Shabbat Thoughts-Parshat Vayeshev

Among the most cherished of all human endeavors is the tucking of children into bed at night.  A hug and kiss, after the last drink of water and the last bedtime story, parents finally say “Pleasant dreams”. The Hebrew phrase is Chalomote Tovim (literally “Good dreams” ) and the less formal version is Chalomote Paz which could mean Golden dreams, or if we borrow paz from Spanish , “Dreams of peace.” This is our hope –that all children, and adults, for that matter, dream of peace and goodness. We aspire to build lives infused with hope. We aspire to dream big –to construct a beautiful world.  That is worth dreaming of.  None of us ever dreams of driving a vehicle into a crowd, with the hope of causing misery and despair.

      What would prompt such an act of brutality? Only exposure to wrong parenting and wrong instruction; education in the ways of jealousy, envy, rabid insecurity, extreme selfishness and the glorification of bullying and the trivializing of dreaming of a better life shared with many. Dreams of superiority over others cloud the perspective and lead directly to paths of extremism and fanaticism. We mourn the loss of life in a Berlin Christmas market. We mourn the loss of the restorative beauty of dreams.

       This week’s Torah reading, Parshat Vayeshev, introduces us to a dreamer. Joseph is the spoiled son of his father Jacob/Israel. Recipient of a prized coat made by his own father (coat of stripes is a better translation than coat of many colors), Joseph probably lords it over his brothers. And when he relates two dreams, both of which suggest he will be their future superior, they lose all control and tear his coat off of him, depriving him of his special status and throw him into a pit; to sell him later as a slave consigned to Egypt.

           It was not only the fact that he was dreamer that caused his brothers to beat him , kidnap him and allow their dad to think he had been torn to shreds by a wild animal by presenting the coat dipped in animal blood. It was the humiliation, the sense of owning some special status which delegitimized them that set them off. We, in our own day, see the same deligitimization proffered by extremism-extremism of any sort-religious, political, philosophical, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, American, European, Asian, Russian or beyond.

           We need to dream big; big enough to teach that all people can and do have a place in our world; a role in constructing a society wherein we can all freely walk along a boulevard  in preparation for a holiday without fear. We need to dream so big that our dreams take root in the hearts of those distant from ourselves.

Shabbat shalom. Rabbi Steve Silberman

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