A Purim Dream

Floating on the sea of Torah with R Efraim of Sudlikov

A few days before Purim, my hevruta Or Rose and I, stumbled upon a Purim teaching by R Ephraim of Sudlikuv (grandson of the Ba’al Shem Tov, died 1800), which was based on a dream that he had. It is a teaching about the internal journey and traveling through Torah.

It made a strong enough impression, that both of us, without telling each other, continued to work on it on our own… So here, in honor of Purim, is Or’s translation followed by my re-envisioning of the Purim dream of R Ephraim of Sudlikov.

A meaningful Purim to all!

“‘For the Jewish people (Yehudim) there was light’—this is Torah...”

(Esther 8:16; BT Megillah 16b).

This verse can be understood as follows, according to what God has graciously granted me in His great mercy and kindness.

It is known that anyone who rejects idolatry (avodah zarah) is called a Yehudi

(BT Megillah 13a).

And I heard in the name of my master and grandfather of blessed memory [the Baal Shem Tov] that pride (ga’avah) is idolatry (BT Sotah 4b); therefore, anyone who rejects (kofer) pride is a Yehudi.

Moses our teacher, peace be upon him, was “very humble, more than any person on the face of the earth” (Numbers 12:3). He was of the quality of mah—“What are we?” (Exodus 16:7-8)—of HaVaYaH (Y-H-V-H) and its diffusion [Tiqqunei Zohar 120a]. That is why the Torah was given to him. As it says, “By knowledge (da’at) the chambers are filled” (Proverbs 24:4).… Moses merited all this because of his humility (anavah), which is the quality of mah.

This is the meaning of the verse, “God saw the light, that it was good” (Genesis 1:4)—good to hide away [for future tzaddikim] (Bereshit Rabbah 11:2). And I heard in the name of my master and grandfather of blessed memory that God hid that first light inside the Torah.

I once saw in a dream an explanation of the following Midrashic [Talmudic] story:

Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua were traveling together by ship.

Rabbi Eliezer was asleep, and Rabbi Joshua was awake.

Suddenly Rabbi Joshua trembled, and Rabbi Eliezer awoke.

Rabbi Eliezer said to him: “What is it, Joshua—why did you tremble?”

Rabbi Joshua answered him: “I saw a great light in the sea.”

Rabbi Eliezer said to him: “Perhaps you saw the eyes of Leviathan, as it is written, ‘Its eyes are like the eyelids of the dawn’” (Job 41:18).

(Bava Batra 74b)

This story is allusive [hinting at the ideas discussed above]:

For the “sea” is the sea of wisdom (yam ha’hokhmah), the vastness of Torah (Zohar I 2a), and the “ship” is the human mind, which sails on that sea.

When these two great sages of Israel were “traveling” together on that sea, deeply immersed in Torah, Rabbi Joshua was “awake”, and Rabbi Eliezer was “asleep”—having not yet truly entered the realm of hokhmah.

Rabbi Joshua “trembled” from what he saw.

Rabbi Eliezer, upon waking, asked what surprising thing made you “tremble?”

Rabbi Joshua replied: “I saw a great light in the sea.”

Rabbi Eliezer then explained that this is a wondrous and exalted marvel—a “great light.”

This is the very same “light” by which one can see “from one end of the world to the other” (Hagigah 12a); it is the light the Holy Blessed One hid away.

Rabbi Joshua saw that light in “the sea”—that is, in the sea of Torah.

He was surprised by the matter of the “hidden light” since [he assumed] that everyone could see “from one end of the world to the other” through their engagement with Torah?

Therefore Rabbi Eliezer answered: “Perhaps it comes from the eye of Leviathan (Livyatan)?” That is to say, light is revealed only to tzaddikim (righteous ones), to those who accompany (melavim) and cleave (medabkim) to the Creator unwaveringly while immersed in Torah (Zohar III 58b). Only they can make use of this light; no one else.

Now we can understand the verse [from Esther] “For the Jews there was light”: “Yehudim” here means those who reject avodah zarah, the idolatry of ga’avah; those who are of the quality of mah (humility). For such people “there was light”—the light concealed within the Torah.

R. Moshe Ḥayim Ephraim of Sudilkov (d. 1800), Degel Maḥaneh Ephraim (p. 1810), Purim (Translation by Or N. Rose)

The Hebrew text from Degel Maḥaneh Ephraim can be read here.

Two ancient figures on a boat

A Purim Dream

This is a story about a dream, a dream that includes a story within it. This is the story of Torah Sh’b’al Peh (spoken Torah) dreaming about Torah Sheb’khtav (written Torah), in this case – Megilat Esther.

