I had an idea for a shiur series – alliteratively and delightfully entitled Qontroversial Questions on the Parashah – that I’m making a written, email-only shiur. Subscribe to continue to receive these and please share with those you think would be interested.
I.
A few months ago, I got calls from a few different members of my shul all asking me about the same topic: bad dreams. I don’t know what was in the Kansas water, but several people had dreams that were so disturbing that they felt compelled to call me and ask me what to do. Did they need to fast for a day or say a special tefillah?
And these questions exposed what I would call the “rationalist’s dilemma.” On the one hand, we are confident that we know bad dreams are innocuous – even if we can’t quite explain the neurological details. But on the other hand, not only do bad dreams disturb us, but many aspects of our Jewish belief reinforce the power of dreams. So, as rationalist as we might otherwise want to be, we feel compelled religiously to take them seriously.
We’ll start with the obvious reason to think dreams are serious (and the motivation for why I’m talking about dreams this week): our parashah. Yosef’s success is because of his ability to interpret dreams – to realize that Pharaoh’s dreams are prophecy. If we deny the power of Pharaoh’s dreams we undercut the entire narrative.
Indeed, Yosef insists that, not only does his power to interpret dreams come from God, but that God Himself sent Pharaoh the dreams – “God has told Pharaoh what He is about to do” (Gen. 41:25). No matter how much we might want to rationalize earlier dreams in the Yosef story (such as the dreams that Parashat Vayeshev opens with as simply revealing Yosef’s ambition), Pharaoh’s dreams are clearly a message from God.
But the prophetic power of dreams are not just implicit within our parashah – God explicitly declares in Parashat Beha‘alotekha that, other than Moshe, all other prophets receive their prophecies ba-ḥalom, “in a dream” (Num. 12:6). And Ḥazal took dreams seriously, too. Not only do they declare that dreams even for regular people are one-sixtieth of prophecy (Ber. 57b), but they discuss the process by which a person who dreamt that they were excommunicated annuls that dream (Ned. 8a–b).
And Ḥazal’s most emphatic proclamation about dreams – which emerges from a discussion of the Yosef story – details a ceremony in which, after a person has had a particularly disturbing dream, they come before three people to have their dream “neutralized,” for want of a better expression. Alternatively, the gemara says, they should daven during Birkat Kohanim for their dream to be “healed,” though this is not an option readily available to those of us who live in ḥutz la-aretz (Ber. 55b).
And this approach trickles down into major halakhic sources, too. Rambam – so often seen as the champion of rationalism – codifies the need to fast after a bad dream: “one who has a disturbing dream needs to fast the following day” (M.T. Laws of Fasts 1:12). And the Shulḥan Arukh codifies both Ḥazal’s process outlined above and Rambam’s recommendation to fast, with the Rama going as far as to stress another aspect of Rambam’s view, that you can even fast on a Yom Tov and Shabbat – despite the usual prohibition of doing so (O.Ḥ. 130:1; 220:1–2).
And this is why every ArtScroll Siddur contains an entire text replete with instructions detailing the religious “recovery” process following a bad dream (I only own their Hebrew-only siddur #KORENISKING, but it’s on p. 420).
The implication of all of this is that, for all that we might like to think of ourselves as generally “rationalist,” dreams are a realm in which we must forgo our rationalism. (This is not a point I want to devote too much time to right now, but even the most rationalist of Jews accepts a point at which rationality must go out of the window.)1 No matter how much we might think that dreams are simply a neurological process, halakhah tells us otherwise and we must take them seriously.
And so, it should come as no surprise to learn that when the members of my shul anxiously called me asking if they should fast after a particularly disturbing dream or if there was some sort of special tefillah to say or something else they could do I emphatically and resolutely told them …
Nope. Not at all.
“Wait…” I hear you ask incredulously, “Didn’t you just explain at length that dreams are really important and even codified into halakhah as serious?! That they are a realm in which rationality goes out of the window?!”
So, why did I tell people not to fast? Why did I tell people not to do the ceremony in the back of the ArtScroll Siddur?2 And why did I not even encourage them to give tzedakah or check their mezuzot?
The latter two are rants, sorry, discussions for another time. But it requires a closer evalution of everything I’ve just said about the significance of dreams throughout halakhic history.
II.
What cannot be denied at all is the significance of dreams in the Torah. Pharaoh’s dreams are obviously significant. And yes, God declares that His prophets prophesy through dreams. But there is another strain of thought here, even within Tanakh. Because the prophet Zechariah – himself a prophet who would have prophesied through dreams – emphatically declares va-ḥalomot ha-shav yedabberu, “and dreamers speak lies” (Zech. 10:2).3
Yes, dreams have prophetic power, but that does not automatically mean – as Zechariah points out – that all dreams have prophetic power. As the great 15th-century Torah commentator Don Yitzḥak Abarbanel argues, if a person is already a prophet, then there’s a high likelihood that their dreams are a prophecy; but a non-prophet’s dreams can be caused by other factors (Abarbanel to Gen. 40). It all hinges on whether you’re already a prophet or not.
And there’s a delightfully subversive understanding of the gemara’s statement I mentioned above, that dreams are one-sixtieth of prophecy, that is mentioned by the great 20th-century Iraqi Rabbi Yosef Ḥayyim of Baghdad (best-known for his influential halakhic work, Ben Ish Ḥai, but also for his masterful analysis of aggadah, Ben Yehoyadah). He notes – though I will admit that I didn’t have the energy to read it closely enough to ascertain whether he later walks this back4 – that the significance of dreams being specifically one-sixtieth of prophecy is important. Because this ratio is an important one, halakhically speaking: usually, if something is one-sixtieth of something else it’s nullified – it just doesn’t count.
