Rabbi Charles P. Sherman
November 19, 2004
Shabbat Va-yetze
Dare to Dream, But Stay on the Ground
This week's Torah portion begins with the story of a dream. Until now, Jacob, mother's pet, has been pampered and protected. Now he has to run away from home. He flees because his brother, Esau, is out to get him for having tricked their father into giving him the blessing of the first born.
Jacob lies down on a rock in the wilderness. Can you image what a scary experience that must have been? The desert is cold and very dark at night. The wind howls and wild animals roam. Alone for the first time in his life, Jacob has to lie down upon a rock – perhaps even without a blanket – and try to sleep.
If you or I were in that situation, we would probably be up all night. We would be afraid to close our eyes for fear that a wild animal might come and attack us in the dark. If we slept at all, we would probably have a nightmare, not a dream. That would surely be understandable in such a frightening situation.
And yet the Torah tells us that Jacob dreamed that night, and it was a very special dream. Listen. (Genesis 28:12 - 15) Jacob saw a ladder. It was set on the ground and its top reached the sky, and angels of God were going up and down on it. God was standing beside it, and God said: "I am the Eternal, the God of your father Abraham, the God of Isaac: the ground on which you are lying I will give to you and your offspring. Your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth. You shall spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you and your descendants. Remember, I am with you. I will protect you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you."
That dream changed Jacob's life. When he left in the morning he was no longer the same person. Now he felt confident, not frightened; protected, not abandoned. He felt that God was with him and that God cared about him and that God would someday bring him back home. With the confidence that he gained from that dream, Jacob was able to go forward and make a new life for himself in the land of Haran.
This Shabbat I want to tell you about another young man whose life was changed by a dream. His name is Merle Singer, and he was three years ahead of me in seminary. We lived across the hall from each other in the dormitory in Cincinnati for a year and a half. I only recently learned something about Rabbi Singer, because he told this story when he received an honorary Doctorate degree from Florida Atlantic University (FAU).
When Rabbi Singer spoke to the graduates, he quoted from Reverend Howard Thurman, who once wrote: "Saddle your dreams first before you ride them. This is the fatal blunder that so many of us make. Our dreams must be saddled to the hard facts of the world before we ride off to the stars." Perhaps Reverend Thurman had our Torah portion in mind when he wrote those words. He was saying that dreams are good, very good, provided that they are anchored to the earth. We need heavenly dreams in order to light up our path on earth, but if our dreams are disconnected from the real world in which we live, if they have no basis in reality, then they fly away and mean very little.
Isn't that what the Torah portion for this week says? A ladder should enable us to climb up towards heaven, but it also must stand firmly upon the earth. After he had quoted these lines from Reverend Thurman, my colleague went on to tell this story which occurred now more than 50 years ago.
It was spring in Minnesota, a wonderful time of the year, and Merle Singer was a seventh grader. Toward the end of the seventh grade the class had to take the SAT, the Scholastic Aptitude Test. When the grades on that test came back, he found himself standing at the teacher's desk as his named was called out.
Looking at his test results, the teacher asked Merle what his future plans were, and he said casually, "Oh, I guess I'll go on to Central High, and I'll take courses that will prepare me for college and then . . ." Before he could finish the sentence and tell her which graduate school, which profession he planned to enter, she interrupted him and said, "Merle, according to these test results, you'll be lucky if you are able to graduate high school. These test results show that you may have the ability to graduate vocational school at best. So, put any idea of going to college out of your head, for if you don't, you will only be disappointed."
When he heard these words, Merle was dumbstruck. What was she talking about? But the look on her face made it clear that she was very serious, not joking. "B-b-but," he stammered, "I'm going to college. I have to."
The teacher said, "My boy, tests don't lie. Take my advice and go to trade school and, if you don't believe me, go talk to the Guidance Counselor as soon as possible."
Some time later that same afternoon Merle made his way to the Guidance Counselor's office. The Counselor studied his test results in silence for a few minutes and this is what he said. "Your teacher is right about these test scores. We don't know why, but the test that is given in kindergarten is sometimes a better indicator of academic potential than any other test that we give. Your kindergarten test showed potential for doing well in school."
"Does that mean that I can plan for college and for graduate school some day?" Merle asked.
"It won't be easy," said the Counselor, "but there is nothing wrong with hitching your wagon to a star, provided that you make sure the wheels of the wagon stay on the earth." And with that their meeting came to a close.
