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December 11, 1998/ 22 Kislev 5759, Vol. 51, No. 12
Perchance to dream
Torah Study
RABBI ISMAR SCHORSCH
Vayayshev/Genesis 37:1 - 40:23
For the ancients, dreams often conveyed a divine communication about the future. For us moderns, raised in the shadow of Freud, dreams are an expression of our unconscious desires.
In this week's Torah portion, Joseph displays a talent undetected in his immediate ancestors. Not only is he, like them, a recipient of dreams with divine content, but he is uniquely able to interpret the meaning of others' dreams. While his own dreams quickly lead to his downfall at home, his ability to interpret dreams leads to his eventual triumph in Egypt.
Not until near the end of the Hebrew Bible in the figure of Daniel do we come across another man endowed with that same special capacity. And again, it is the key to Daniel's swift ascent from captivity to the royal court. A victim of the Babylonian exile, Daniel is perceived to be not only learned and wise, but also "understanding of visions and dreams of all kinds" (Daniel 1:17). Thus when King Nebuchadnezzar has, like Pharaoh before him, a deeply disturbing dream which he can't recall, it is Daniel who, to the astonishment of all the king's sages, not only recovers it but then explains it.
Existence transcends what we are capable of experiencing. Our senses, therefore, are not only our windows to the world, they are also our constraints. The recurring experience of dreaming is a foretaste of realms beyond our tangible experience, though not our imagination.
The rabbis who transformed the religion of ancient Israel into Judaism retained a modicum of belief that dreams, or any state of unfocused consciousness, may serve as a mediator of the divine will. For example, if you rise early and a specific verse of the Torah comes to mind, there may be a touch of prophecy at work here. However, while the rabbis affirmed that dreaming may still be a form of divine communication, they believed it is actually a crude and unreliable instrument with lots of room for error.
Indeed, in the latter half of the second century, the rabbis curbed prophecy itself. The era of prophetic communication was over, having ended some 700 years before with the last of the minor prophets - Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi. In their own period, the rabbis dared to avow that the sage was to be preferred to the prophet. They said this to vindicate their own leadership. God's voice was no longer accessible directly, they said, but only indirectly. The interpretation of scripture through painstaking study became the only valid manner of detecting God's will.
In third-century Palestine, Rabbi Yochanan went so far as to declaim that since the destruction of the Second Temple, prophecy was to be found only among fools and children.
Behind this mounting aversion to prophecy was the unmitigated disaster of three failed Jewish rebellions against the Roman Empire between the years 66 and 134, fueled by messianic fervor that had thrown caution to the wind.
According to Josephus, who chronicled the first uprising which led to the destruction of the Second Temple, prior to the year 66 C.E., Palestine was overrun by messianic pretenders, who incited Jews weary of Roman misrule.
"Deceivers and impostors, under the pretense of divine inspiration fostering revolutionary changes, they persuaded the multitude to act like madmen, and led them out into the desert under the belief that God would there give them tokens of deliverance" (The Jewish War, book II, line 259).
It is no accident, therefore, that Rabbi Judah the Prince's Talmud writings, which appeared around the year 200, consisted of a thoroughly prosaic legal compendium, without an iota of apocalyptic tension. The job description of his students, who were rapidly assuming the religious leadership of the nation, was to administer the courts and instruct advanced students of Torah.
Dreams, like prophecy, have been confined to the dustbin of history in an effort to keep religious enthusiasm in check.
Rabbi Ismar Schorsch is chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City.
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