Blogs

There is a new development in our home.  Every morning, our son asks us about our dreams.  When we can remember, we share the content with him, and he does the same with us.  (Cue police chases.  Many, many police chases!)

The really intriguing question though is the one he asks before he falls asleep.  “What will you dream about tonight?”

We explain that we can’t know for sure, but I am always left wondering.  Is it possible to set an intention and then dream about it – bring it into waking lives somehow?  Or does the act of dreaming, human as it is, occupy such a mysterious edge in this life that there will always be aspects of it we cannot comprehend?

In Vayetze, this week’s Torah portion, we encounter Jacob as we did in last week’s portion, but this time he is a young man on the run from his brother Esau’s murderous rage over Jacob’s theft of their father’s blessing meant for the older Esau.  En route to his Uncle Laban’s home, Jacob stops for the night, lays his head down on a stone and falls asleep. 

And then.

Then he has an extraordinary dream of a ladder stretching from heaven to earth, with angels going up and down the ladder.  As they ascend and descend, God stands beside Jacob and speaks to him: “I am Adonai, the God of Abraham and Isaac: the ground on which you are lying I will assign to you and your offspring… Remember, I am with you: I will protect you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”  We then read that Jacob awakens and deeply shaken, exclaims: “Surely God is present in this place, and I did not know it!”

Alone in the world for the first time, Jacob had dreamed into being a God who would assuage his uncertainty and vulnerability.  A God who would shelter him and assure his future.  His dream broke open his waking sense of what is possible in this world, and gave him the understanding he needed that he was not truly alone.  Rather, he was a link in a chain that stretched back to Abraham, and would stretch forward to include the generations to come.  No wonder he proclaimed the ground on which he awakened, in every sense of the world, to be holy.

And for us?  Perhaps the greatest assurance we can take from Jacob’s dream is that our own become even more important in the face of darkness or brokenness.  It’s a difficult world we inhabit, but articulating what it is we dream of, whether for ourselves, for our loved ones, for the human family helps us stay connected to hope, and to a vision of better times to come.  In the words of playwright Jane Martin, “it’s our dreams make us what we are.”

So what will you dream about tonight?

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Gutterman