Genesis Cycle Four Vayeshev

I’m sitting in a classroom. It’s large and white and there are windows overlooking waterfalls and madrone trees, the kind that peels so you can see the smoothness. The teacher has just given a prompt for a written essay exam. It has to do with my ordination. I have to pass. Suddenly the soft light becomes expansive. I want to shut my eyes and bathe in it. But I have to write. The subject is God. And I have to write. But now the light is so great I can’t see my paper or pen. Everything is radiant. And it’s in me. I don’t know what to do. Other students are writing. I can hear the pens scratching.

Chava, the teacher says kindly. Why aren’t you writing? I hear her but can’t see her anymore. I only see this dome of exquisite vibrations (in which I find myself) and hear the unearthly chime of the light itself. I feel despair, like it’s too much. I could just submit and not even write the paper, I think. But that’s not why I’m here, I think. That’s not why I’m here. Feeling I have to deal with this, knowing I don’t know how, knowing I can’t leave the real work to the students next to me, I wake up. The dream is clear as a bell.

This happened about five days ago. And the reason why I’m sharing it is because it brings up a conflict that I think everyone has and is very present in Vayeshev.

The parasha Vayeshev is a big dream parsha. The irony though is this:

Vayeshev means and he settled. Quite a title for a parasha replete with dreams. After all, when one settles one thinks of being set in an earth-bound way. The very idea of being settled infers a certain understanding of the circumstances, a decision (if not a vow) to apply oneself to this time and place. It means putting up the curtains, the pictures on the wall, registering the children at the local school, paying the rent or the mortgage monthly, becoming a part of the community. There’s a certain solidity, an acceptance, a down-home recognition of the word settled. There’s the ability to write and pass a paper in a classroom. Farmers are settled as they till the land. Bankers are settled. Mailmen are settled. Teachers. Doctors. They have their jobs. They get used to the place, stay for years, decades maybe. Being settled is not just to live somewhere. It infers you might be buried there. It means you’ve dug the fists of your heart into this earth and don’t see yourself moving soon. The dream world feels amorphous, illogical, surreal, wild, ephemeral, always changing and seemingly just out of reach. My question therefore is how we can join the dream world with the settled, the surreal with the real, the intangible with the tangible. Because if Torah is going to begin such a dream-parsha with the words and he settled this alone is a teaching. Consciously or unconsciously our Torah has been organized into parshot. And these words were chosen to begin this parsha…and this is what we are served. Therefore it is our sacred work to join this dream world with the settled, to see where they merge.

So first let’s look quickly at the grounded story line of this parasha. Jacob and his twelve sons settle in Canaan. The brothers become jealous of their father’s love for Joseph and then hate him even more when he has (what looks like) self promoting dreams. Then Joseph goes to look for them and a stranger…or an angel… says to him that they are elsewhere but he ends up finding them where he is looking….at Shechem. There, the brothers steal his colorful coat and throw him into a pit from which he is sold to the Egyptians. They then put blood on the coat and tell their father Jacob he has been torn apart by wolves.

Cut to the story of Judah. I won’t go into all the details. To make a long story short, after a series of what feels like contrived events Judah makes love with his daughter in law Tamar. He doesn’t do it knowingly. When he find out he restrains from the intimacy but still is the father of her twins.

Cut back to the story of Joseph. He ends up being a slave for Potiphar, one of the Pharoah’s officers and he is a good slave….but then we get the story of Potiphar’s wife who tries to seduce him but he does not submit. Angry, she accuses him of attempted rape and he ends up in the Pharoah’s dungeon. There the chief steward and the chief baker both have dreams and Joseph successfully interprets them. The parasha ends there in mid-story.

It’s like life. Sometimes the happenings in our life stop in mid-story. They have to be placed on hold for no apparent reason. For example, we might be in a special relationship which feels like it’s on hold. Goals get placed on hold if we’re ill. Things we might want to buy. Trips to Tahiti. Here’s more that’s like life: all of the images. The sheep. The coat. The Egyptians. The wife of Potiphar. In fact, the roller coaster ride of Joseph and all the wild details…this all feels familiar by the way they parallel life. We drive to the store and we see a man in a wheelchair on the sidewalk, a lady walking her cat, people behind the shield of their cars, snow on the mountains, ice cream dropped in the street, a kid with a huge Mohawk. Visuals get reamed at us moment to moment.

