Sermon for Shabbat Vayeshev 11-30-07

About five years after the end of World War II, Ed McCurdy, a singer, songwriter, who had performed in vaudeville, on radio and on television wrote an anti-war folk song while he was living and working in New York City’s Greenwich Village. It has been recorded by recording artists as diverse as Simon and Garfunkel and Garth Brooks. It has been sung at anti-war rallies by John Denver in 1974 and by East German school children near the Berlin Wall in 1989 and lately by many amateur singers on YouTube. It has been translated into 76 languages and has become an anti-war classic. The lyrics and the message are very simple. The song says, “Last night I had the strangest dream I'd ever dreamed before. I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war. I dreamed I saw a mighty room filled with women and men, and the paper they were signing said, ‘They'd never fight again.’”
Since this song was written, our country has pursued war in Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of these wars were justified, some were not.
Since this song was written, the world has experienced many wars, some major, some minor, some defensive wars, some aggressive wars, some civil wars and some wars between countries. Wars that come to mind are the wars in Cambodia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda, Angola, Somalia, Ethiopia and Sierra Leone and the wars between Iran and Iraq and between India and Pakistan. But one of the most intransigent and continuous wars in the 57 years since that song was written is the Israeli-Arab war. And no matter if you distinguish the individual battles as the war between Israel and Egypt or Israel and Lebanon, it still boils down to the same thing and the same basic players; the Israelis who want the Jewish state of Israel to survive and the Arabs who don’t.

The song speaks of the end to war as a strange dream, perhaps a more appropriate term would be an impossible dream but it is a dream that all humanity shares nonetheless. Dreams play an important and significant role in this week’s Torah portion and in the history of our ancestors. We start first with Joseph, the first child of Jacob’s beloved wife Rachel. Although he is the eleventh born son of Jacob, Jacob treats him as his favored first born son because of his love for Rachel. In fact, Jacob coddles him and spoils him and causes Joseph to become the object of his brothers’ wrath, indignation and resentment. It was bad enough when Joseph would show off his beautiful multi-colored coat, a fine piece of clothing that none of his brothers would ever get their sheep-shearing hands on but when he began to tell them his dreams, their sibling rivalry and jealousy boiled over into murderous rage.

In the dreams, which he gleefully shared with his brothers, Joseph reveals how he was going to become superior to them and that they and all of the people of Israel would bow down to him one day. These dreams and his superior attitudes cause his brother to attempt to murder him but Judah, the righteous son, encourages them to settle for selling Joseph into slavery. Through a variety of untoward events, which we will not get into now, Joseph ends up in the royal Egyptian jail and dreams again play a vital role in his future.

His two prison companions, the Pharaoh’s wine steward and baker, have disturbing dreams which they share with Joseph. Joseph discovers that God has given him the ability to see the hidden message within the dream and so he interprets the dreams of his cellmates. Not wanting to take away from Matthew’s speech tomorrow, I will not reveal the content of their dreams but suffice it to say that because of those dreams, Joseph is eventually freed from prison. He is brought up from the dungeon and interprets Pharaoh’s frightening dream about the 7 fat cows, the 7 emaciated cows, the 7 full ears of grain and the 7 withered ears of grain. Joseph explains the meaning of the dream to be God’s warning that after 7 years of abundant crops, there would be a severe 7 year famine in Egypt. Joseph becomes the vice Pharaoh in charge of all of Egypt’s food and when his brothers come down to Egypt for food, the family of Israel is ultimately reunited and allowed to live in Egypt. This sets up the Israelite enslavement in Egypt three generations later and leads to the glorious redemption wrought by God through Moses and the birth of the nation of Israel.

In the Bible and in later rabbinical literature, dreams are seen as tantamount to prophecy. Dreams are not simply the idle by-products of our cerebral cortex but they are truly communications from God which must not be overlooked. Dreams are not supposed to be discarded as delusional fluff, fantasies that we can enjoy for a moment but which must ultimately be ignored in the face of harsh reality. Dreams are supposed to give us a pathway towards our future. You need to have the vision; you need to have the dream to provide us with that guiding beacon towards a better future. John Lennon, who was violently gunned down in New York twenty-seven years ago, imagined a world without possessions or greed or hunger, a world without borders or divisions, a world where all the people were living life in peace, he sang, “You may say I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us and the world will be as one.” To call someone a dreamer, it would seem, is to negate their vision to discard the world and the future they imagine. We need dreamers, we need visionaries, we may not have prophets but we need people who will look at the possibilities in our world and in the words of George Bernard Shaw often quoted by Robert Kennedy will not “see things as they are and say why.” Rather they will, “dream things that never were and say ‘Why not?’”

Just this past week, ironically on the 60th anniversary of the United Nations vote that created a Jewish state and an Arab state in the territory of Palestine, Israeli and Arab delegates met in Annapolis, Maryland to begin again the discussions and negotiations which might ultimately lead to that reality. Many Arab and other Muslim organization and states are vehemently against this. For them any recognition of the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state within the dar al-Islam the Islamic world is tantamount to blasphemy and an insult to Islam. Many hold that this concept is at the heart of Islamic belief for most Muslims and that recognition of Israel’s right to exist and the honest negotiations to create a lasting peace between Arabs and Israelis is an impossible dream, a fantasy.

The Religious Action Center of the Reform movement, one of the more liberal organizations within the Union for Reform Judaism, posted an online resource site for information about the conference in Annapolis and any documents, statements or indications of progress would be reported via this website. The password to enter this website was “peace.” Rabbi Walter Zanger, a Reform rabbi who lives in Ein Karem near the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, wrote that the Religious Action Center by using “peace” as the password demonstrates how it is a “victim of its own dreams, delusions and fantasies.” His rhetoric is and always has been rather harsh. I agree with his statement that this attempt at the rebirth of the Mideast peace process is best approached without illusion but I strongly disagree that the hope for peace, the dream of peace is a foolish waste of time. Rabbi Zanger goes on to say, “God bless the dreamers because they want they right things but let us not delude ourselves into believing that this conference will in any way contribute to peace.” I am not ready to give up hope and to despair. I agree that it does not look very promising and that the optimism I felt thirty years ago when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat came to Israel has waned considerably, but I am not prepared to give up hope; I am not prepared to stop dreaming.

Rabbi Dr. David Nelson who sits on the Rabbinic Council of ARZA, the Association of Reform Zionists wrote, “No one knows what will happen in Annapolis but we ought to hope. Even though the chances that any real progress will be made is slim, the risks to Israel are great and the administration’s motivation is questionable, im kol zeh, even knowing all this, we should allow ourselves to hope.” Rabbi Nelson asks, “Why hope when most rational analysis suggests that there is very little that we can realistically expect?” and he answers, “Our goal, our raison d’etre, our reason for being as a people is the repair of the world. This mission is what drives us, what defines us. And in order to accomplish it, we must maintain hope that it can be done. While Senator Barack Obama characterizes hope as audacity, for us Jews, hope is nothing short of a mitzvah, a commandment. Without it, we would quickly give up our dream of bringing the world to perfection. Without it, we could not sing our national anthem Hatikvah – the Hope.”

Od lo avda tikvateynu Our hope has not been lost despite all these years of war and oppression and persecution. Our hope is not lost and our dream will never die. As the poet Langston Hughes wrote, we must “hold fast to dreams for if dreams die, life is like a broken winged bird that can not fly.”

May it be God’s will that our dreams never die, that our hope is never lost and that someday we will be able to see a world perfected and complete where each person can sit under their vine and fig tree and no one can make them afraid.

And let us say, Amen