Jewish Dream

I had my first Jewish Dream last night. I don't even know that I've ever dreamt about being in church, that I can remember. But I definitely dreamt about going to Jewish services last night. Or this morning, just before I woke up. In fact, coming out of the dream, I wasn't tired, but I wanted to go back to sleep, because somebody I knew was about to make an announcement, and I wanted to hear what he had to say.

But that wasn't the interesting part of the dream. The interesting part was where I was sitting in the folding chairs, between two old friends from college, who were Jewish, or at least I believe so, or they were in my dream. And there was kind of a rug area in front of us where some people were sitting to watch the goings-on. It was a fairly big space. It was like a cross between Chochmat and a Conservative synagogue. It had that comfy, homey, low-key, rugged floor aspect of Chochmat, but the "stage" area at the front was bigger, and all the chairs were facing forward. So I guess it was a little bit like church.

In fact, that was part of the dream. I am wondering if there is a Freudian term for a dream in which you express your personal opinion? I mean, there's wish fulfillment, sex, fears. But what about ideas, beliefs, opinions? Can that happen in a dream? Because I think it happened in mine.

And here's where technology enters the picture. I seem to have had a multimedia dream, where at the bottom of the "screen" (my field of vision), there were various things - items, applications, doodads - you could rollover and do things with. I am not sure how the "rolling over" was happening. It was kind of like mentally "rolling over" more than anything else. Just bringing my attention to that thing. And I don't remember what most of those items were, but I kept my attention for a long time on this one image that popped up. It was a picture of the Pope, wearing white, and kind of a Monty-Python-esque animation, where his jaw would move and he would nosh on the edge of a big, round, sacramental wafer. A wafer such as most Christian and Catholic children who grow up in a church with such things fear for dear life, because of their exceedingly dull and crispy flavor. Me, for my part, I always liked them, for some reason. When my mom had to do work in the sacristy, I would always steal the broken ones. And she would let me. It was probably like some kind of big sacrilege. I bet we're both going to Hell. But it was fun. It was more fun than church. I looked forward to that more than snack time at recess.

But anyway, back to my dream. So we had the Pope down there, noshing on his big wafer. And when you rolled over him, he became - a Rabbi! His image would be replaced by a similar picture of a Rabbi, with a big grey beard and side curls, and HE would be munching on a big piece of Matzah, the exact same size and shape of the wafer! It was so exciting, that I "rolled over" it several times in my mind, just to really make sure I was seeing what I was seeing. Because I thought, this is perfect. There is something to this, because of course (and I didn't automatically think this at the time, but I knew it already), the "Last Supper" was a Passover Seder, and that's where they get the wafer idea from. And when Jesus was doing the whole "body and the blood" business, what he was really doing was making a Kiddush over wine and bread, and he said, "Whenever you do this..." But when he said that, what he meant by "do this" was, really, say a Kiddush. Because he was talking to Jews. But Christians don't say a Kiddush. Well, I guess they do, sort of, in a way, but it's certainly not a Jewish Kiddush, such as el Jésus would have made. And they sort of do it in "remembrance" of him, but it's really more like, I would say, in some sort of bizarre obsession with him, based on my experience.

But the point of the dream is this: Pope, Priest, Rabbi. Same basic idea. Different external stuff. Different external ideas. But it comes from the same place. And the bread and the wine is still bread and wine.

What was always my favorite part of a church service? Communion. That's where people come together to share this common food. I don't care if it's the body of Jesus or anybody. I care if it's people experiencing communion together and becoming one instead of a disparate group of individuals. That's what's meaningful to me. And that's what I find so much more in Judaism, even though it is certainly present in Christianity. And I just think Christianity could embrace Judaism a lot more than it does. That's why I'm doing it. But I don't need the Christianity in order to do that. But I do feel it's given me a little bit of pre-Jewish knowledge, even though I don't yet know Hebrew.

There is a whole movement to kind of bring Jewish and Christian leaders together and find common interests between the two faiths, which, really, as far as I am concerned, is pretty much the same faith. It's just that Christianity has this extra Thing attached to it, which conflicts with my own personal reading of the Torah, but I also have to come back to my other personal (Jewish) view, which is, if it works for them, great. Who am I to talk them out of it? We can all exist peacefully. Because what I see is more in common than that which differentiates.