All the Wombs I’ve Been In: Dreams, Trauma & Hopefulness
I had the craziest dream…
It was the kind of dream that, when you wake up, you think was real, except that it couldn’t be real, because snakes as thin as grass cannot swallow a young woman in midair while a Greek temple falls to pieces around them.
(I told you it was the craziest dream.)
The girl who gets swallowed by a snake in a crumbling Greek temple, she’s kind of the main character in the dream (which, my therapist will assure me, means she’s me, duh). She becomes, in this “movie within a dream,” ancestor to all the other characters. There are family secrets, sexual shame, and a really weird scene that I can only call a posthumous fetus transplant, in which this very girl’s potential child has been incubating (through some sort of magical-but-physical transgenerational trauma) inside the uterus of one of her descendants, and then surgically extracted and grown in a free-floating hospital-made womb. Apparently, I dream in sci-fi.
This ancestrix constantly looks over her shoulder as she enters the temple. She carries a shallow brass bowl between her forearms. She wears a flowy white robe/dress, her hair pinned up like in an old Hollywood movie about the goddesses of Mount Olympus. Curvy body, bare feet hurrying up marble steps and about to head between two columns when all hell breaks loose. Fire, projectiles busting through stone walls, dust everywhere. And then the snake, which makes its first appearance in the beak of a snowy owl who, for some unknown reason, drops the thin, scaly creature, sending it careening down between the columns, mouth open. Impossibly fast, the lime green snake swallows the girl whole before slapping to the mosaic floor and slipping between some rubble.
Dust settles, sparking in the rays of sunlight coming through the holes in the ceiling and walls, and the sound cuts out completely. The snake sheds its skin, slithering away unchanged, and yet, the remains of the girl are left behind, too, absurdly inside the papery snakeskin. Bloody, contorted, bones protruding from limbs. She’s between the walls, buried in the rubble, in a little cave that’s formed, and there she stays while the film goes into a time-lapse. She decays, but her dress miraculously does not degrade, impossibly white among ashes and dust.
With a sudden shift to first-person POV, I’m the girl (and I’m dead). I’m looking out at the scene from inside whatever used to be her, me. It doesn’t hurt; it’s like I’m looking at the world through the smooth, delicate fabric of my robe, and I feel protected, safe, like nothing can touch me unless I want it to. Suddenly, someone scoops me up, or what’s left of me, within the folds of the robe, and now it’s not precisely like a robe, but more like a tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl, with its fringes tied in a pattern that reminds us of the Torah’s 613 commandments. Incongruously, impossibly, I’m bone shards, and piles of ash… and pools of blood — viscous and deep red as a garnet, my birthstone. Whoever has rescued — found? disturbed? — me has folded the white fabric over, and is stitching the edges, a makeshift bag. The world dims. They raise the bag and me with it. And then I understand that they are taking me home.
The homecoming is like a party. A debutante ball, or a wedding. It smacks of “rite of passage” somehow. My parents (not my actual parents, which makes sense, because my dad really was more partial to the Romans) have opened their courtyard to… everyone. I see just their ankles and legs, their hips in their draped robes and short togas. My parents make speeches that I hear as mumbles, and they serve an extravagant banquet. And then everything quiets, and all the focus in the room shifts to the center of a big, open stone pavilion surrounded by arches and columns, and the stars pinprick against the onyx of the night sky, and my parents dance with me.
The white garment, hastily stitched on three sides, has a bulge at a corner along the bottom. The bundle, like sand, like the pudgy body of a puppy, occasionally sweeps against the floorstone. I’m inside, all goo, red-black and moving slightly slower than the fabric that stops me from spilling, spreading into every crack between the tiles, into the earth beneath. My parents hold me, together, by a loop formed by a knot tied in one corner of the toga/tallit. They dance, European ballroom-style, with their hands intertwined, holding the fabric together through the force of gravity and the strength of the knot; they don’t struggle to hold its weight, my weight, the weight of what’s left of me, my remains.
Inside, below their linked arms, the soft shuffle of me against well-worn stone, I’m dancing, too. A dance of a sort, at least. And it feels like rocking. Rocking a baby. Or the way you rock a baby before it’s a baby, by swaying your swelling this way and that. The way some Jews move when we pray, side to side, as though we’re shaking our heads, “No, this kind of abundant love (what our tradition calls ahava rabba) can’t be real.” Or shuckling front to back, like bobblehead toys, as if to say, “Yes, yes, if I pray this hard, then my body and my mind and my heart will know it’s real.” Like that kind of dance.
