh himself has a dream.

I want to pause here, because if we rush past this moment, we miss what I think is the heart of the story.

Joseph has now spent years in what I think of as “the long middle” — the part of his life where nothing is resolved, where there is no moral arc yet, there’s no visible redemption. He’s stuck in this prison, cut off from the only world he has ever known. He has no family, no legal standing, no power.

What’s striking to me is not just that Joseph survives it, but how he does. He’s operating within these very narrow and difficult confines of a life that he did not choose, but he adapts. He acts with integrity. He refuses to let suffering and injustice turn him into someone bitter or angry or vindictive. He doesn’t allow the wrongdoing of others to dictate who he will become.

That long middle — those years of patience and discernment and restraint — those years are easy to look past once the story turns triumphant. But they’re the reason the ending means anything at all.

Because what comes next only matters because of who Joseph has already chosen to be.

When we come back: the Pharaoh dreams.

So. Pharaoh’s dreams come one after the other, twice in the same night.

In the first dream, he sees seven fat, healthy cows come up out of a river. But behind them come seven emaciated, sickly-looking ones. And then, the seven sick cows consume the seven healthy ones. Suddenly, and I imagine somewhat fearfully, Pharaoh wakes up from this dream in his bed only to fall back to sleep and dream again. This time, he sees seven good, healthy ears of corn, followed by seven thin ears springing up behind them, and the thin ears devour the healthy ears. And again he wakes up troubled. So he calls for all the magicians and wise men in Egypt, to come to the Pharaoh's house and tell him what these nightmares mean. But no one can.

This is the moment when one of Pharaoh’s servants — the one who met Joseph in prison — remembers Joseph and tells Pharaoh how he correctly foretold the fates of two men. Pharaoh immediately sends for Joseph, who is pulled from the dungeon, cleaned, shaved, and dressed to come before Pharaoh. Pharaoh tells Joseph the dreams — how repulsive those sickly cattle were, worse than he’d ever seen in all of Egypt.

And Pharaoh tells Joseph: None of these wise men can tell me the meaning of these dreams. Can you tell me?

Joseph says that these two dreams are actually one, and they are a message from God. God is showing Pharaoh what he’s going to do — that there will be seven good and plentiful and productive years followed by seven years of terrible famine. The famine years will be so horrific that all the years of plenty will be completely forgotten.

After Joseph interprets the dream, he goes further: He tells Pharaoh that to prepare for the famine years, he should find a wise man to set up a system throughout the country: They’ll collect a fifth of everything that grows during the years of plenty, to set aside and store so that when the years of famine come, there will be enough food to keep everyone alive.

Pharaoh tells Joseph, “There is no man here as wise as you. You will be that man.” And again: Pharaoh does the same thing that Potiphar did, and the keeper of the prison. He gives Joseph control over his whole house, and over the kingdom, and tells him, “Only in the throne will I be greater than you.” Pharaoh takes off his ring, puts it on Joseph’s hand, and puts a gold chain around his neck and fine clothes on his body and tells him that “no one in all of Egypt will so much as lift their hand or foot without your permission.” At this point, Joseph is 30 years old and essentially ruling the entire country.

And the future all transpires exactly as Joseph predicted. Seven years of plenty — when they gathered so much food that they had to stop counting it because “it was as the sand of the sea” — followed by seven years of famine.

But the famine that Joseph foresaw doesn’t stop at Egypt’s borders. It spreads outward, consuming fields and emptying storehouses, until even the land Joseph was born into can no longer sustain itself. So one day, Joseph’s brothers — the same ones who sold him into slavery, who last saw him pleading from the bottom of a pit — arrive in Egypt to buy grain.

Joseph recognizes them immediately. But he has become Egyptian in every visible way — in language, in manner, in dress — and they don’t recognize him at all. He is the ruler of the land now, so they bow down to him when he enters. And Joseph instantly remembers that dream from when he was seventeen, that had made them so enraged.

And what Joseph does in this moment is test them. Are these the same brothers who cast him into that pit? Have they changed at all?

Joseph “makes himself strange” to them. He “speaks roughly” to them, only through an interpreter, as an Egyptian, and he accuses them of being spies.

