Meir’s Dream

I am walking near Kittan (a local textile factory) juncture, on the old road to Beit-She’an. There was some sort of hut, and I saw someone there, looking like a re-ligious kibbutz member, withkova tembelon his head (a typical Israeli hat, one of the Israel’s national symbols in its first years). He was sitting there, and I saw myself as if I were going to work (in Kittan). He says to me:“Shalom Meir, how are you?”and I reply:“Shalom, what are you doing here?”And he points at this house (Yaish’s), toward the wadi, indicating that they are working there with compressors, digging some sort of a stream. I ask him why, and he says to me:“Look, the stream as it exists today, the rain always blocks it. The passage they dig, it’s in the direction of this (Yaish’s) house.”And I ask him:“What hap-pened?”And he says:“Look, here it always overflows; that is, it disrupts the traf-fic and all this. So we would like to dig a stream here.”And he shows me how they work.

Suddenly I meet another person, and he also asks me how I am. And the place is full of trees; really, trees all over, and people are coming out of the place, old-timers, like Yemenite Jews. And a young man was standing there, like I told you before, a kibbutz member with kova tembel. And I ask him:

“Who are these people?”And he replies:“This is an oldmoshav( a semi-coop-erative village), and in the morning every one is going on his work.”And I see them, one with a basket, another with a bicycle, etc. I asked him: Can I see this?” And he says: “Sure.” I entered that place and, instead of seeing some sort of amoshav, I saw something like his (Yaish’s) house.

And I see something like a hospital, a Sick-Fund clinic, girls with white gowns, all this. And I see a man sitting there, with three bottles of wine near him, and inside the bottles there are mirtles. I ask him:“Tell me, are these mir-tles? I would like to ask you a question.”And this is what I asked him: “Why doesn’t every plant succeed?”He replied:“Look, this is a secret I can’t divulge.”

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And I see the people, like sick people, sitting there, as in a Sick-fund clinic. And he tells them to take some arak from the bottles, as if they threw away (the pills)

…As if they took some pills or something, and now they don’t take these pills anymore. And he gives them some arak to drink, this is their medicine. And I ask them:“Well, how do you feel?”And they say:“All the pain that we had– with the stuff he has given us, it’s O. K., it’s passes away.”

And I go on and I see a third man, and I ask him:“What do you plant here?”

And he says,“Look mister, here, near the entrance to Beit-She’an, we already planted something one year ago, but the inhabitants spoiled what we had plant-ed. Then I say:“You should blame no one. You informed us neither by letters nor through the Ministry of Religion or the local municipality.”Then he says:“You’ll receive a letter and then you’ll know.”That’s what he said to me.

Exegesis: In contrast with Ya’ish’s dreams, which take place in a contextual vacuum, Meir’s dream involved places and characters from Beit She’an and its environs—the Kitan junction (the location of the factory where Meir worked), a man from a religious kibbutz (of which there are several just south of Beit She’an (, an old Yemenitemoshav, a clinic, and of course Ya’ish’s home, where the dreamer was headed. The diversion of the creek towards the house signaled the identity of the site—Genesis 2:10 states that“a river went out of Eden to water the garden.”The creek supplied the water for the sapling to grow, the sapling symbolizing the shrine. In the prosaic municipal context in which the dreamer lived, the new road, meant to enable easy, unobstructed access by car to the holy site, signified a wish that word of the site spread and that it become more popular. The excavation work itself may have signified laying the founda-tions and the development of infrastructure for construction on the site, and per-haps also unearthing the opening (in the dream, the“crossing”), the heart of the site. (Meir was in fact a vocal supporter of a proposal to conduct archaeological excavations at the site.) The figures he met indicated that, for Meir, the way to the Gate of Paradise, which ended in a development town inhabited mostly by North African Jews, began in a religious (Ashkenazi) kibbutz and went through an old Yemenitemoshav.This is more than a hint of the expansiveness of Meir’s vision, which addressed the shrine’s social significance (an element completely lacking in Ya’ish’s revelation dreams). Indeed, in his subsequent dreams, the Gate of Paradise took on the character of an all-Israeli shrine, which drew large crowds that included familiar Israeli figures of the 1980s such as Prime Minister Menachem Begin, President Yitzhak Navon, and Israel’s Sephardi Chief Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef.

The identification of the site’s vicinity as a tree-linedmoshavmay have de-rived from the appearance of Ya’ish’s street, which was lined by one-story houses surrounded by trees and shrubs. At the same time, it could refer to the tradition-Dialogic Anthropology 153

al pastoral image of the Garden of Eden and its residents (in which case“old”

may refer totsaddiqim). The dream transition from Ya’ish’s home to the adjacent medical clinic probably derives from the functional similarity between the two institutions, which were competing centers of healing, but it also derived from the physical proximity between them in waking reality. Beyond the presentation of the shrine as a place of healing, the conjunction between the two made it pos-sible to display the superiority of the traditional over the modern system: the araqand myrtle replaced the pills as the preferred medicine.

The optimism that the dream projected was accompanied by apprehension and uncertainty about the realization of the vision, summed up in the key ques-tion,“why doesn’t every planting succeed?”The question’s importance was pre-figured in its formal prelude:“‘I want to ask a question.’This is what I asked,”as it was in the mystery surrounding the reply. The answer came from a third per-son, who appeared in the dream soon before its end. He said that the sapling—

the holy site—had already been planted a year before at the entrance to Beit She’an (Ya’ish lived close to the town’s western entrance), but that the inhabi-tants“ruined it”(were not worthy?). Meir’s attempts to validate the revelation, which in the real world led him to take upon himself to apply to well-known rab-bis and to suggest archaeological excavations at the site, are expressed here in his longing for a concrete sign that the sapling had taken root. The references to the town council and the Ministry of Religion as“addressees”in the matter suggest these institutions’reluctance to recognize the shrine in the absence of corroboration other than the dreams. The promise, at the end of a dream, that a letter would arrive probably referred to the Announcement to the Public that Ya’ish disseminated throughout Beit She’an; indeed, Meir’s dream may well have catalyzed it.

From the perspective of the dream as a whole, it looks as if the three figures that guided Meir along his way to the shrine all represent the site’s patron, Elijah the Prophet. In Jewish folklore, Elijah often appears incognito, in the guise of a variety of characters. This can explain his manifestation as a religious kibbutznik in a cloth cap. The fact that the first two figures greeted the dreamer is of great significance in this context, because encounters with Elijah in which he greets those who encounter him on the road are considered to be of greater value than those in which there is no verbal interaction with him.

In conclusion, clearly Meir’s vision placed Ya’ish’s revelation experience cen-trally on the plane of community and the collective. It imbued the revelation with meaning deriving from its local context in Beit She’an. The dream displayed the huge importance Meir ascribed to the site as a center of healing and renewal, as well as his intense hope to play a central role in its development and promotion.

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