"A dream provides an exact tincture of the soul...to wake us from a faint-hearted life." So writes Rodger Kamenetz in The History of Last Night's Dream.

Kamenetz is probably best known as the poet who accompanied a diverse group of rabbis to Dharamsala to meet with the Dalai Lama. He chronicled that journey in The Jew in the Lotus (1994), which both confirmed and strengthened the emerging communal crossover between Judaism and Buddhism. (Full disclosure: that book set me on my path toward the rabbinate.) Since then he's written other books exploring Judaism in a variety of ways, but nothing as groundbreaking as The Jew in the Lotus --until now.

Kamenetz is a professor of philosophy and religious studies at Louisiana State University, where he also founded the MFA in creative writing program. He's also a poet and, now, a dream therapist. His latest book is simultaneously as thoughtful and cogent as one would expect from a college professor--and as far-out as one would expect from a mystic and a poet. This book challenges the reader not only to think about dreams in a new way, but in so doing to relate to her- or himself anew.

For Kamenetz, dreams are a point of connection with the Infinite. Jewish tradition has mistrusted them, sought to pin them down and diminish their uncanny power, since antiquity. But if we can find a new way of relating to our dreams, he says, they may offer us a direct connection with God.-Rachel Barenblat

ZEEK: I imagine since The History of Last Night's Dream came out, you've had many opportunities to distill the book in words. How do you describe this latest addition to your oeuvre?

KAMENETZ: I see it as an attempt to understand the role of imagination in religious life. An exploration of how powerful the dream is for religious experience and a lament over the loss of that power in our contemporary religious life.

ZEEK: What's the trajectory that brought you to this work?

KAMENETZ: I've always been interested in dreams, as a poet and as a writer. Dreams played an important role in my life--I discovered my voice as a Jewish poet through my connection with my gradfather, and after his death he appeared to me in a dream, which turned into a poem called "Curve of the Earth." In retrospect, that dream seems to confirm that I was on the right track.

And then "Terra Infirma" is built around a dream I had after my mother's death. In both of those cases--in the case of "Curve of the Earth" and the sense of connection beyond this life that that implies, and in terms of "Terra Infirma"--dreams have been important to me. If dreams of the dead are such powerful experiences for us--and they're very difficult to dismiss--there must be something to dreams.

ZEEK: "Curve of the Earth" feels so real to me. There's something in that experience [dreams of the dead] that I think we can all relate to.

KAMENETZ: There was an actual dream; there's no art to it whatsoever! Being lazy, I thought the idea that you could get a poem from a dream seemed like a great possibility.

ZEEK: I think there's a deep connection between poems and dreams. We relate to both of them in a way that's not purely intellectual.

KAMENETZ: We've lost an understanding of something people once knew: if we're talking about the human soul, what are we talking about if not imagination? So when we're talking about people who write or paint, creative thinkers who we call inspired, we're talking about the realm of the soul. And the unconscious, the psyche, dreams. Our religious discourse is so impoverished if people don't refer to the imagination, it's all intellect, it's all in a book.

ZEEK: You write that "[t]o the mystics, the Torah is a dream and every character in it is you." What a beautiful way to bring this way of relating to images into the way we relate to our central text.

KAMENETZ: I would say that the authors of the Zohar clearly had a huge experience in the imaginal realm through dreaming or active imagination. They didn't read Torah as stories or laws; they understood that those were the outer garment. But the naked body of Torah was something underneath which they found in the text through using imagination. Their experience of dreams informed their reading.

And on the other hand, if we don't have a rich or deep experience of dreams, then our reading of Torah will be superficial. It's like eating the bread wrapper instead of the bread.

In Zohar it says, you could just eat grains of wheat if you want to nourish yourself! But wouldn't a fine pastry be a little better? There's also a Torah that's more like a rich pastry.

Rugelach ZEEK: And the pastry's made out of the same raw ingredients! That's what makes the metaphor great.

KAMENETZ: Right! If it's just wheat, why not nibble on raw kernels --

ZEEK: Because you're missing something.

KAMENETZ: You're missing the soulfulness of it. We explore dreams to explore the soul.

ZEEK: I heard you speak about this material a few years ago, and one of the questions you asked was, "How could the tradition that gave us the dream of the ladder end up essentially 'phobic' about the revelation dream?" Can you recap your answer for Zeek?

KAMENETZ: The Joseph sequence [in Genesis] tells us that dreams provoke a reaction. Joseph dreams, and his brothers and father have a strong angry reaction. Why do people get angry in that story? Because they're afraid. And we see that later on too, that the butler and the baker are terribly anxious and afraid when they dream. And we see Pharaoh anxious, too. So dreams provoke different emotions, and fear underlies them all. The history of that fear is intertwined with the history of interpretation. And that's a thread that's run through the history of dream interpretation.