But they deny it. “No, no. We are all one man’s sons. Twelve sons. Ten of us are here, the youngest is at home, and one is dead.”

Joseph demands proof. He says, If you really are who you claim to be, just bring your youngest brother back to me. Ultimately he tells them: One of you will remain behind as a prisoner. And the rest can return home with the grain.

Joseph’s brothers speak openly amongst themselves, in their own language, lamenting — never imagining that he is following every word.

And what they say is revealing.

The brothers speak of their own guilt for getting them into this situation. They remember Joseph’s anguish — how he begged them for mercy in that pit, and how they refused to listen to him. They interpret their present suffering — this ordeal in Egypt that may yet cost them another brother — as reckoning. They see it as a direct consequence of their mistreatment of Joseph all those years ago.

Joseph listens to all of this — to his treacherous brothers and their broken-hearted regret at what they had done to them — and he turns away from them and weeps.

But still, he doesn’t reveal himself.

When the brothers return home and tell their father that they need to bring their little brother back to the city, Jacob — who’s an old man now — refuses to let them return to Egypt with the youngest, Benjamin — Joseph’s only full-blood brother.

“No,” Jacob tells them, “You will not take my son. His brother Joseph is dead, and he alone is left of my beloved wife Rachel. If any mischief befalls him, you will bring me to the grave in sorrow.”

But the famine worsens. Eventually, they’re running out of food again, and Jacob is forced to relent or see his whole family starve. He says to his sons, “Okay. You will go, and you will take all kinds of gifts for the Egyptian — balm and honey and spices and almonds — and you will take your brother Benjamin. And if I am bereaved of my sons, then I am bereaved.”

So the brothers return to Egypt. And when Joseph sees them coming and that Benjamin is with them, he tells his servants to prepare a banquet so that he can dine with them. The brothers are terrified to be called into his house. They’re afraid he’ll take them as slaves or kill them. Instead, they’re given water to drink and to clean up. Their animals are fed. And their brother — the one who’d been held as a hostage — is brought in to join them. At this point, the brothers are marveling to themselves at their good fortune. Because this is the last thing they expect.

Now, when Joseph comes in, it happens again — the fulfillment of his dream at age seventeen, where his brothers bow down to him — and he watches them closely. When the meal is over, he tells the steward of his house to fill their sacks with food, as much as they can carry. But this time, he instructs that his own silver cup be placed in Benjamin’s sack. And when the brothers are on their way, just outside the city, Joseph sends his steward to chase them down and accuse them: “You have stolen from my master. And whichever one of you has the stolen goods will become my slave.” They search through all the sacks, and when they find Joseph’s cup in Benjamin’s, the brothers tear their clothes in grief. Benjamin is seized, and all the brothers follow him back to Egypt.

They plead with Joseph. His brother, Judah, recounts everything: how Jacob had mourned the loss of his son, Joseph, killed by a wild beast. How Benjamin is the only other child of the beloved wife Rachel, and how if any harm should come to Benjamin, then his father would surely die of grief. He would not survive it. Judah tells this “Egyptian” — who he has no idea is actually his brother Joseph — to please take him in Benjamin’s place, to let him bear the punishment, so that Judah would become a slave, and Benjamin would return home to their father.

To listen to Judah — the very brother who had suggested selling Joseph as a slave — now offering to become a slave himself, to save another favored brother. To hear how their father had mourned Joseph, how intensely he had suffered Joseph’s apparent death. To hear how fearful he was of losing Benjamin, too — Joseph can’t contain himself any longer. He urgently sends all of the Egyptians out of the room.

And he loses it. He begins to weep so loudly that the Egyptians hear anyway.

He tells his brothers, “Come close, come close and look at my face. I am your brother Joseph who you sold into slavery in Egypt.” When his brothers realize that this is Joseph, they cannot speak because they are terrified.

But Joseph says, “Do not be grieved. Do not be angry with yourselves that you sold me and that I ended up here. Because what you did is how God was able to use me to save countless lives — including yours, and our family — from this famine.”

