The Master of Dreams

I just completed a Seasons of Transformation workshop in Israel. It was for me, as they have all been, an extraordinary experience. We were a group of 36 men making the choice to spend 3 full days together opening our hearts, showing up with the courage to be real and listening to our common humanity.

I know for myself that sometimes my heart is not so open, I’m too afraid to be real and I can be too preoccupied in my own head to truly listen and hear the greater symphony we are all a part of.

Rabbi Nachman talks about the need to be an expert in rising and an expert in falling. Created life has cycles; light and darkness, inhaling and exhaling, remembering and forgetting, vibrating towards and away, creating boundaries and connecting in intimacy.

Living our lives from joy and wellbeing and consciously experiencing intimacy from that place is a great gift and perhaps the skill there is the ability to humbly appreciate the opportunity our lives are. Finding ourselves in constricted consciousness, not in wellbeing and not in healthy intimacy happens as well, and crying out in simplicity and connecting to God’s presence in those places is also a skill. Joyfully absorbing the light and acknowledging where it comes from and having the faith that when in darkness we are never really alone; are both ways of bringing consciousness into the full spectrum of life’s frequencies.

We speak about going down and being enslaved in Mitzrayim/Egypt, a lot, during Kiddush, Davening, learning… We certainly don’t choose to dwell on the dark, but it seems that we don’t want to forget it either.

One understanding of our remembering slavery is to allow us to distinguish the quality of freedom; just like there is no experience of light except in relation to darkness, and there is no conscious intimacy with the One except through the experience of other.

Besides the opportunity to make distinction and therefore feel appreciation for the difference, retelling the story of going down to Mitzrayim also gives us a model of how to go down and how, ultimately to come back out.

Yoseph was sold into slavery, into Mitzrayim. Yoseph later realized that God had sent him down to ensure Israel’s survival until our deliverance. He understood that God had sent him, not random circumstance, not his brothers.

Yoseph was a master of dreams. He was able to understand how sequences within the mind relate to the contexts we find ourselves in reality. He was able to embrace seeming random events into a greater whole. Like a jazz musician he could weave separate notes into the structured chord progression of the greater melody. Yoseph’s youthful spontaneity flowed with the mysterious unfolding of the present while maintaining full integrity to the overall purpose.

Yoseph embodied these qualities and God embedded that consciousness into the womb of darkness and chaos before the rest of us went down.

Before exploring the mysteries of our own darkness; we need to be clear that the opportunity is not in blaming our brothers for how we got there. The greater value is relating to present reality as exactly the conditions God gave us to free our own consciousness to serve the One.

Have a great Shabbos,

Simcha