Home Shalom Monday Message #31

Home Shalom promotes healthy relationships and facilitates the creation of judgement free, safe spaces in the Jewish community. Home Shalom is a program of The Advot Project.

Please contact us if you are interested in a workshop and presentation about healthy relationships, self-worth or communication tools.

“A dream is according to the interpreter.” – Talmud Berahot 56a

Everybody dreams. Some dreams are simple, everyday dreams like getting married, having healthy children and being able to buy a house. Some dreams are visions of grandeur like achieving stardom, discovering a medical cure, or starting the next billion-dollar tech company. In truth, dreams come to us whether we want them to or not nearly every night of our lives.

The sages of Jewish tradition recognized the power of dreams and had much to say about their potential impact on our lives. They recognized that, as poet Carl Sandburg once wrote, “Nothing happens unless first we dream.” Striving to better our lives, working to improve our society, discovering cures for diseases, creating innovations in every field, writing music, creating art, writing dramas, inventing new ways of communication or traveling all begin with a dream. In the Torah, Jacob’s dream of a ladder extending from earth to heaven teaches us that we are all on a spiritual journey that is bigger than any one of us alone. Joseph becomes successful enough to rescue the entire future of Jewish civilization because he is brilliant at interpreting dreams. The Talmud teaches that it is through dreams that God communicates directly with each of us: “Although I hide my face from them, I shall speak to them in a dream” (Hagigah 5b).

There is a story in the Talmud of a rabbi who said, “I took my dream to twenty-four interpreters in Jerusalem and each one interpreted my dream differently, and they all came true” (Berahot 55b). From this story, we are taught the power of interpretation and that ultimately it is up to each of us to decide the power of our dreams and what they mean. That is why the Talmud states so clearly, “A dream is according to the interpreter.”

When life is difficult or painful, when we feel suffering or loss, when we experience discrimination or injustice, those are the moments when we need dreams more than ever and to remember that we have the power both to dream of the future we desire and to create that future for ourselves and those we love.