In the case of the rabbis, speaking broadly--in Brakhot 55b there are many opinions, but the takeaway is that the main focus is on dream amelioration. We have that ceremony of hatavat chalom, "making the dream good," which is still practiced by some. That tells me that the concern there is not with the revelation power of the dream but with the anxiety provoked by the dream.

ZEEK: There's kind of a band-aid impulse here, not wanting to look at what's behind the fear.

KAMENETZ: I have empathy for the rabbis who promoted this. They're concerned for ordinary people, who they may have felt couldn't handle a psychic exploration. But we live in a time where perhaps that approach could be revisited, because people are more sophisticated psychologically and more able to handle these explorations. We're exposed to so much more in the way of information and imagery. Of course, the concern is that people will go nuts.

ZEEK. It's a kind of shvirat ha-kelim, in the Lurianic sense--a breaking of the vessels.

KAMENETZ: Of course, the vessel includes the psyche and the mind. Luria was such an incredible dreamer. It's said that every night he visited the heavenly academy and received Torah there. He was familiar with this process. And I think the account of his dreaming informed his books.

ZEEK: You write, of Marc Bregman, "I wanted to know and he wanted me to feel." I suspect that's a familiar tension for many of us, maybe especially within Judaism, which is so deeply a tradition of the book. Intellect is comfortable, but that's not where he wanted you to be.

KAMENETZ: For someone like me, so oriented toward explanation--he showed me I wasn't really ready for the journey. I wasn't ready to risk changing my consciousness. I wanted it all explained. I was like the baker or the butler in prison [in the Joseph story]. "Tell me what it means!" But I think the dream comes to get you out of prison.

ZEEK: It's a real leap of faith, to listen to the call that says (in Rilke's words) "you must change your life."

KAMENETZ: It requires the ability to be disgusted with yourself. If you're always satisfied, then there's no reason to change. Dreams have a way of pointing to the cracks, the places in you that are not well put together. That's the source of the fear and anxiety. The exposure. The initial news from dreams for most people is not good.

Broken VesselZEEK: Even if you know the cracks are "where the light gets in," if you will, it's hard to be okay with that.

KAMENETZ: Right, and we tend to paper over with our pieties. We jump back to the light without experiencing the terror of the crack. We don't want to face our fear. That's the issue. The most terrifying dream that I can remember--one of them, anyway--was simply being in a room and looking for the door out and not seeing a door. Going with my hands over the walls, around the room, knowing there must be a door, and not being able to find one. It was a simple dream! But the depth of terror was huge.

ZEEK: For me it's always that I can't see. I've become blind.

KAMENETZ: If dreams can show you fears, then they can teach you courage. I work with dream clients now, and for many people the scary dream is simply that someone else is driving the car. For some people they're in the backseat and no one's driving the car! But if you can reach the point where you're in the backseat and no one's driving and you're okay with that, then you're really getting somewhere.

ZEEK: Suddenly the whole road opens up!

KAMENETZ: And then you understand that God's driving the car. We talk a good game, but what does it really feel like to really live that? To say, it's not up to me?

ZEEK: We need a practice of perennially reminding ourselves. Because we forget. That we're not driving the car.

KAMENETZ: Absolutely. This is mostly what Marc Bregman calls first-stage work, but eventually people do have these very powerful experiences with the archetypes that he takes and I take to be partzufim. Not precisely in the Lurianic sense, but--not dissimilar. These are faces of God, and we encounter images that are relationships. Which I think is really important.

This goes back to a teaching of Reb Zalman's which I cite early in the book [that many people conceptualize God as an oblong blur]--how do you pray to an oblong blur? How do you have an emotional connection to God if all imagery is banished? Or if all imagery is contested. It's almost become politically incorrect to talk about God the father--we feel we have to immediately add "and also God the mother," there's a kind of politics to the nomenclature, which--as is typical to political correctness--overlooks the actual emotional experience of people in their inner lives.

ZEEK: I think of the prayer "Avinu Malkeinu," and my own journey from saying it without thinking, to pushing back aainst it, to reintegrating the father and king imagery into my understanding of God.

KAMENETZ: What the dreamwork seems to point to is, if a problem in your relationship to your mother or to your father is the primary manifestation of your pathology, you're not going to get anywhere on a spiritual level until you work through the problem at the psychological level. Instead of running away from Avinu Malkeinu because it's seen as a patriarchal imposition and political statement, both men and women need to work through their feelings about their fathers.

ZEEK: I'd like to dip into The Jew in the Lotus. In chapter 7 of that book, Reb Zalman Shachter-Shalomi talks with the Dalai Lama about angels. It seems to me that the reactions of the various rabbis in the room speak volumes about the range of ways in which we've responded to images and metaphors, which are very much the language of dreams. Are you getting the same range of responses to the dream work Zalman got to the dream work?

