Dreams

With all of our attention on Chanuka, it's important to give some thought to פרשת מקץ as well.  To skip ahead to next week for a moment, Chazal say that the famine ended after only 2 years because Yaakov came to Mitzrayim.  I always thought that this meant that in the merit of his entry to the country, the רעב was somehow inappropriate, and therefore it stopped.  This might be true, but it seems a bit odd considering that according to the simple reading of the pesukim, he was hit by the hunger in כנען.  Maybe the reason that the hunger stopped was because Yaakov came to מצרים; meaning, the only reason that there was a famine to begin with was in order to get Yaakov and his other sons down to Mitzrayim.  This could have taken 2 years, 4 years or 7 years, but once they were there, there was no purpose in Hashem withholding food from the people. 

We see that the dreams in this story don't actually happen as foreseen - after all, Yosef predicted 7 years of hunger, 5 of which never materialized (if we were evaluating him as a נביא, would he pass?).  Similarly, the most dramatic part of פרעה's dreams was the skinny cows eating the fat cows.  Yosef interpreted this to mean that the famine would be so bad that the years of plenty would be forgotten.  In reality, due to Yosef's
plan, the opposite occurred.  The years of plenty were well remembered during the hunger years, because the people had the food left over.  The dream doesn't accurately predict the future, only the default future - what will happen if you don't alter reality, because clearly it is subject to change based on people's actions.

If so, maybe we can better understand a famous but puzzling Ramban.  He says that the reason that Yosef didn't tell his father or brothers who he was, and why he acted the way that he did is because he was trying to ensure that the dreams came to fruition.  Why?  Did he have a מצות עשה to do Hashem's bidding?  Perhaps he did he because he wanted the dreams to come true.  He knew that the fact that he dreamt them did not guarantee that the scenario will play out, but it was a result that he wanted, so he worked to make sure that it happened just as he had seen it.

(Disclaimer: Ramban uses this theory to defend Yosef for putting his father through this ordeal, so I'm not sure that this approach would work within his opinion.)