Literary Review 4: A Hasidic View of Dreams, Torah-text, and the Language of Allusion

Citation:

Wineman, Aryeh. “A HASIDIC VIEW OF DREAMS, TORAH-TEXT, AND THE

LANGUAGE OF ALLUSION.” Hebrew Studies, vol. 52, no. 1, National Association of Professors of Hebrew in Institutions of Higher Learning, 2011, pp. 353–62, doi:10.1353/hbr.2011.0031.

Summary: This text gathers different Hasidic views and sources on dreaming. For example, there's various superstitions such as being asleep is equal to being 1/60th dead. There is also cases discussed from the Zohar and the Ohr Yitzchok, two Jewish texts which are extremely important to the Hasidic community. It goes over the text in the Torah as well, and discusses Hasidic views of the dreams that appear in Genesis.
Author: Aryeh Wineman has written several books about hasidic Judaism. Many of them focus on more spiritual and mystical interpretations and stories. He is also a rabbi, which makes him something of an expert.
Key terms: hasidic judaism, kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), zohar (book of Jewish mysticism)
Quotes:
". . .when a person sleeps, his soul roams through the world, and what one sees in dreams is really what the soul perceives in its journey." (p. 1)

". . .it might be suggested that the subject and presence of dreams in Hasidic texts and stories reflect something significant concerning the core-nature of eighteenth-century Hasidism which centered its sense of reality not within the external "objective" world, but rather within a person's own inner interiority and consciousness." (p. 2)

" . . .Pharaoh, in his sleep, also saw the truth on that same higher level, but upon awakening he perceived that truth only as expressed and clad in a physical, figurative manifestation." (pg 3).

Value: This work has a lot of information that Freud would have been learning in his studies. Drawing on what he learned, I can improve my argument that Freud's dream theory was based in Judaism. For example, that dreams contain truths that can only be discerned upon awakening. Additionally, Freud was very interested in the human psyche and consciousness, an interest that he may have gained from hassidut. 

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