We Are All On Shaky Ground

8 Tammuz 5786

I woke up from a nightmare this morning and found myself literally trying to climb the wall next to my bed.

My regular readers will know that I'm not in the habit of sharing dreams (aside from the one about the moon), but this one I knew immediately carried an important message that had to be shared.

The beginning is blurry, but I was trying to do something important and I hired a person to help me, but every time I turned around, I had to hunt them down and redirect them from tasks that I had not assigned.  All around me people were busy doing things, but each was in his own little world.  People were not united around a single task but each was off on his own agenda and working very hard and very diligently at it.

At some point I was outside the building where I had been working away and as I was walking back towards it, the ground appeared to rise up like an undulating wave.  I thought to myself what a strange optical illusion and commented on it to someone nearby.  My body felt the slightest tremor, like I was imagining it, and I said, it's weirdly like an earthquake.  Then the shaking got real and I was back inside the building.

An earthquake struck and rubble was falling from the ceilings, floors were canted up at weird angles and debris blocked the halls.  Everyone was stumbling around looking for a way out, but every approach to an exit was blocked.  At first it would look like a way out and just as we got to it, it became blocked for one reason or another.

I kept asking people for help, to organize to come up with a solution, but no one would cooperate. 

Finally, I saw that this was yad Hashem and that unless we did teshuvah and ask for His help, we had no chance to survive.  I started yelling for people to come and listen, to gather and give their attention so I could tell them that.  

People filled the room but they were all talking at the same time but not to each other and no one seemed to be listening.  I saw a woman with no clothes on* complaining about being disturbed.  If we had the nerve to call everyone "right now" then we had to accept her in whatever state she was in at the moment and she had no shame about it.

One man said in a regretful voice that he had left his shoes someplace and really wished he had them now.  Somehow I knew where they were and we went and got them, then I realized that I also had no shoes on and that it was dangerous to walk around barefoot in all the debris.

The next moment, an idea occurred to me, a place where we still might be able to get out of the building, a place with a stable connection to the building where we could all get out.  The land had kept shifting and falling away all this time and it was like we were nearly afloat, only tethered at one point.  I went and found it and though I yelled and yelled to people to come and help me, only one woman was nearby, and she just would not do anything to help.  No one was coming.  

Next to the building was like a boardwalk with posts at intervals.  The land was splintering off at the point where it connected to the building.  Now, it began to slide and I was clutching at the boards on the other side trying to keep us from sliding away.  I think this is the point when I begin to pray as earnestly as I have ever done.

Until then, there had been time for all of us to climb out of the building to safety on the other more stable side.  I thought if only someone would help, we could throw some rope over to tie the building to one of those posts and that would buy us crucial minutes more, but the slide was gaining momentum and I saw nothing close to that was ever going to happen.  That's when I tried to save myself by hoisting my body over to the boardwalk and woke up flailing at the wall in my bedroom.

*I immediately connected the vision of that naked woman to the most disturbing video I had seen this week.  It was at one of the chareidi hafganot, yeshivah boys in their suits and hats blocking a highway and an older woman in only the skimpiest underwear walking among them, confronting them, pushing her body against them, one after another, just wandering with a smug smile on her face.  The boys tried to get away from her, turning this way and that, shoving her off themselves.  No police interfered with her.  They were busy elsewhere,  viciously beat our sons and brothers, dragging their pants off of them and leaving them in their underwear.

This was the real world and the double exposure was also a message.

If you did not see it, this might sound like another nightmare and it was, but a waking one.  It really happened, and it was the most shocking thing I have seen yet and still it does not appear to make an impression on anyone.  Nothing changes.  

I keep expecting people to wake up to how dire our current situation is.  The information is out there and the images to prove it.  I've tried to spin recent events positively in my own mind, because there is a positive side, no doubt about it.  But, we can't just ignore the negatives.  They must be recognized, confronted and corrected or we are all going to pay the price of ignorance and apathy.