It is also the dream of a person – R Moshe Efraim of Sudlikov, the grandson of the Ba’al Shem Tov, and the author of Degel Maḥanh Efraim. He is the teller of the dream, but he is also a listener, an interpreter and a re-weaver. I too am a listener of the dream, an interpreter and a re-weaver. I am Ebn David who dwells in Brookline. My grandfather, Fred, who was married to my grandmother Rosalie, reached this country as a refugee from WW2, worked as a high-school janitor, and ended up working as an engineer designing spacecraft for NASA. I am also a teller of the dream.

It is a Purim dream, so it is not big on boundaries. It is not invested in keeping apart the dream and the interpretation, the text and the response, and it is unconcerned about your confusion in attempting to discern whether it is cursing Haman or blessing Mordekhai.

Envision this: Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua were on a boat in the ocean. The ocean was deep, many generations deep, and as wide as the world, stretching from horizon to horizon. Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua were learning Torah, mostly bobbing along on the surface in their little boat, but longing for the depths.

We know that the light that was created on the first day of creation shines throughout the entire universe, leaving no room for shadows, creating a world of total transparency and honesty, where nothing is ever hidden or invisible. This was the world as God imagined it, for who would want to live with anything less than absolute honesty? This was God’s dream world. But God had also created humans in the world, and as God thought deeply about the way She had created humans, God realized that humans would need to start out with something to hide behind. We would need a conscious and a subconscious, somewhere to immerse and marinate before rising to the surface, somewhere to process before coming out to meet others. Allowing for light obscured by shadow was dangerous – it made room for falsehood and manipulation, and for destructive denial. But God understood that we would have to achieve transparency, not receive it, so God hid the light of total transparency below the surface of the ocean of Torah, waiting for righteous deep divers to discover it.

Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua were floating on the surface of the ocean – one of them was awake and the other was asleep. Every figure in the dream is you, and you cannot go deep diving unless you have both on board. On the surface, the one who is awake observes, notices and sets direction. The one who is sleeping is oblivious. But it is only the one who is sleeping who can enter the realm of the dream and live its images. The one who is awake can only tell the story.

The one who was awake saw, but he did not know what he saw, and he was shaken. In response, the one who was asleep began to rise from the depths, slowly approaching the surface. As he reached the surface, his eyelids opened only a crack, and in the darkness a thin line of light appeared, like the horizon just before sunrise. The light continued to grow until the sky was visible, and then his friend, the one who was awake.

- What did you see, he asked, why did you tremble?

- I saw a great light in the sea.

Envision this: Torah was brought to us by Moshe, light wrapped in light wrapped in letters, layer upon layer. Moshe was put in a boat on the water when he was three months old, floating on the river until he was gathered in by Pharaoh’s daughter. What fears did he take with him from that journey on the water?

God said to Moshe, come to me, to Pharaoh king of Egypt, and took him through rooms within rooms to the silent lake where the great sea-monster lives, the great Tannin, the deep Tehom, the Leviathan that God plays with and battles, its roots intertwined with the deepest roots of the Divine. If Moshe was to know God face to face, see the hidden light and bring it to us wrapped in Torah, he would have to go back underwater and see through the eyes of the great Tannin, the terror of his childhood and maybe even of God’s.

When Jonah got so close to God that he was overcome by terror and could only run away, God brought him back underwater in the belly of the whale, and looking out through its eyes he saw the light of the world as it existed on the first day of creation, as it exists in the depths of Torah.

Perhaps, said the sleeping one, you have seen through the eye of Leviathan, for it is only through that eye that you can see the light hidden in the deep, under the surface of Torah. You can spend a lifetime studying Torah and never see the light within it because of your fears. When looking through the lens of your fears, the Leviathan is the monster in your dark places, your loss of control, your capacity for destruction and evil. You are pushed to protect yourself from all of this, you categorize it all as evil, you pray that God shatter the heads of the tanninim on the water, and you cannot see the light of honest living shining in the depths of Torah. It is only when you are humble enough to let go of your fantasies of control, only when you can walk into your fears, come to meet your Pharaoh, go to the bottom of the ocean of your subconscious and see it through the eye of Leviathan, that you will see the light hidden in Torah. Only when the one awake and the one asleep within you are talking, will your learning lead you to a life of honesty and transparency.

Envision this: Esther, Mordekhai, and the Jews of the Persian empire faced death. But Esther walked in to meet it. She invited it to a party, she ate and drank with it and took it to bed at night. And at that party she separated the parts that threatened with destruction from the parts that gave her power and the possibility of speaking words of wholeness and truth. It was the death that she went to meet in the throne-room that she came to know and own, and it was the light she saw through that Leviathan’s eye, that gave her the power to speak words of wholeness, of truth and transparency to all the generations that followed, Divrei Shalom v’Emet.

The Jews learned humility from Esther, and through her they were able to see the light hiding under the surface of Torah. There they found joy and celebration and dignity, so may we merit as well.

ליהודים היתה אורה ושמחה וששון ויקר

כן תהיה לנו