The Dream in Between

What is a Jew who lives this middle life?

On Shabbat, I will go to the synagogue, and I will pray for the welfare of the State of Israel. I will say that Israel is the “first flowering of our redemption.” I will pray it, and then I will pray for this first flowering’s soldiers, and then I will pray for this first flowering’s hostages to be returned. I will pray these things, and I will mean these things, and I will not understand anything at all.

This is an in-between moment in the history of my people. As the Holocaust fades out of living memory, as Israel’s age surpasses the first-world life expectancy of its own citizens, the stories we tell about the end of Jewish history have become muddled and confused.

Didn’t you see it? the older generations say to me. Didn’t you see a nation miraculously brought back to life? Didn’t you see us retake Jerusalem, a language impossibly revived, an unprecedented event in human history? Didn’t you see all of that?

I didn’t see it, I say, but I heard about it, yes. What I saw was different. What I saw was a prime minister assassinated, in his pocket the blood-soaked lyrics to a song of peace. What I saw was a disenchantment with the idea of coexistence and the abilities of leaders, a retreat to the naked right to survive. What I saw was the limbs of Jews in the wreckage of buses and the burning of olive groves. I saw the erection of walls. I saw proxy battles on campuses, the toxification of discourse around issues on the other side of the world, generations of young leaders turned off the Jewish project by the putrid smell of impotent argument, and I saw terrifying unpredictable violence, and I saw an erosion of goals from peace to harm reduction to better discourse. I watched this and realized I was watching the credits, that the movie had finished before I had arrived, the crowd was leaving, and I knew that I would not live long enough to see what story might play next. I had not come at the end at all; rather, I had come before the beginning.

I know, rationally, that it can get better. I know that a day may come when Israel knows no war, when Palestinians have a home, when the skyscrapers of Gaza City gleam nightly deep into the Mediterranean sea, when the horrors of the moment live on only in Hebrew textbooks that nobody reads, when the idea that Jews need armed guards in order to pray in their synagogues sounds like a dark fantasy from another world. I can say these things, but I know they are things for a different lifetime. A third of Israel is children. Half of Gaza is children. Even if it stopped tomorrow, the tendrils of this moment’s violence will not let go until long after I am gone.

In all likelihood, you and I will live our lives in this muddled middle place, deprived of both a beginning and an end. So I ask: what shall we call ourselves? What do you call the people who live in the unquiet spaces between the grand stories, who thirst for meaning in the awful lull? What is our role when our lives are too short and our heads are full of blood and worse? Tradition tells us that we cannot be healed; even King David, dynasty builder, was not allowed to build the Temple, for he could not wash the blood off his righteous hands. We have seen too much; we are impure with the impurity of death, and the remedy is unavailable. It doesn’t even matter whether we’re in the right. Our mission, it seems, is simply to hold out until we die. To hold space—painfully, if necessarily—for the ones to come.

Of course, we can be optimistic. The world changes in unimaginable ways, and it changes all the time. But now is hard, and now is where we live.

Perhaps we could escape? The desire is strong. The Talmud tells us about Ḥoni, a man who tried to escape from the now. While reading the Torah, Ḥoni was struck by a verse reflecting on the experience of returning to Israel after seventy years of exile: “When we returned to Zion, we were like dreamers.” The verse doesn’t confuse Ḥoni. He knows what it means and it torments him, it hurts his heart, because he knows it is right, because it stabs him with the acute truth that seventy years—what the psalmist elsewhere characterizes as a normal human lifespan—often does get written off as nothing but a dream. It hurts because the people most likely to dismiss the past as dreams are the ones who actually achieve the goal, the ones who get to the place that people of the past wished their entire lives to see but never once beheld.

Did it feel like a dream to them? I imagine Ḥoni wondering this as he looks out his window, watching an old man plant the seeds of a fruit tree he will never see. Did it feel like a dream to the people who saw the Temple burn with their own eyes and died in exile? Did it feel like a dream to the people too young to remember the exile but too old to see the return? Does the indeterminacy of such lives simply evaporate because it all worked out in the end (even when it didn’t really work out in the end)? Do the tortured decades simply melt away, like a nightmare with the dawn? Is that the fate of all lives of pain and waiting to simply burn off in the heat of redemption?