RK: I don't think that book would exist if it weren't for that moment. In that one moment we peeked into the power of yetzirah, before moving back into assiyah, where I usually live. [That's a reference to a kabbalistic understanding of reality. - RB]

ZEEK: Where we all usually live!

RK: I thought of it then in terms of poetry; yetzirah is the realm of poetry and of angels. The higher world gets reflected into our imagination and then down into the sensual world. So absolutely, that moment--yes, that was pivotal.

How this book's been received...there are some people in the Jewish world who've been very moved by it, and others I think have not engaged. I have a feeling the book will slowly creep up on people over time. But I do think the book calls for a re-examination of Judaism in terms of the role of the imagination and the role of dreams, and people are responding to that.

We need to take our dreams seriously as part of the life of the soul. The very word "soul"--I was challenged on that by one interviewer who said, "you talk about God the Father, isn't that Christian?" I said, "I have two words for you: 'avinu malkeinu!'" But his point is, most Jews don't have an experience of God the Father per se. Maybe they see the words in the prayerbook, but it's not real relationship. Whereas if you look back in Talmud, it was commonplace. It comes from a deep experience. To exile it and say it only belongs to Christianity--something's gone wrong here.

ZEEK: I continue to hope that this is a time when we're opening doors we weren't ready to open before.

KAMENETZ: Raba said, in the time of the hiding of God's face--what Nachman calls the double hiding--maybe God will speak to us in dreams. It's a minority opinion, but it's there.

Artwork by Barry Donaldson, all rights reserved.

In the forms of meditation practiced by many Westerners, one central practice is simply "being with" everything that arises in the body, mind, heart, etc., neither holding onto anything nor pushing anything away. This is quite different from most Jewish and psychiatric practices, which often seek to change these states--from sadness into joy, for example, or restlessness into peace. And it is entirely different from our basic instinct, which, thanks to eons of evolution, is exactly to hold onto the good stuff and push away the rest. If we didn't do that, we'd never survive. Indeed, self-preservation is surely the purpose of registering stimuli as positive or negative in the first place.

Happiness, too, is unnatural. Once again, if we were all perfectly happy with what we already have, we wouldn't strive for more. We wouldn't reproduce, wouldn't compete for scarce resources--and we'd be selected right out of the species. So it's human nature to be somewhat unhappy, and to work to address that unhappiness by taking action, building things, having children, nurturing them, and building cooperative communities of love. All these things feel so right because we've been bred for them.

So what the Dalai Lama has called "the art of happiness" is unnatural in its means and its ends. Its means are counter to basic human instinct, and its promised end of happiness is the opposite of our natural (naturally selected) disposition.

But given the choice between Buddhist-style being-with and Jewish-style fighting negative emotions, I'll take the Buddha, thanks. Nothing depresses me more than trying to be happy.

In my own practice, I've often experienced "being with" negative emotions in a visual way, seeing myself as someone nearly drowning in mud or excrement, but managing to be with it, to stay alive and breathe. For years, this extremely unhelpful image both encouraged and betrayed me. Encouraged, because it emboldened me to stay with it, like a dharma fighter on the cushion. Betrayed, because the whole image contains an inevitable aura of resistance--of fighting, enduring, persisting. Actually, it was more Jewish than Buddhist. After all, how many Jewish mothers does it take to change a light bulb? "None, dahling, I'm fine here in the dark." We stay, we complain, we endure.

But what I've learned over the last few months, in the wake of breakup, loneliness, heartbreak, and occasional rebirth, is the benefit of drowning. There's been so much pain for me in this period that I couldn't fight it if I tried (and I have tried). If I were really standing in a deep pile of mud, it would've covered me long ago. And so I've let it. And I found I can breathe underwater.

Instead of fighting to stay afloat in the indignity, anger, sadness, unpleasant physical sensations, I've just myself sink down, and down, and down... and sometimes, through. The lesson is: I thought I needed air, but I don't. I can breathe in the mud, and the act of surrendering to it is the relaxation and release.

What about the other times? The other times I do one of two things. Either I feed the negative emotion with stories, self-pity, and endless thoughts about what's wrong--or I fight the negative emotion with more stories, justifications, or accounts of why this happened or how I should act next. Either way, the effort is the problem. Sadness is like quicksand: moving in any direction makes it worse. But it's unlike quicksand in that the point is to sink in, be swallowed--and be fine.

Surrender and Supplication

This surrender, this willingness to be thoroughly taken and destroyed by sadness, is consonant with two quite different faces of God that I experience in my religious life.

