Vayetzei
Genesis 28:10-32:3
Hosea 12:13-14:10
Dreams are a major motif in this week’s Torah portion. In the Talmud it says that a dream not understood is like a letter not opened. Sigmund Freud wrote, “Dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.”
Dreams are at the heart of two dramatic episodes involving our patriarch Jacob. In the first episode, the scoundrel Jacob has just cheated his brother by trading Esau a bowl of stew for his birthright. Then he deceives his father, Isaac, and gets the blessing that was intended for his older brother. After these events he flees from his family home and sets off for Haran.
There, in the quest to find a bride, he meets his match, his uncle Laban. Equally deceptive and cunning, he tricks Jacob into marrying his older daughter Leah, instead of her sister Rachel. With chutzpah, Jacob has to ask Laban how he can renege on his agreement in order to take the younger daughter, Rachel, as his bride.
Some 20 years after this trickery, Jacob sneaks away, taking his family and his flocks and beginning the long journey back to his native land. At that point we read about Laban, who is pursuing Jacob, having a dream. God appears to Laban and says, “Beware of attempting anything with Jacob, good or bad” (Gen. 31:24).
In spite of all his treachery and mistreatment of Jacob, something positive and decent wells up within Laban in this dream.
Our dreams and fantasies can truly be wonderful, expressing the highest and best in our humanity. They are a part of the process whereby we accomplish amazing things.
The Golden Gate Bridge, for example: It has 700-foot towers and a 6,000 foot span. Each one of the supporting cables is more than a yard thick and consists of enough wire to circle the earth four times at the equator. This bridge cost millions to build more than 50 years ago.
What is now this beautiful and imposing landmark was first a dream in the minds of those who had vision. It was put on paper and every detail marked down before actual work was begun. People with grand imaginations built that bridge.
Rabbi Michael Gold points out that a profound Jewish value is found in the very first of Jacob’s dreams we encounter in Vayetzei: “[Jacob] had a dream; a ladder was set on the ground and its top reached to the sky, and angels of God were going up and down on it. And the Eternal was standing beside him and said, ‘I am the Eternal, the God of your father, Abraham, and the God of Isaac'” (Gen. 28:12-13).
Just what this dream intends to teach us is not so easy to comprehend. Some have suggested that the ladder represents Jacob’s desire to be delivered from the reality of his life at that time. The reality is that Jacob has been cut off from his family and sent away by his mother to hide from the anger and resentment of Esau.
Naomi Rosenblatt notes that God responds to Jacob’s “wish fulfillment dream” by offering Jacob “a ladder out of his despair, a bridge connecting heaven and earth” that promises to restore Jacob to family, home, and blessings. Scholar Ketav Sofer, suggests that Jacob’s assignment was to plant his feet solidly in here and now and attend to the practical affairs of day-to-day living.
Yet far more important than its interpretation is the clear value expressed in one simple phrase in the dream: “And the Eternal was standing beside him.” Throughout our lives, it is God’s presence, our symbolic way of speaking about what is most moral, ethical and best in our universe, that is most important.
The interpretation of dreams may be important. But it is the judgment of dreams that is crucial. May we judge the imaginings of our hearts and minds by what our tradition has always asked of us: to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly before the One who created this magnificent universe.
Rabbi Larry Raphael is the senior rabbi of Congregation Sherith Israel in
San Francisco.