In other words, yes – Ḥazal said dreams were one-sixtieth of prophecy. But by framing it with that specific ratio, they effectively declared dreams to be meaningless.
And other statements of Ḥazal cast similar suspicions upon dreams. Such as the uncertainty they raise over the source of dreams – part of their wider discussion on dreams in Berakhot that I’ve already quoted from. Because, Ḥazal point out, dreams may be divine messages, but they may also come from demonic forces. (And yes, the seriousness with which Hazal understood demons is another classic example of the rationalist’s dilemma.) Similarly, they note an incident in which a person had a dream and sought out twenty-four different dream interpreters – only to receive twenty-four different interpretations (Ber. 55b). (Though I should note the kicker here: all of them came true.)
And there’s also an incident described in the gemara where a person was distressed about the fact that they could not find money they had been bequeathed until they had a dream in which a person revealed to them both the location of the money and the amount of money. The only downside was that the person in the dream also stressed that, halakhically speaking, the money could not be used because it was ma‘aser sheni. Yet, despite the clear indication that there was truth to this dream, Ḥazal declared that this person could ignore the halakhic instruction within the dream, “as matters appearing in dreams do not impact [halakhic decision-making]” (Sanh. 30a).
And this skepticism of dreams also trickles down into major halakhic and philosophical sources, too. The great late-14th- and early-15th-century Algerian Rabbi Shimon b. Tzemaḥ Duran – better known by his acronym, Tashbetz – not only casts doubt on the validity of some dreams (he still reckons there are others that are meaningful) but suggests that external factors may play a role in triggering certain dreams (Responsa Tashbetz Vol. II §128).
And the idea that dreams might more often just reflect our thoughts and feelings throughout our waking hours is a common one. Abarbanel notes it, too. And the Ḥatam Sofer – the 19th-century Rabbi Moshe Sofer who helped define Orthodoxy in the modern era – likewise suggests that our waking thoughts have an impact on our dreams. In his case, though, this is not just a cause to dismiss bad dreams: we might consider the dream of a person in which they made an oath to fulfill a mitzvah or perform an act of ḥesed as reflecting their conscious thoughts, though he stresses that that may not always be the case (Responsa Ḥatam Sofer, Y.D. §222).
And even Rambam who stresses the need to fast adds a crucial qualifier to that fact:
A person who has a disturbing dream must fast on the following day, so that he will be motivated to improve his conduct, inspect his deeds, and turn to God in repentance.
In other words, it’s not that a person prophesied something awful was about to happen – and they thus fast to avert the awful thing from happening – it’s that God sent them a bad dream in order to motivate them to think more critically about their conduct as a Jew.
And in his masterful Piskei Teshuvot, Rabbi Simḥa Rabinowitz lists a who’s-who of rabbis in the modern era who either dismiss or at least weaken the seriousness of dreams: Ḥazon Ish, Ḥafetz Ḥayyim, Arukh ha-Shulḥan, to name but a few (220:1).
And this was why my response to those who asked me about doing something in response to their bad dreams was to (sensitively) dismiss the dreams. Because there’s no reason to assume that dreams do have significance.
And I’d add two further things here: the first is not something explicit within sources but I think emerges from them – we have to be careful that dreams don’t become self-fulfilling prophecies. In the spirit of Ḥanukkah tonight, we must be mindful of the tragedy of Oedipus. His very determination to flee a prophecy caused it to come about. If we let our dreams take hold of ourselves, we may find ourselves living too much in reaction to them.
The second is that I’m not so sure religiously validating dreams – even with providing an opportunity to neutralize them, such as with fasting or tefillot – is particularly psychologically healthy. (Though, admittedly, it could be the opposite: by providing a process by which Judaism neutralizes dreams, that is psychologically healthy.) I’d rather discourage people from seeing significance in their dreams than implictly reinforce their worry that they unintentionally prophesied.
III.
All of this opens up a much larger discussion for another time, regarding the rationalist’s dilemma. Because I don’t think we recognize how the distinction between rationalists and mystics is one of the major halakhic and theological distinctions within Judaism. And while Rabbi Natan Slifkin has written on this – and you can read Rabbi Alex S. Ozar’s excellent review of the book here – it’s not something we pay enough attention to.
And the conflict that this brews, from my perspective, is that though we are a community that generally embraces rationalist thought, we struggle to distinguish between non-rational ideas that all Jews must embrace and mystical/Kabbalistic/Hasidic ideas that have found their way into the mainstream despite not being that mainstream.
But I hope my discussion of dreams serves as a general blueprint. Because it illustrates that we don’t dismiss the significance of dreams by simply screaming “neuroscience!” and going back to our daily lives (which might not be the wrong response but it can be hard to defend in front of a mystic) but by following other halakhic threads. We don’t need to take dreams seriously because many great figures of Jewish history discouraged us from doing so.
The response to mysticism is not external rationality: it’s the embrace of other sources from throughout halakhic history that suggested a different approach. Yes, Pharaoh’s dreams were prophecy, but we aren’t living in the Biblical era. And so there’s only so much we can see in the parashah here as precedent.
This gives me a good opportunity to tell you about one of my best/worst moments (depending on your perspective) as a rabbi when, during Sukkot of Covid, one of the members of my shul was complaining that our precautions were foolish because they just weren’t “rational.” To which I responded, “we just spent the day waving a tree to our invisible God – I think a demand to conform to what’s rational went out the window a long time ago.”
Other than the obvious fact that I’m just a shill for Koren.
Fun fact: this is the second time in QQotP that this verse has been mentioned – as it’s also a verse in which Zechariah talks about teraphim.
Look, sometimes when looking for support points you just have to skim things – especially when it’s a text that’s not particularly your jam.