And as he speaks, Joseph falls into his brother’s arms. It actually says that he falls on Benjamin’s neck and weeps. And Benjamin weeps right back, pressing his face into Joseph’s neck. And Joseph kisses all of his brothers, and they weep together, and after that, his brothers talk with him.

We’re not told all the details of that conversation, but it’s not hard to imagine the questions, the exclamations of wonder and awe and gratitude and sheer disbelief at these circumstances. A dozen brothers attempting to come to terms with all the years of one another’s lives that they had missed.

The text says that this encounter quickly becomes known throughout all of Pharaoh's house.

Knowing that their father Jacob is very old, Joseph tells his brothers, “Go, right now, and tell my father all of this: that I am ruler of all Egypt, and tell him to make the journey here right away” — Jacob and his children and their wives and their children, everyone who pertains to them, and their animals and everything they have — “Come. Now.” And Joseph says, “There are still five years of famine coming. Tell my father of my glory in Egypt, and that I will nourish you here, all of you.” Joseph tells them he has a special place for all of them to live near him, and he says to tell his father: “Thus saith thy son Joseph.”

In the years after my estrangement from my family — that tumultuous period when the foundations of my life seemed to have dissolved — I found myself drawn to this story. Not to the epic drama of Joseph’s rise in Egypt, being plucked from a dungeon prison and elevated to the dizzying heights of power, which honestly seemed too miraculous to really learn much from.

It also wasn’t the fact that Joseph lived to witness the repentance of the people who had done him such harm. To finally hear them profess their guilt. To see how drastically they had changed during the years that had separated them.

It wasn’t only the moment of reconciliation that drew me in, either. Scenes just like that, between my family and me, have been playing out in my dreams since the day I lost them. I want that. I hope for it — my own moment to share everything that’s happened in my life, to ask them about all the things that I missed in theirs, to be wrapped in my father’s arms again and to press my face into my mother’s neck, and to feel her tears on mine. But I’ve always known that I can’t depend on the possibility that I’ll ever have one of those moments myself. I can hope for reconciliation, but I can’t wait for it. I can’t build a life that requires it in order to move forward.

What kept pulling me back instead was “the long middle” — the years in which Joseph has every reason to despair, but finds ways to thrive. He displays this very particular quality — “longsuffering” — which is one word, not two, and it’s an idea that I’ve rarely heard used outside of a biblical context. The word itself sounds miserable, honestly. “Longsuffering.” Even now, I feel resistance to the idea of celebrating a person “suffering well.” But the quality that word refers to is actually a form of power, I think. The power to endure difficulty without crumbling under the weight of it. The power of self-restraint, even when genuinely harmed or offended. The fortitude to maintain optimism and hope — for others, and for the future — even when present circumstances look very bleak.

None of this is easy to do. And when that moment of confrontation between Joseph and his brothers comes, forgiveness is definitely not the obvious choice. He could have imprisoned them as he had been imprisoned. And yet, he doesn’t. It’s from a position of strength, not weakness, that Joseph chooses grace, and that's what makes it so arresting.

Through all the years of the long middle — with every injustice, with every humiliation — Joseph has been practicing something. He cannot control what is done to him. But he can decide whether the wrongdoing of others will be the author of his character.

I know that the form of estrangement that I’ve gone through is relatively severe. People often refer to it as “going no-contact,” and it’s what my parents and many members of my family feel that they have to do to me, because of their beliefs. But I also know I’m not unique at all in being estranged from people I love. Even the less extreme versions can be extraordinarily painful — being misunderstood and cut off from people who we thought would love and protect us. When I look around online, I often see these exhortations that returning harm for harm is the best viable response, that our greatest power is in punishing those who hurt us. I think that’s why this story feels radical even thousands of years later. When Joseph’s brothers stand before him — powerless, as he once was in that pit — he is the one who breaks down and weeps. And the grace he shows them isn’t just a release for them. It’s freeing for him — the weight of an enormous burden, lifted.

During some of the hardest times of my life, I have thought of Joseph’s example. I’ve been moved by his refusal to let pain determine who he became. I lost a lot when I left the church, but this story — the possibility of choosing otherwise — this is something I want to keep.