Let's Choose Our Dream!
Veha’aretz hayetah tohu vavohu / “the earth was confusion and emptiness” (Genesis 1:2) – meaning, in a state of chaos. Sound familiar?
God, in creating the world, works with a stormy mass of disordered debris and seeks to tame this turbulence. People’s moral development mirrors physical life’s evolution; made in the “image of God” (verses 26-27), we emulate the divine intention to transform unstable conditions into purposeful existence.
Tohu vavohu / “confusion and emptiness” can serve, then, to represent seemingly intractable, inchoate substrata of random, capricious thought and mood patterns. Following God’s example, we struggle with nature’s disorientation and uncertainty and from them wrest stability and coherence.
If we so choose, we can will what is at first unconscious to become more conscious. Belief in conscious evolution (emphasized by Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan among others) that is reflective of a divinely creative influence – transforming meaninglessness into meaning, entropy into harmony – pervades Jewish religious understanding.
I have been reading about “lucid dreaming.” It is a topic of psychological research that, its proponents and practitioners claim, involves an ability to control, direct and shape one’s own dreams.1
They suggest that, while drifting off to sleep, watching imaginings and impressions pass along the assembly line of dream formation, we have the ability to let some pass and to lift others off that fantasy-factory conveyer belt and decide what we should make of – the story we’ll tell with – those we’ve selected.
We don’t have to be at the whim of our dreams, or a helpless instrument of their seemingly insane ramblings, but can help shape them to suit our sensible needs and realistic aims: We can choose what and how we dream.
This notion accords with Torah’s affirmation of a unifying, divine power at work in those deep recesses of each person’s psyche, but let’s explore possible implications for the social mind…
Everyone needs to feel secure in one’s surroundings, confident in the knowledge that they make sense. Perhaps our collective unconscious – Carl Jung’s term for human beings’ shared values, “a species-typical repository of ancestral history and memory accumulated over evolutionary time”2 – obeys the same powers and process of self-direction that apply to us individually. If so, we might have here a game changer that could reorient Jewish thinking and improve Jews’ cultural life.
Reimagined as an exercise in intentional dream formation, collaborative endeavor to sustain a meaningful communal order can serve as a new way of promoting Jewish empowerment.
Some dreams are nightmares, and some of those real-life traumas. Acknowledging history but seeking to transcend its horrors, we must re-envision Jewish life in a way that animates our collective dream with hope for a future better than the past. Doing this requires readiness to let go of discouraging, debilitating mental constructs so that, instead of being at the mercy of our imaginings, from them am yisrael / the Jewish people can select and draw inspiration, pursuing imaginative storylines – dream threads – that reinforce the willingness to hope.
To that end, we must be clearheaded, not taken in by implausible assumptions that could flatter our wishes with false optimism. One pitfall to avoid is the belief that trying to reason with or placate mortal enemies, who clearly wish us harm, can do anything to change their minds. Do not expect kumbaya moments.
Lucid dreaming on a public scale, such as I’m inviting you to engage in with me, does not require us to abandon sober realism. We can’t afford to do that! As the book of Bereshit/Genesis describes in that opening chapter, making order does not mean ignoring the chaos around us (indeed, you know as well as I what a mess the world right now surely is in!) but demands that we grapple creatively with it. This takes work.
I’m looking for others – Jews and friends of ours – who’re eager for the challenge. Every day can be an opening for us to dream lucidly and constructively together in a spirit of joy: shaping what we imagine could boost spirits and uplift the human condition, discovering order in the chaos all around us, recognizing portals for peace on battlefields where for so long war has raged senselessly on and on. Let’s unite in this holy task. There’s no time to spare.
We should get to work.
(https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2022/02/07/12/33/space-6999302_1280.jpg)
(https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2017/06/27/11/48/team-spirit-2447163_1280.jpg)
Thank you!
well put...thank you