From the
Midwest Book Review

How Dreams in the Bible Affect Human Destinies

September 15, 2003
Midwest Book Review,
Oregon, WI

Engagingly and informatively written by Seymour Rossel (a Reform rabbi with many years of experience giving lectures and teaching workshops on the Bible and dreams), Bible Dreams: The Spiritual Quest is a thoughtful and thought-provoking guide intended for Christians, Jews, and anyone else seeking to better understand and acquire a heightened spiritual awareness.

Individual chapters cogently address how dreams in the Bible affect human destinies, the wisdom that lies in classic scriptural parables, the potential for healing and  transformation through faith, and much, much more.

A deeply spiritual outreaching, Bible Dreams: The Spiritual Quest is enthusiastically commended to the attention of non-specialist general readers with an interest in religion, spirituality, metaphysics, and the Bible.

An Authentic Voice

by Jacob Neusner
National Jewish Post & Opinion
November 28, 2003

Judaism is a public religion, which encompasses personal spirituality. Religion is public, a fact of society and culture, not private or personal. Spirituality refers to attitudes, experiences, and feelings that are private and individual. Religiosity is a matter not of attitude or personal conviction, but of public activity; it is what people do together. The difference is, we can study what a group does, but only acknowledge the report concerning what an individual believes in private. What a group affirms can be examined in context, derived from the interplay of contemporary opinion and the heritage of doctrine and normative deed through the ages. What an individual professes can only be noted. Of spirituality one may use the language, "My 'Judaism'" or "My 'personal encounter with Christ,'" but of religion one speaks of what is shared and public: "Judaism teaches…," "Christianity maintains…," "Islam holds…."

The task of writing authentically on the spiritual life of Judaism ("Jewish spirituality") is not easily accomplished, because by "spirituality" people mean many things, most of them subjective. But a number of highly gifted scholars of Judaism have created a literature of Jewish spirituality that is worthy of its task: to represent what is particular to Judaism, public and shared by us all. The names of Harold Kushner and Neil Gillman come to mind. Rabbi Kushner has transformed a personal experience into an artful and compelling "companion" to suffering. Rabbi Gillman has made theological argument into the medium for rigorous thinking about intangible attitudes and emotions. Lawrence A. Hoffman in The Journey Home: Discovering the Deep Spiritual Wisdom of the Jewish Tradition has written a classic of remarkable sensibility, and anyone who perseveres in the profound work, Kaddish, by Leon Wieseltier knows what it means to study Torah as an act of religious engagement.

In the context of writing on spirituality in the tradition of Judaism, Seymour Rossel now adds his name to that short list of authentic voices capable of speaking to the individual in behalf of the public and corporate religious world of the Torah. He writes for a broad audience of Jews and Christians, but his is a perspective shaped by Judaism. He writes with art and restraint, not relying on rhetoric to replace religious reality: encounter, authentic emotion.

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Jacob Neusner, Bard College, is author of Judaism: An Introduction (London and New York: Penguin, 2003).

The Spiritual Life of Dreams

by Holly Lebowitz Rossi
Forward
February 6, 2004

Call me crazy, but I am suspicious of anyone who claims to have heard a message from God delivered through his or her dreams. But if anyone could convince me that such a communication is possible, it's Vanessa L. Ochs.

Ochs, a professor at the University of Virginia who is an expert on the history of Jewish spirituality, said that dreaming can be a spiritual activity and that dream interpretation is a practice that has its roots in the Bible and the Babylonian Talmud. Further, the practice of "dream incubation" enables people to project a question, topic or object into the universe and fall asleep anticipating a message, inspiration or insight.

So if you have Tu B'Shvat on the brain, the Jewish new year for trees that begins on February 6, tree-related symbols might appear in your dreams. An olive tree, the Talmud says, would mean that you will be blessed with abundance. The branch of a vine means that you can expect to greet the messiah.

Those meanings, which Ochs says were attached to trees in talmudic times because trees had a specific function and social role then, might not feel immediately obvious to modern dreamers. But the exercise of exploring what a tree might symbolize this Tu B'Shvat--rootedness? renewal? that you read "The Lorax" recently?--is in itself exciting and, forgive the pun, fruitful.

It also gives the layperson "the opportunity to be a midrashist," Ochs said.

Dreams capture the creative imagination because they represent just that--the creative side of our psyches that is unfettered by such pesky constraints as gravity, time and space. Is it a coincidence that dreams have been the linchpins of so many icons of pop culture, from "The Wizard of Oz" to "The Matrix" to Bobby Ewing's miraculous resurrection on "Dallas"?

Ochs's most recent book, The Jewish Dream Book: The Key to Opening the Inner Meaning of Your Dreams (Jewish Lights), together with Bible Dreams: The Spiritual Quest (SPI) by Rabbi Seymour Rossel, show that dream interpretation is not solely the province of Hollywood screenwriters, Freudians and New-Agers but a practice that has its roots in some older Jewish traditions.

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Holly Lebowitz Rossi is a freelance writer in Arlington, Mass.