I Have a Dream! | Rabbi Zalman Baruch Melamed | Beit Midrash

Torah Portion and Tanach
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קטגוריה משנית

People are dreaming. People have ambitions. Every person has a dream that he wants to fulfil.
Jacob has a dream. His dream, his greatest desire, is to be a leader, to pave a new way. A way that is not level but on the rise. He dreams of a ladder placed on the ground and its top rung reaches the sky. That’s his dream – to be this ladder.
Sometime a person has dream, he starts dreaming about something, and then he gets into it until it suddenly feels realistic, and then suddenly, he wakes up! When Jacob woke up he said "I know God is here with me' (אכן יש אלוקים במקום הזה). When we say 'He is with me, it can mean that He is standing on the same ground but it could also refer to "He feels me and is spiritually with me".
There may be other people who went to sleep on that same piece of land, but did not have the dream, - this door that made them experience that God is there with them. And although they were standing on the same land, they still did not feel that God was there with them.
Each and every Jew must believe in himself. He must learn to appreciate his strengths by reminding himself that he carries, deep in his soul, the image of god that is his endless source of energy. And the more he focuses on it, the more he will discover how much power is hidden within him. And this is the principle that we learn from Jacob’s dream - We must set high goals and not stop dreaming. Only then will we discover the forces within us. Shabbat Shalom!

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