Vayetze D'var Torah: Delivered by Grace Wickerson, November 29th, 2025

I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling like Gregorian Year 2025 has been an exceptionally long and difficult year. I currently work in climate policy, where I focus on the impacts of climate change and health and livelihoods and what we can do about it. Throughout this year, hard-fought wins that took years of disciplined organizing were unraveled in a matter of moments, many of my colleagues lost their jobs or funding for their work, and we saw the devastating consequences of a weakened federal government with climate disasters like the Texas floods. Personally, the campaign I had been leading for the federal government to take comprehensive action on extreme heat collapsed as this climate change-denying Administration decided to ignore the problem, and I spent months in limbo trying to decide how this work could move forward (and selfishly justify me continuing to have a job - thank you nonprofit industrial complex).

So it’s unsurprising that I’ve been constantly searching for ways to keep myself grounded amidst all of the chaos. As I’ve settled into Kislev and tentatively accepted these longest nights of the year are here to stay, my mind has been on dreaming as a practice and discipline. 

I don’t know about you all, but dreaming is not a muscle that comes easy to me. For starters, I am quick to forget my dreams as soon as I wake up. I’m someone who leaps into action to start the day, there’s never time to dwell on my dream world. Day dreaming? Of course not! There’s work to be done! A pause to dream can feel trivial when every second counts if we’re going to act in time on the climate crisis. How is a dream supposed to help when the here and now feels all consuming? But as I think about this week’s Torah portion, maybe my aversion to dreaming is actually standing in the way of encounters with inspiration I’m needing.

This portion begins with Yaakov fleeing for his life. To recap last parsha’s events, Yaakov deceived his father Yizthak and stole Esau’s birthright, an act that Esau commits to avenge by killing Yaakov. Soon after beginning his flight, Yaakov encounters a “certain place” and rests. In this place Yaakov stumbles via a dream portal into an encounter with G*d, receiving the prophecy of the future of the Jewish people in the first of eight dreams that we’ll encounter in the Torah portions of Kislev. Upon awaking from his dreamworld encounter with G*d, Yaakov exclaims two quite poetic lines:

“Achen yesh y’hova bamakom haze ve'enochi lea yadati” - Surely the Lord is in this place - and I did not know it!

“Mah norah hamakon hazeh. Ein za ki em-bit elohim veze sha'ar hasamyim” - How awesome is this place, this is none other than the House of God––this is the Gate of Heaven!

Where might Yaakov be if he didn’t pause to let himself dream? In a time of utter life chaos; the last thing on my mind would have been giving myself over to the dream world. And yet, it’s at this time of disruption that Yaakov needs the dream to realize his place in the world and find his unique connection to the divine. Dream practice is the practice of revelation. While “the place” bamakom is exceptionally special here, the site of the future temple, I think we can all find a place in our lives where we’re in need of dreaming.

Rabbi Jill Hammer says dreaming is the “undertorah” defined as an “unique realm that weaves consciousness with what lies beyond it”. In a book by the same name, she goes on to write that “a dream has something real at its core: a seed of truth, even if that truth has many shoots that grow from it…our dreams are a reflection of our intimate relationship with our bodies, each other, the sacred, and ultimately the cosmos. Every dream is a portal to that bedrock reality, those shifting images like tectonic plates below us.” An ancient midrash about Jacob’s ladder drives this point of dreams as a portal to self-realization home, in Genesis Rabbah 68:12, the ladder is actually Jacob himself, drawing down the power of the divine and allowing it to move through him. Our dreams are the energy moving through our body, a fuel for the cold and dark months ahead, physically and metaphorically.

Dreaming and yearning is crucial for any movement for social justice and collective liberation. From MLK Jr. “I Have a Dream” speech to Trisha Hershey’s “Rest is Resistance” movement, our modern movements have used dreams as an exercise of imagination of other worlds and ways of being. A dream of a better world, however impossible to imagine, is necessary for our survival - even if we do not have all of the answers. It is the work of the waking to find the way forward.

I had told my partner in 2024 that I couldn’t imagine trying to do national climate policy during a second Trump Administration. Quite frankly, I had a vision of what was to come and how exhausting it would be to do this work, which by the end of 2025 has been fully realized to a horrifying extent. And yet, I’m still here. I still want to be here. But to continue on this path may require me to stop running for a moment; and take a second to pause. Maybe there’s something I don’t know yet about the places where I am. May some unexpected Divinity lay around the corner, if I’m willing to let myself listen.