If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m a feelings person. I’m terrible at small talk; I’d rather know your deepest longings and secret fears, your aspirations that have nothing to do with material success, wealth, or titles. I want to know you, what you are, what you value. I’m not the person to come to for advice on where to invest your money (what money?). I am the person you come to when you need a shoulder to cry on, a hug, a verbal affirmation that you’re a deeply flawed and deeply lovable human being in a crazy, ephemeral, beautiful world. When you are in a crisis, the phrase “others have it just as bad, or worse,” will never cross my lips. When someone you love dies, I will never be the person spouting, “They’re in a better place.” This place, this crumbling temple, these bodies of spongy-in-childhood-and-brittle-in-elderhood bones, these veins filled with blood that flows and clots and, eventually, stops circulating — they’re what I love best.
So, I wasn’t exactly surprised that I had a dream about disappearing potential and decay and death and fraught spiritual sites. I was surprised (affirmed? delighted?) to wake from that dream and enter my weekly practice of reading the Torah portion scheduled for the coming Shabbat and realize that this Shabbat marks my emergence from a womb of sorts, a leaving of part of my past and accepting a new temple. This Shabbat is the anniversary of my bat mitzvah.
I was called to the Torah on Shabbat Vaetchanan, which is also (always) Shabbat Nachamu, the first of the Shabbatot of Consolation that fall after Tisha b’Av, meaningful to me because of the Hebrew name I chose, Nechama, comfort. Leading services and publicly chanting Torah on that day meant I would also chant a passage from Isaiah containing one of the verses that had inspired my chosen name.
But the Torah passage for that day, Vaetchanan, is a complicated read; as part of the book called Devarim (Deuteronomy), it’s actually a long restatement of Moses’s speech to the people before his death, as they stand right at the border of the land of milk and honey. I recall, when preparing for my rite of passage, slightly regretting my choice not to celebrate around the time of my birthday (which felt weird, given that I’d become an adult long before this ritual took place). I remember wishing (like many thirteen-year-old Jews) that I’d landed a portion in Bereshit (Genesis), with its rich human drama. I didn’t realize until my dream precisely how much human drama Moses communicates all by himself in this portion.
Moses toggles back and forth between reassuring this mixed multitude of the descendants of former slaves, and chiding them for the mistakes they’ve made in the past, and fretting over whether they’ll just go on to make the same mistakes in the future — all the while knowing he won’t be the one to intercede on their behalf or turn them back to the path toward peoplehood, toward covenant.
Moses is legit freaking out about how the trauma of the Jewish past will be integrated and healed in the Jewish future.
Or maybe it’s just me. I’m legit freaking out about how the trauma of my own past, the Jewish past, the American past, the past of my nuclear family, will be integrated and healed in the future of my children and my students and everyone I love and teach and encounter and share this fragile, spinning earth. I dreamed about it, and I opened the Torah the next morning, and I read these words:
וָאֶתְחַנַּ֖ן אֶל־יְהוָ֑ה בָּעֵ֥ת הַהִ֖וא לֵאמֹֽר׃ (Va’etchanan el HaShem ba’eit ha’hu, leimor,)
I pleaded with the LORD at that time, saying, (Devarim/Deuteronomy 3:23).
What Moses pleads for is for God to take back what God said, about not entering the promised land. But what struck me was the phrase of the verse itself, the verb, the first word of the passage and therefore the title we use to name this portion: Va’etchanan, I pleaded.
It’s not just asking. It’s not just pleading. There are words for that. Many of our traditional Biblical commentators mention the unusual verb choice. Ibn Ezra (12th c. Spain) translates it as “I begged”; Rashi (11th c. France) muses whether we should translate it as “I prayed.” Somehow I never thought about it until this week, when I absolutely needed to: Va’etchanan shares a root with the word חן, chein, “grace.”
Duh. It’s right there, in the center of the word, the only letters left when you account for all the grammatical construction in that opening: Va’etchanan, “and I pleaded.” I sought grace. I begged for something I knew I could not, would not have, from a Being who had proven time and time again that miracles are possible.
I pulled out my go-to Biblical Hebrew/English dictionary and confirmed, just to see it there in black and white. In its various forms, this root, חן, chein, “grace,” encompasses the following: to cover; to caress, grace, favor; to bend oneself, to supplicate; and the real kicker, to come to rest, to be collected, as in “until [Moses’] mind be collected again” (citing this very same verse, Devarim 3:23).
