Hear please! The limits of communication

Genesis 37:6

"And he said to them, Hear, please, this dream which I have dreamed"

This is the second dream Joseph is sharing with his brothers. The words "Hear please!" stand out in their emphasis. The commentary Hizkuni writes that in this Joseph is trying to convince his brothers that this second dream proves it is all coming from heaven.

Yet he fails to convince them - on the contrary, they hate him even more. 

We have all had, no doubt, the feeling of debating or arguing with someone, and thinking, "If I just say the right thing, or use the right words, s/he cannot help but see the truth of my position." Advocates of specific political positions, for example, continue to urgently share videos of posts on social media thnking, no one who sees this can remain unconvinced. And yet people do. Because when they are entrenched, or entirely committed to their viewpoint, or emotionally blocked, it basically does not matter what is said to them, it will not make a dent. And the brothers were entrenched. "Hear please!" begs Joseph, thinking logic or divinely-sent evidence will win the day; but it is a lost battle from the outset.

I'd like to make a connection between the above and a question that has been troubling me for years.

Jumping to an earlier section of Genesis: Rebecca and Isaac seem to have a good relationship. They pray together for children (vs. Rashi);  and Isaac, unlike Abraham or Jacob, never takes a second wife, even though the children are long in coming. So why did Rebecca, seeing that he was about to give the birthright blessings to Esau, not sit down to discuss with him this plan? After all, she has a very strong proof that the blessings should go to Jacob - the fact that God told her even before they were born, "And the older shall serve the younger?"

It seemed to me that the answer lay in Eve's curse:

To the woman he said, I will greatly multiply the pain of your child bearing; in sorrow you shall bring forth children; and your desire shall be to your husband, and he shall rule over you (Gen 3 16.)

We can't help noticing the parallel with Gen 4:7:

If you do well, shall you not be accepted? and if you do not well, sin lies at the door. And to you shall be its desire and [yet] you shall rule over it.

The parallel set up by these two verses is: as woman is to man (her desire to him, yet he rules)

so evil inclination is to human (its desire to him/her, yet s/he rules)

Here, woman and evil inclination are drawn similarly. What is the resemblance? I felt that a woman stuck in a patriarchal system is not free to make her wishes known. Just as the evil inclination must work by subterfuge, whispering its seducations quietly in your ear and making you think it's a great idea to go do that evil thing, so too a woman must manipulate, whisper, and make the man think he is acting independently. This is truly a curse!

But just as Adam can free himself from the curse by harnessing nature and progressing, so too woman can free herself by changing herself and society. By becoming fully whole and balanced, she invites wholeness and balance in the man. And so we can head for equal relationship. Sarah Yehudit Schneider explains that this is the final destination: The Ari states in this place that the 7th and ultimate relationship between man and woman is when they meet “face to face and are completely equal.” (You Are What You Hate, p. 93)

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I still stand by the above idea, that the world must try to move towards equal and open relationship, of communication and respectful debate and listening. However, in the recognition that the world might not yet be quite there, I learned something from the Joseph story that sheds other light on Rebecca's action. Perhaps she was simply aware of Isaac's blind spot. He loved Esau and would not be able to listen to any argument under the sun. So she had to resort to this rather repugnant trick.

This is not ideal,  it also relates to an imperfect world, but at least it is not as gender-imbalanced or tainted by curse as the first situation. Both men and women have their blind spots. Communication is not always the solution to problems in relationship. People have all sorts of emotional blocks than can only be resolved in other ways than direct speech.  Had Joseph been wiser and more mature, he might have looked for other ways to convince the brothers than appealing to their reason.

Bread, Oil and Life Coaching - the Expansion of Abundance

The Shulchan Aruch (Orach Chayim 180) instructs:

Do not remove the tablecloth and bread from the table until you have said Grace After Meals. Those who leave no bread on the table will never see a sign of blessing.

The Mishnah Berurah here notes that blessing cannot rest upon something that is empty, and that we learn this from the story of Elisha and the jar of oil. This is found in Kings II:4:

1. And there cried a certain woman of the wives of the sons of the prophets to Elisha, saying, Your servant my husband is dead; and you know that your servant feared the Lord; and the creditor has come to take to him my two sons to be slaves.

2. And Elisha said to her, What shall I do for you? tell me, what have you in the house? And she said, Your maidservant had not any thing in the house, save a jar of oil.

Elisha tells her to gather many empty utensils, and pour out from her jug into these. She does so, and a miracle occurs, and the jugs keep filling up in abundance, until all the utensils are finished.

Elisha did not create something out of nothing, but rather expanded what was already there. This is a fantastic lesson for us and is consonant with the principles of life coaching. One major difference between life coaching and therapy is that instead of delving deeply into what's wrong and trying to fix it, life coaching looks to what is already there, the strengths and the positive that exist, and begins immediately to increase it incrementally, through action, through positive thinking and affirmations.

Though a prophet - whose job it generally is to aid people to do inner processes of repentance - Elisha here did not to go into why the woman was starving or the spiritual reasons behind it. He stepped in, said "What do you have in the house?" and proceeded from there. Similarly, we don't always have to go into deep therapy to fix what's broken in us; we can make positive change and that in and of itself can heal us and make us whole and full...

As Rebbe Nachman of Breslov says in his well-known Torah "Azamra" (Likutei Moharan 282), we look to gather the good points, from amongst all the negative. And when we gather those good points, true good is created and expanded, and together all the points make up a melody.

P.s. In parshat Toldot, when Isaac wishes to bless Esau, he asks him to bring him tasty food first, so that he can bless him from within the experience of savouring delicious food. I think this fits with the idea developed above, that in order to create expansive blessing, Isaac wished to get himself into a state where he was already fully inside the positive experience, of what there already was, and proceed from there to expand outwards to what hadn't yet manifested.
This principle is something some New Age philosophies emphasize (e.g. Abraham-Hicks) and I think there is great wisdom to it, to start with what there is, from where our souls can bless and thank G-d naturally.