Rabbi Singer then paused and explained to the FAU graduates how it happened that he had showed so much potential in kindergarten and yet had flunked the SAT test in seventh grade. The kindergarten test was a pre-reading test and that is why he did so well. Back then it was not known that people who test poorly on reading tests may have what we now call dyslexia, a learning problem in which the brain reverses letters during reading. It turns out that Merle Singer, like many other people, is severely dyslexic. And, like so many other people who suffer from this disease, he has had to learn to compensate for it. In those days, unlike today, there was not much awareness of this problem that makes so many people see a printed page differently. For such people learning, and especially reading, can be difficult, even painful experiences.
Walking home from school that afternoon, the Guidance Counselor's words kept ringing in his ears. "There is nothing wrong with hitching your wagon to a star, because there are so many stars out there that you could catch on to. And even if you don't catch a star, you will at least learn how to reach." Those words stayed with Merle Singer all through high school and all through college.
At the end of his sophomore year there came a moment of truth. Merle failed his first Hebrew class. Now if you do not master Hebrew, you can not become a rabbi. And so it began to look like that seventh grade teacher might have been right after all. Merle wondered – maybe I should have listened to her. Maybe instead of going to college and trying to become a rabbi, maybe I should have gone to trade school like she told me to. But then the college officials told him that if he came back in the Fall and passed the Hebrew Competence exam, he could continue.
Rabbi Singer said, "It was early in the morning when I left Cincinnati, which is where I went to school. Those were the days when you traveled by train; my bags were checked and I had some time to kill before the train left, so I thought I would go out on the promenade in front of the Union Terminal and take one last look at the Cincinnati skyline – because I figured I might never see it again.
"Suddenly I remembered a story that I had learned in Sunday School. It was a story about a great teacher named Rabbi Akiba. The story is that he was once an illiterate, an unschooled shepherd who could not read. He wanted to become a scholar, but everyone around told him to forget it. After all he was now 40 years old; nobody can start at 40 and learn a whole new profession. All his life he had tended sheep up in the hills; how could he possibly change careers in mid-life and start over from scratch, learn the alphabet and go on from there to become a scholar? Everyone he knew told him it was impossible.
"But one day he was watering his flock near a stream, and he noticed that at the base of the waterfall the rocks had been hollowed out by the flow of the water. Now rock is stronger than water and yet the steady flow of the water – drop by drop, week after week, month after month, year after year – had eventually worn away the surface of the rock.
"Akiba said to himself, ‘If water can wear away rock just by flowing over it again and again and again and again, then I believe that knowledge can enter my brain the same way.' That very day Akiba decided that he would enter the academy in Jerusalem. It took him 24 years, but eventually Akiba became the greatest scholar in all Israel, and one of the chief architects of the Judaism that we live by today."
Merle Singer, standing outside the Union Terminal in Cincinnati, remembered that story about Akiba and said to himself, "I may not be an Akiba, but if I put my head to it and work at it hard enough and long enough, I can pass that Hebrew exam." And so he studied Hebrew all summer – conjugating verbs, declining nouns – and in the Fall he passed the make-up test. He went on to become a rabbi whose rabbinate has blessed the Boca Raton community in so many wonderful ways. He is retiring this June from a congregation which now numbers 2000 families.
I wondered whether I had the right to tell you this story, so I asked Rabbi Singer's permission. He said, "Sure, by all means you can tell it. If this story can help somebody sitting in your sanctuary, someone who has been told by some insensitive teacher or parent – ‘You can't do it. You'll never achieve it. You can't make it.' Perhaps hearing my story will remind them of what dreams can do when they are saddled to life. Tell them for me not to give in to the nay-sayers and to those who tell you what you can't do. Instead, tell them to dare to dream, because there are a lot of stars out there, and even if you don't catch one, at least you will learn how to reach.
"But remind them of one more thing. Your dreams have to be connected to the earth; they can't be just dreams. They can't be fly-by-night fantasies that disappear when dawn comes. They have to be dreams like our father Jacob's were, dreams that give you confidence and that make you feel you are not alone. Dreams that see a ladder which is firmly rooted on the earth and which also reaches up toward heaven."
My friends of all ages, may all of us reach far and dream big as Jacob-become-Israel did. We are his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. May all of us learn not what we can't do, but what we CAN do, if only we have the determination. May all of us stand on ladders that are rooted on the ground, but like Jacob's ladder, may ours also reach up towards heaven. Amen
I am grateful to Rabbi Jack Riemer for much of this message.