Moses cannot watch the people cross the river into the promised land until he resolves, settles, his mind and his heart. And the way he seeks to settle himself is to reach out to a Being who knows what he’s been through, who loves the people, who is, according to another verse in this same Torah portion, passionate. Moses laments his lack of control, the shift in how he will influence this messy, stiff-necked, chosen people. Moses begs God to reassure him, to caress him, to grace him with the assurance that intergenerational trauma will not be the only thing he passes on, but that the stories of their suffering, of his own sacrifices, of his teaching and leadership, will endure.
I assume that Greek ancestor, who had an offering in her arms, whose body was sexy and strong, whose blood cried out to her descendants, whose ovum and womb contained something of her pain and her will to survive — I have a feeling she would plead and beg, too. But I know how her story ends, so I can reassure her.
After the convoluted and confusing process by which the descendants (including me) of our Greek heroine (also me) find a safe womb in which her ancient but somehow vital fetus can resume growing, the scene shifts: first-person POV again, except now, I’m the baby.
Pampered and patted, diapered and swaddled, I experience nourishment, touch, caress. I experience welcome, and expectation, and hopefulness. I experience the pressure of parental wishes and the acceptance of a community’s love. Because I’m not a baby suspended between individual parents. Instead, I’m a baby at a bris, a covenantal welcoming ceremony. My parents (my actual parents? my teachers? my lovers? my friends? my children? my enemies? every single person in my past and my present who has shaped me into the person I have become? Yes) are standing over an open Torah scroll, the words black ink on ivory parchment. They are speaking words of blessing, and a name: Yechiel Tam. Yechiel combines the phrase “let live!” with one of God’s Hebrew names. Tam means pure, simple, innocent.
I dreamed a tale of death and transgenerational trauma, and it ended with Yechiel Tam. A pure little earth-creature who would live, connected to an Eternal story, an Eternal longing, an Eternal energy.
After the blessing over the Torah, I experience the most amazing sensation. It’s the sensation of being passed from person to person, embrace to embrace. I see, now, not ankles and feet and waists, but arms and hands and faces. I see smiles and hear coos. Laughter surrounds me, and suddenly I am raised up, exulted, in the arms of a vast community who dance around the temple (not ruins, not, but a synagogue) with swaddled, infant me, just like Jewish folks dance with the Torah, wrapped in its beautiful garment, and passed around from embrace to embrace on the holiday of Simchat Torah. When we dance with the Torah, we hold it against our hearts, resting on our shoulders, like a baby. And so, this dance: Yechiel Tam (also me) was the Torah, the center of a whirling mess of love and fear and hope and relief. Not a rocking, swaying waltz this time, but a raucous, round, chaotic, joyful, bouncing hora.
Grace comes unbidden, undeserved, unasked. In Jewish tradition, it often appears in a triad and describes the Divine: חן וחסד ורחמים, chein va’chesed, v’rachamim. Grace, and loving-kindness, and mercy.
I don’t know if dreams come from God. Frankly, my entire conception of God doesn’t exactly lead, logically, to dream-messages in the first place. But my dream settles my mind and my heart, inspires me to hope. Moses begged for grace, and some days I feel like I’m begging, too.
Someday I’ll process all this in therapy, and in prayer, and with friends, and with my sister. Someday I’ll write a book that makes sense of all this, for you, dear reader, so that you may know that living and breathing, pure and innocent, eternal feeling of grace that comes unasked, of love and kindness that emerge from a covenant (a sacred agreement between you and your community, your past and your future), and of rachamim, mercy.
For now, open the dictionary with me once more: רָחַם, racham, to love. In its other forms: to have compassion on; to befriend; to be loved, beloved.
And look, just below, the noun: רֶחֶם, rechem, “womb.”
Transitions are hard, and they’re triggering, and uncertainty feels unbearable, sometimes. Sometimes the Temple crashes down around us, our offerings spill to the floor, neither accepted nor rejected, just… suspended. We are in the womb, here and not-here, present and future, promise and disaster and hope.
I had the most beautiful dream this week, as I sway and rock in the womb of change. Through the walls of this womb, through the fabric of this death-shroud, between the threads of a prayer-shawl, I see a world that was. I see its pain and its joy and its secrets. And I see a world that is. I see its uncertainty and its crisis and its relentless, persistent life. And I also remember seeing the tops of the heads of the folks who crowded around me, a scroll inscribed with stories of my ridiculous, flawed, maddening, culpable, creative ancestors. I remember how it feels to be uplifted, literally, and to sway and bob in that circular dance.