And Ḥoni is right to be hurt, because the answer is unambiguously yes, because it is precisely that distance from the past that allows the people of the future to accomplish things that the people of the present cannot even comprehend. As Kahlil Gibran wrote a hundred years ago, the essence of children is that “they dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.” And Ḥoni would say: yes, because a parent’s life is but the dream of their children, the ethereal mother plot from which the next generation must awaken as the brick house of tomorrow becomes the cloud chamber of today, as the next ones awake, and awake, and awake, until you and I become ancestors, become nothing but a dream within a dream within a dream, a recursive slumber that we call Torah, our traditional phantasm.

We know this, but it still hurts. It hurts because nobody wants to die mid-book, because it is hard to know you are in a dream without desiring to awaken into firmer realities where walls are stable and names are remembered. It hurts because if the future will turn good, then what is the point of us, of our lives? Are we fated to be nothing but filler, occupying space and time until the people unscarred by the horrors we have seen, clean of our violence and anger and sadness can do the thing we wish we could have done ourselves? Is the point of my life just to be a living buffer, a fatality of humanity’s inability to just let things go, filled up with poison without ever letting it through? Is my purpose for being on this earth just to wait, aspiring for nothing more than to become a forgotten dream?

Again yes, says the Torah. Absolutely yes. God, for whom a thousand years passes like a single day, is more than happy to wait us out, forsworn from killing us with the quick violence of a flood but happy to witness us die in the dread drip of old age, slow to anger but quick to condemn a generation to irredeemability. For forty years, say the rabbis, the Jews of the desert would dig holes deep in the sand, sleep-dreaming in their own graves so that God could kill those fated never to enter Israel without the messy memorializing of funerals; the wind would blow, the dunes would cover the dreaming corpses, and they would be no more. These people, the sole living witnesses to God delivering the Torah at Sinai, lived lives that the Torah itself passes over in virtual silence, telling us nothing of their journey but the names of the places they visited in that interminable time, skipping us effortlessly from introduction to conclusion without the messiness of the middle chapters. They left Egypt, they lived blank lives, and when they were all gone the story resumes again with their children. (There, too, was born divine absence, the missing father who comes to the wedding.) And so, Judaism’s traditions and anti-traditions were born in the same breath, the religion of memory forged in an amnesiac crucible.

Even Moshe could not escape this fate. Seeing God tying crowns to the letters of the Torah scroll, Moshe asked to visit Rabbi Akiva, the man who could decode their meaning. So God put Moshe in Rabbi Akiva’s classroom, but it only distresses Moshe more. “Master of the World,” says Moshe. “Akiva is better than I. Akiva is the end that you are seeking. Why don’t you just jump to Akiva? Why torment me with living a middle life?”

So God gives a non-answer—because even though it hurts, it cannot be any other way. That is what it means to live a life. When Ḥoni awoke, escaped from his now, he found himself in an alien world, one that loved him as an idea but not as a person. The very world that Ḥoni birthed, that affirmed the work of his life, was so strange that he recoiled from it in horror. Ḥoni prays to die; he dies. Of him the rabbis said, “either a friend, or death.” People cannot be extracted from their contexts. Were Moshe to stand behind me now, seeing me write a story about a story, he would surely not see himself. We cannot even imagine what a better Israel will look like—and if we could it would probably distress us. We are fated to live in our own lives, even when we know we are nothing but the dreams of the ones who will come.

In a faith where memory is holy, it is hard to be the forgotten progenitor. Memory lionized magnifies the points of tumult and turns all else into a testimony to the extent of our people’s patience. We prepare the ground for a redemption we cannot see, cannot truly imagine, and which will not remember us when it arrives. This, in truth, is the history of most of my people, now and in the past. We survive not just the world, but the long deserts, the harrowing blankness between memories. We are the lyrics, not the refrain.

And yet, we can plant seeds. And yet, we can tie crowns. These gifts are notable for their ambiguity: not the fruit but its equivocal kernel, not the letter but its multivalent embellishment. This is the stuff of dream residue, surviving not because it is clear but because its interpretability allows it to ride the waves of history, leaf in a hurricane. The dreams we remember are the ones we can claim as our own; we succeed when we make ourselves claimable. That’s all we leave: not our plot, not our names, but a sweet syllable, a momentary sadness, a smallish sound, a glint of afternoon sunshine through a blue window, an amen, the corner of an old smiling mouth, the thousand thousand fragments that the awakened call the empty room: the space in which they dance.