Resurrecting Hebrew

Some years ago I had the first of two dreams that pushed me to an unexpected search, the way dreams are sometimes able to do.

In that dream I was at a dinner party in an elegant apartment. I had never been there before. One of the hosts had invited me, but when she opened the door and greeted me, I realized she had forgotten my name. She stuttered while trying to recall it, to no avail. She then apologized. I told her not to worry; I, too, have trouble remembering names. Thankfully, I never forget my own name, at least not yet, I said as I told it to her.

The host smiled and walked me into the living room. There were about a dozen people in the apartment, none of whom I knew. As I often do at parties, I got a glass of wine, found a comfortable chair, and sat down to observe. A voluptuous young woman with curly hair, holding a plate of hors d’oeuvres, walked toward me. She took a seat by my side and began an enthralling tale about an ugly, menacing beast she had seen at the zoo. The name of the beast sounded like the Liwerant. She repeated the word several times as if I knew what it meant. She said it was a fanciful, long-necked bird with a multicolored tail that fans out like a rainbow. The beast resembled a tall turkey, with a head so small it could pass for a tennis ball and a double chin that dangled bizarrely under the long beak. Those who crossed its path swore that its penetrating eyes could frighten even a cobra. Its legs, ending in three claws, looked like pencils. And although it couldn’t fly because of its meager wings, the wind could lift the beast so that it hovered overhead as if suspended by invisible strings.

“Strange,” I said.

“It sings some perplexing tunes,” she whispered. “And it feeds on yarmelakis.”

I asked her what a yarmelaki was, but she ignored my question. I suddenly realized that yarmelaki wasn’t the only word I hadn’t understood. As she spun her yarn, it became increasingly difficult to follow her sentences. She seemed to be speaking in a foreign language. I was completely at a loss. Was she still talking about the Liwerant? I felt uncomfortable and looked around. I saw a cadre of rabbis. One of them resembled a great-grandfather of mine, Kalman Eisenberg, whose sepia photograph, given to me by my mother, hangs in the ground-floor hallway of my house. The other rabbis looked like what Kalman Eisenberg’s friends probably looked like. I told the woman I needed fresh air and headed in the direction of the rabbis, who, I believe, were conferring about a Talmudic passage—something about an apple falling from a tree into the yard on a neighbor’s side of the fence. “Does the apple belong to the owner of the tree, or is it now the neighbor’s property?” asked one of the rabbis.

Since dreams allow for dead people to come visit, I asked Great-grandfather Kalman if he knew what language the attractive woman spoke. He looked at me in disbelief. “But of course,” he replied. “It’s Hebrew. She’s my niece.”

“It can’t be,” I replied. “I know Hebrew.”

“You do?” he questioned. “Then you must be aware that God doesn’t act alone. He is perpetually in need of help.”

I looked toward the chair where the beautiful woman had been sitting. To my surprise, she had taken off her clothes. She must have been in her early thirties, but her short, curly black hair made her look younger. Her beauty was stunning.

The woman was sitting next to a rabbi. In the dream it crossed my mind that such a scene was utterly impossible. Rabbis aren’t allowed to be with women who aren’t their spouses, let alone naked ones.

At this point I woke up in a cold sweat. My teeth were chattering.

Dreams can refer to unfinished business we might have, people we’re in debt to, journeys we’re ready to embark on. They have something to say to us, something that reason alone cannot explain.

The Talmud says that an uninterpreted dream is like an unread letter.

I spent weeks trying to sort out my dream. The face of the woman wasn’t recognizable to me. I couldn’t remember having thought about Kalman Eisenberg in the preceding weeks. Maybe the act of simply walking back and forth through the ground-floor hallway had brought his image into my unconscious. I still didn’t know what a yarmelaki was. Could it be an echo of the Yiddish word for head covering? The presence of the Liwerant was easier for me to explain. Not that I had ever seen such an anomalous creature, but recently I had become interested in imaginary animals and, as a result, had acquired an old copy of The First Voyage Round the World, by Magellan, an 1874 edition translated by Lord Stanley of Alderley, about imaginary kingdoms. It contained references to a couple of beautiful dead birds from “the terrestrial Paradise” called Bolom Niwatha. The birds were said to be “large as thrushes, [with] small heads, long beaks, legs slender like a writing pen, and a span in length.” Instead of wings, they have “long feathers of different colours, like plumes. . . . They never fly, except when the wind blows.”

I had been intrigued by these curious animals, but it wasn’t the Liwerant I was most attracted to. The part of the dream that kept coming back to my mind involved the unintelligible woman. Was it really Hebrew she was speaking? How come I couldn’t understand her? Why did she undress? And how to explain the reference to God needing help?

Several months later, I told a friend who has known me for decades about the dream. I described it to him in detail. His response was unexpected.

“Have you forgotten your Hebrew?” he asked.

“Why?” I didn’t have much to say. “Maybe I have. There was once a time when I could speak it fluently. But I haven’t used it for years.” I paused. “Yes, I have abandoned it.”

He said that I was going through a period of language withdrawal.

I had never heard the expression language withdrawal before, yet I immediately felt guilty.

My friend said, “Losing one’s Hebrew might be a synonym for losing one’s soul.”