Each of us, through the power of imagination, retains the ability to transform the world. Cultivating our creative powers--learning to imagine as a community and to channel our social inventiveness towards visions of justice and of holiness--is one of the central functions of Judaism. Our religion trains us to visualize a better world, in which Jews are more passionate and observant, in which all people are kinder and more cooperative. Judaism nurtures that creativity as a source of inspiration and guides us--through mitzvot--toward translating that vision into a living reality.
This week’s Torah reading reveals the power of imagination in its full dimension. Jacob has just fled his parents' home. He is on his way to his uncle, Laban, and to a future shrouded by uncertainty and doubt. Exhausted after his journeying, Jacob uses a stone as a pillow, and falls fast asleep under the heavens. Jacob dreams in his sleep. He sees angels mounting a ladder to heaven, and other angels descending another ladder toward earth. God speaks to Jacob, renewing the covenant between God and Abraham, between God and Isaac. God clearly extends that covenant to the third patriarch, and through Jacob to the Jewish people as well.
When Jacob awakes, he says that "surely the Lord is present in this place and I did not know it."
The Torah never clarifies whether Jacob's dream was merely the product of his own fantasy, or whether that imaginative facility provided him with a deeper insight into reality. We never know for sure, but Jacob acts on his dream as a new understanding of truth. For Jacob, his dream was a crucial step in recognizing God's presence in his life.
Rashi approaches this paradox by explaining that when Jacob said "I did not know it," he meant, "For had I known, I would not have slept in such a holy place." Had he not slept there, he would never have known that the place was holy at all! To understand that location was sacred, Jacob had to trust his ability to imagine his own inner power to construe.
Every human being has this power. Each of us looks at the world as it is, but we then select which facts matter, and how they are to matter in our own understanding. We look at the world as it is, and we imagine it as it should be. For us, as Jews, that process of imagination takes two principal forms.
By reading the world through the perspective of the rich stories of the Torah and of rabbinic tradition, we see ourselves in the timeless world of Jewish values and ethics. We make ourselves contemporaries of Moses and Miriam, of Rabbi Meir and Beruriah. It is as if each of us leavesEgypt personally. And through mitzvot--deeds of holiness in time--we train our imagination to view the world as a place where Jewish behavior, whether lighting Shabbat candles or caring for a widow, can transform the world. As with Jacob, our imagination provides the necessary first step toward transforming ourselves and our world.
Shabbat Shalom.