Parashat Vayetze 5783
Dreams tell you a lot about a person’s psyche. They are personal, private. So perhaps it's strange that I am about to share with you one of the recurring dreams I’ve had throughout my life, but here we go. One of my recurring dreams is that I go out and get a wildly shitty tattoo. In one dream, I casually told the tattoo artist to do whatever she wanted on my entire arm, which ended up looking like a kid took a crayon to me, leaving the multi-colored scribbles on my skin forever. Another time, at the joking advice of a friend, I went out and got a slough of really interesting tattoos all over my body. A frog. A Nike symbol. A cowboy hat. The dreams, though different in content, all share a similar arc: I feel whimsical and decide to get a tattoo, I get the tattoo, and at some point the panic sets in and I start thinking about how to remove the tattoo (in one dream I even opened my phone to google the closest tattoo removal place).
In this week’s parsha we have the first of 9 dreams we will read about in this month of Kislev, which are 9 out of 10 total dreams mentioned in the Torah. Jacob, with his head on a very comfy rock, dreams of angels ascending and descending a ladder that reaches from the heavens to the earth.
If we were to take a Freudian approach to this dream, we would start by asking ourselves what unfulfilled wish Jacob has that is being expressed through this dream. Since he was fleeing his brother, perhaps Jacob did have a desire for an escape, a ladder where angels could escort him from his frightening situation.
If we were to take an Jungian approach, we would start by asking ourselves what this dream is expressing about not only Jacob’s personal unconscious, but the collective unconscious. Marie Louis von Franz, a Jungian psychologist said of Jacob’s dream, “The ladder symbolized a continuous, constant connection with the divine powers of the unconscious.” Every rung on the ladder, she explains, is a level of the psyche. And every dream we have is a rung of the ladder.
Regardless of which of these approaches we take, Jacob’s comment when he wakes up seems a bit out of the blue, “God was in this place and I, I did not know.” On the surface at least, the dream didn’t seem to be place specific, nor did it give Jacob any information about God being in the particular place he was sleeping. Lawrence Kushner’s book with Jacob’s quote as the title is a midrash of its own. He puts a comma between the two I’s, capitalizing the first and keeping the second lowercase (God was in this place and I, i did not know) implying that Jacob is in awe of his own higher self, which he had not known prior to the dream.
Dreams can tell us a lot about ourselves, both our individual and collective unconscious, and if we go with Freud, our unfulfilled longings in the world. Perhaps my recurring dream is telling me that I should get a tattoo. Or perhaps it’s saying something about my relationship with commitment, who’s to say really?
In this month of Kislev, may the darkness outside help us turn a light on our insides. May we pay attention to our dreams, asking ourselves what is trying to be heard, and perhaps, like Jacob, discover ourselves through them.
Shabbat Shalom.
