Written by a Rabbi with a commendation from the American Roman Catholic Church … a popular exposition ….

— An Authentic Voice —

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.

His basic thesis is, “In the Bible every dream of vision is a prophecy, but every prophecy is not necessarily a dream.” He argues that “as individuals, when we record a dream, we are performing an act of creation… share our dreams with others, especially in the creativity we bring to interpreting our dreams and visions together.” So he meets head-on the challenge of subjectivity and insists that he engages in a public act. Dreams are deliberately forced to serve our waking selves. In interpreting Jacob’s dream, the sages wanted to know how it shapes the future of the people: “the Bible’s most famous dream and the interpretations placed on it by the sages provide clues for how the interpretation of dreams may ultimately shape destinies.” He expounds “paths of interpretation,” and then illustrates the journey. Abraham and Jacob “sought divine answers to moments of uncertainty and distress by initiating the dream process in a ritual way… they sent a question upward… received the inspiration and guidance they were seeking….” “If Jacob’s staircase dream dealt with estrangement, divorce, and the path to salvation, the story of Jacob’s wrestling match deals with maturity, self-image, and reintegration.”

Naturally, Joseph provides the occasion for much discussion, but in “From Scout to Seer” Rossel finds those who walked “in the footsteps of Joseph.” Having explored the dreams of Genesis, he turns to two dreams from other biblical books. He concludes with two chapters: “The Potential for Healing and Transformation,” “Out of the Dream Forest: The Meaning of the Spiritual Quest.” In these chapters he focuses on the meaning for the present of the messages contained in dreams: how we can do for ourselves what here he does for us. This is comparable to Rabbi Gillman’s essay, in his theological book, on how the faithful of Judaism can do theology for themselves — a tour de force.

What Rossel succeeds in accomplishing, therefore, is to make the most intimate and private experience, the dream, into the raw material of social culture. He has shown how to transform what is personal into what serves the public interest. This he has done through the force of intellect and the power of rigorous thought. That is why to the list of those who have met the challenge of writing books not about Judaism but of Judaism is added the name of Seymour Rossel.