Field of Dreams

Yes, I know, there’s a film about baseball with the same name and it had quite a mystical theme to it, as I remember.  Well, it’s interesting because a field, a sadeh, in Torah wisdom is also loaded with mystical meaning.  I’m not an expert in this but what I have gleaned is that the word for land is eretz, which is feminine, and what we can understand from this is that, in the mystical sources, feminine is always to do with the aspect of building and bringing things to fulfillment; we see this most clearly with men providing only half a genetic seed for a child but women being the ones who build the child in the womb and give it existence and independence. Women are naturally attached to the Land of Israel, the source of which is Tzelaphechad’s daughters who challenged Moshe Rabbeinu to receive their inheritance of the Land.  But it was with Avraham Avinu that we see the first acquisition of a field from Ephron to bury his beloved wife, Sarah.  The deeper sources reveal that buying a field relates to marriage and producing new life and one can start to see the correlation between the two – the land also has to be sown in order to produce. There’s a further fascinating correlation in that the resurrection of the dead, techias hameisim, will also arise from the earth.
 
As I was thinking about this agriculture/mystical connection, it occurred to me that we quite often use agricultural terminology in our everyday speech to describe our inner desires and striving.  We talk about the cultivation or germination of ideas, the seed or kernel of an idea; it’s almost a natural way to describe our desire to bring potential into actual – it is in effect a birth process.
 
All our desires start with the initial thought, sometimes a very vague notion of how we might want things to be but without the belief or practical ability to bring this concept to fruition [there we are, another allusion to agriculture – fruit!].
 
I can think of an occasion in my life when I had an intense desire not to be working in a commercial setting anymore, I felt spiritually dry and wanted something more “vocational”.  Out of that undefined awareness arose a yearning to work in a more spiritual environment where what I did had intrinsic value.  Not long after that the opportunity came to work in a Torah environment on a voluntary basis. I liked what I saw and imagined how it would be to work there to the extent that I couldn’t imagine working anywhere else.  A short time later, I was offered a permanent position.
 
In recent years, I developed a yearning to develop creatively and within a relatively short period of time, started writing literally from nothing.
 
And therein lies another lesson: our initial thoughts are channeled through our imagination so what we imagine has real power.
 
We sometimes give up on achieving a goal because we think it’s within our control to achieve it.  Of course, a person with emuna knows that no outcome is in our control, only Hashem’s, and therefore the only control we have is over our desire, what we choose, and it’s that which we actually give birth to.
 
That’s why it’s so important not to give up on what we want particularly when we make our goals spiritually and Torah compliant.  It’s so easy to become despondent when things don’t seem to go the way we want, even spiritually, but we can overcome this negativity by dreaming, using our imagination to visualize what could be even when it seems beyond our capability.
 
I can remember while I was growing up occasionally being told “you’ll never be able to do this or that”.  In context, it was always meant well, but actually is one of the worst things you can tell a child because it sticks and takes a great deal of effort to uproot.  I think what enabled me to work through some of this “stickiness” was my ability to dream.  As child, daydreaming can be very enjoyable but not very productive but channeling that imagination through adulthood into something more mature has got me on occasions to where I want to be, and it’s still enjoyable.  Right now, my daydreaming very much centers round being involved in a Torah community in Eretz Yisrael and developing creativity in different areas.  Sometimes I feel closer to achieving my goals and sometimes further away than ever, but that doesn’t take away my ability to imagine and I can still live in that imagination while doing whatever I need to do in the here and now. And unexpected events take place, signposts from Hashem, which give me hope and help me stay focused. At other times, when I try and think about all the logistics involved in making aliyah with my elderly mother, I feel I want to give up straightaway because it just doesn’t seem possible. I don’t know what Hashem wants me to do exactly but He sends messages all the time, and I just have to take note and be patient… and carry on dreaming.
 
So that’s my field of dreams – what’s yours?