What else in this parasha is so much like life? The sexual conflicts. Said or unsaid, ignored or recognized, we are sexual beings and the innuendo is constant. Quick smiles, a passing glance, most are forgotten or placed aside. But mistakes related to some of the most severe prohibitions of Torah…such as incest and attempted adultery and falsely accused rape…these are tro be seen and dealt with. Therefore sex in some way affects everyone. And it certainly affects us as Jews. Because if the wife of Potiphar had not accused Joseph then he wouldn’t have had the chance to prove himself in jail. What we see later is the Pharoah would then not have met him and who knows what would have happened during the years of drought…. and whether or not there would even have been an Exodus.

This brings us to another aspect that is like life in this parasha. The chain of events. Strange actions lead to life-saving moments. What seems to be evil actions saves the Jewish people. There isn’t any rhyme or reason. Everything seems to speed by…like life…and there isn’t time to get caught up. In this way nothing feels settled. It feels like an out of control train somehow within the boundaries of some expanded system of control (beyond our understanding) and we are on it.

Here’s more. The characters act…for the most part… only in gut response to pent-up emotions. This is very familiar. Not because it’s so settled though. But because it isn’t settled. Movement determined by emotion is never predictable but oh so human. There’s a death (of Joseph) that isn’t a death. There’s strength and jealousy that overcomes righteousness. Even the scene with the stranger at Shechem. How often does it happen that we meet someone and a message is inferred and we walk away stunned by the timing?

As for myself I was in the YMCA sauna and an Asian woman tells me my name means rain in Tibetan. And I needed to hear that.

This brings us to the world of dreams…which isn’t all that different from life if you think about it.

That’s because in life that which is settled is the illusion. That’s because..as we see in this parasha… nothing is settled. Not so with dreams though. As Kushner writes so the Creator returns again and again to that underlying pattern of being. Arrangements of motion that organize and animate all being…. Holy literature. Organizing motif beneath the apparent surface. …the consciousness is never still. Not even for a moment. Creation is in us. The plan the creator used reappears everywhere…from the erudite contemporary cosmological library to the opening sentences of Genesis, it is the same.

Dreams, according to Kushner, Jung and many scholars, are made up of this exact movement of God as He returns again and again to organize all being. This is the constant. The organization is continually changing therefore but the movement of God is not. This makes the organization seem settled but it is not. What is settled is the God-movement.

To repeat this another way, any feeling of being settled therefore, according to Kushner, comes from our godliness. So if Jacob is settled in the beginning of this parasha it’s because he has arrived to a place beyond-life to the heart-of-the-dream…to the place of God. If Joseph wants to relate his dreams it’s an attempt to transmit the God-motion, to show the God-stability in his and therefore his brother’s lives…since they are in the dream. The brothers don’t listen to the God-voice of the dream. They listen to their egos, the organization that is never continual or stable. They cling to what is never settled (the quotidian meaning of the dreams) in order to settle it…an impossible task.

What do we do with them though? These dreams? In Berakhot 56b Rabbi Joshua b Levi speaks of what I see as affirmations. If we dream of a river we wake early and say I will extend peace to her like a river. If we dram of a bird we wake early and say as the bird hovers so will the Lord of Hosts protect. And we say this before another verse occurs to us. If we dream of a mountain we say how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger of good tidings. And again we say this before another verse occurs to us. And if we dream of a lion we say a lion hath roared…who will not fear.

While these are all verses from scripture we can make our own and bless the images in our dreams as well. Because they are God-movements asking to be blessed. Waking dreams or sleeping dreams. They are all, like Torah, a journal of forgotten, reworked and remembered holy moments.

So may we bless the messengers and bless those who throw us into the pit. May we bless the wife who falsely accuses us and our family and our teacher. May we bless God who brings so much love to us we sometimes can’t see. May we wait patiently for clear vision. May we be settled in the heart of God while we walk here on earth. May we go ahead and submit to any expanse of light before us with faith that this release will not only expose our writing tools but enable our creations. Then, we will transmit God in ways we haven’t even dreamed. May we live with God in the dream of reality that within itself is one and the same. May we know who we are.