The first of these faces is the nondual, which is essentially mental where the personal is emotional. This is the nondual truth that God is the yotzer or u'vorei choshech, the Former of light and Creator of darkness. This God offers a different kind of comfort; not the love of the Friend, but the simple truth of what is. This God is not necessarily nice; it's the God of cancer wards as well as summer pastures, of war as well as love. This is the God that asks us if we can handle the truth: that both evil and good are godly.

But then there is also the personal God, the emotional one, the one to whom I cry. The personal is the devotional, the place of faith and trust: hinei el yeshuati, eftach v'lo efchad. Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust and not fear. This personal, devotional, anthropomorphic God is largely projection; it's a way of seeing more than a thing that is seen. But as projection, God is a precious Friend, a beloved, a companion.

My religious life oscillates between these poles. At times, I love to think of God in what are essentially human terms. This is the God to whom I pray--and of whom I say "whom." This is the God that is You. At other times, I love the clarity of the more atheistic, nondual God: What Is, YHVH. And of course, I've long understood that these "poles" are better expressed as two sides of a single coin, or two perspectives on the aperspectival.

But I've only recently understood how these two perspectives so deeply enrich one another. When I'm drowning in the shit of life, I say hinei el yeshuati precisely because God is the vorei choshech. I can trust that I can breathe in this mud because the mud is God. Not good--it's definitely not good in any ordinary sense of the word. But God. I can cry out because I can let myself be drowned.

For the Seal of God is Truth

If all these words were just words, just theological proposition, they wouldn't be worth much. What's more important-at least to me-- is that I can experience the nondual God. After the surrender, during the drowning, the Presence is still there. That's what matters--not the premise but the proof.

I know, because I've heard from others, that the path of embracing light and darkness which I've sketched over these last few months is not for everyone, and is not necessarily the dominant strain in the Jewish religious tradition. I also know that it's difficult to tread, and difficult to share with others. No one really likes negative energy, even if, for me, it connects me to the parts of myself I like the most: the open, feeling, truthful, loving, and teaching parts. It's good at retreats, not so good at parties.

So given all of that, it's important to me to see that this idiosyncratic, difficult, and not-for-everybody religious path actually works. I assume that the more conventional one--fighting sadness with joy, accentuating the positive--works also, since I see so many people following it and seeming to have success. But I'm a truth addict. Anything that seems to be coloring or distorting what is feels uncomfortable, even insincere. Just to see that it is possible to breathe while drowning gives me the trust to do it more.

Just the release in my own heart is enough to make the effort/non-effort worthwhile. But there are three consequences I want to notice briefly before concluding.

First, as the "law of attraction" is increasingly popular these days, just a word about that. The main point is that "breathing while drowning" is not wallowing. Emitting negative energy, dwelling on it, turning it over, is even more counterproductive than trying to struggle over to the positive side. The point is total surrender, total release. Not judging anything as good or bad. Not feeding the fire (to switch elemental metaphors) or trying to squelch it. Just letting it happen, letting it burn--and letting it burn me up, only to discover that I am not consumed. In that fiery place, love is possible, as is positive intention. I continue to believe that the specific directionality of conscious manifestation is ineffective. But in my experience, there is power to a general setting of intention, and a general openness to abundance. These are enhanced, not compromised, by surrender.

Second, as I mentioned a moment ago, I'm at my most real when I'm most connected to my brokenness--and I'm at my most effective as well. Having just taught at two Nehirim retreats, I've seen firsthand that I am more effective and compassionate as a teacher when I'm not pretending to be okay. I don't know about you, but I can't stand these teachers who hold themselves out as never-suffering and so successful. I have met a few enlightened people, and it is indeed possible to end suffering. But only a small percentage of teachers who hold themselves out in this way actually are, and many are offering a kind of false consciousness. I don't trust them. In any case, even if all the authentic teachers were teaching the cheerleading approach, I'd stick with mine because it's true in my experience.

And speaking of my experience, I finally want to note that this doesn't work all the time--but it is available all the time. On a particularly lonely night recently, I just couldn't break free of the mental pattern of self-pity, blame, and regret. Even now, there are so many opportunities for it; just one evocation of one issue from my just-ended relationship, and I can get hooked into content and story and argumentation. It's almost irresistible. But unlike trying to swim, which gets more difficult the deeper you sink, drowning is always available. If I can't "make it work," I can surrender to having failed at making it work--and then it works. There is always a new opportunity to surrender more, even to the most inveterate of Buddhist sinners like me.

Ultimately, the method remains a simple one: releasing whatever is going on (but really), letting go, letting drown, letting expand, letting relax. Breathing while drowning, the attention naturally comes to the present, with nothing pulling it elsewhere. And then, with a breath, without hope, expectation, or object, a simple wish of love.

 

Art Credit: Sushanta Meh