Life
Dreaming of a missing sub-text
Zelda's had a Jewish dream. And she's confused by its simplicity.
November 6, 2020 11:13
Zelda's had a Jewish dream. And she's confused by its simplicity.
November 6, 2020 11:13I had a Jewish dream! This is an exciting first for me. It reminds me of when my mother told me about her time living in France for a year. After three months, she started to dream in French, and realised she had turned a corner in her level of fluency. So, does my dream indicate that I am — at last — a proper Jew?
It is a novelty for me to remember a dream at all. My insomnia is so bad that I’m not usually asleep long enough for any dream to get past the opening credits. That said, I feel this Jewish one is short on plot. I don’t hanker after high-octane action and car chases, but some narrative development would be nice: surely I’m owed a high-quality experience to compensate for the small quantity of dreams on offer?
In the dream, I find myself in an Orthodox synagogue. Already, I feel slightly on edge. Is it because I know that, by Orthodox standards, I simply do not count (even though I have a certificate of Jewishness signed by three rabbis)? Orthodox Jews don’t accept the Progressive view on patrilineal descent, and I doubt they’d accept that the Liberal conversion classes I took were enough to support my affirmation of my Jewish status.
I find the practice of seating men and women separately at shul challenging for a number of reasons. For a start, up in the gallery, it is hard to hear everything from the bimah, so a significant percentage of women turn to talking to each other rather than being engaged in the service. It’s not that I’m of a religious bent, because I think God has long since shrugged His/Her shoulders and given up on me as lacking the appropriate level of commitment. But when I’m at shul, I do at least try to be mentally present and experience being part of it, not just showing up to tick the shul-attendance box.
In the dream, the men and women are all on the ground floor, divided by a screen that seems part garden trellis, part clear glass or plastic (It’s a Covid-safe dream — I’m so law-abiding). We once went to a frum barmitzvah where an elderly aunt who couldn’t manage the stairs to the ladies’ gallery had to sit downstairs with the men. To make it acceptable, they screened her off in a one-woman trellis enclosure, as if she were an unsightly wheelie bin who had to be hidden from view. I did struggle with the logic of this. She was well into her 90s by this point. Was the trellis screen to protect her from the men’s lustful gaze? Or to shield the men from the unwelcome distraction of her feminine wiles when they should be focusing on the Torah reading?
But something very odd strikes me: the two banks of people are in rows of chairs facing each other, with the front row of each section close enough to touch if it weren’t for the screen.
In the front row, anyone sitting immediately facing a member of the opposite sex is looking down and away to one side to avoid eye contact. I take a seat a few rows back and — in my desire not to do the wrong thing (quite likely, given my track record: can’t remember how to shake a lulav, have bread-based fantasies during Pesach, spend the whole of Yom Kippur hallucinating about strawberry tarts) — I look down and away towards the back of someone a couple of rows ahead.
Then I feel a sharp tap on my shoulder — it is a warden telling me I’m getting it wrong: sitting in the wrong place and looking in the wrong place…
And that’s when I woke up.
But what does it mean? Annoyingly, I’m no longer in therapy (even I ran out of neuroses to dissect eventually. Also, by then, I believe I’d already funded his new bathroom so my work was all done…).
Instead, I recount the dream to The Teen and, surprisingly, he listens. Usually, the only sentences he comprehends are: “Do you need any money?”, “More roast potatoes?” or “Would you like a lift?”
“What do you think it means?” I ask him.
“Just that you’re worried about fitting in.”
No doubt he’s right but I thought dreams were a way for your sub-conscious to tell you something? I can’t see a sub-text. All it seems to say is that I still have a way to go before I’m an accepted member of the tribe — hardly a startling revelation. It needs more of what creative writing teachers call a “narrative arc”. Also, a sub-plot would be nice, nothing fancy-schmancy, maybe just an oblique take on the week’s Torah portion.
Answers on a postcard please…
Zelda Leon is half-Jewish by birth then did half a conversion course as an adult (half-measures in all things….) to affirm her Jewish status before a Rabbinical Board. She is a member of a Reform synagogue. Zelda Leon is a pseudonym
