"The Sabbath Dream" by Joel Rosenberg   

Joel Rosenberg is currently writing Crisis in Disguise, a book on the cinema of Jewish experience.

The Sabbath Dream
Joel Rosenberg

I dreamed I was in Safed in the Ari's time,

on a wheat-white Friday afternoon.

I was arriving from the northwest,

as the Sabbath came up slowly from due west.

And I, too, like she, had walked

a long, long way. My car had broken down

at Biriyya; the sun had bleached the road,

and trees were growing scarce,

but for a line of tall, blue cypresses

bearding the mountain grade. But she

took steps she seemed to float on,

getting there before me,

with the sunbaked Galilean fields

prostrate behind her.

 

Some followers of Rabbi Luria himself

were coming down the hill

so slowly in the distance, along

the southwest slope,

walking in confessional

pairs, clad in their white

caftans, with a long

dusk's shadow of them to the east

making them look like the singed

wing of an angel.

 

They were intoning

one of their Sabbath songs,

a braid of voices

calling on Jerusalem

in her shame and slumber

to awaken and shake off

the dust and time.

 

I wanted to call out to them

not to forget me. I was pulling myself up

the hill by their memory

as by a vine. I was afraid an owl

would come by, a swooping birds of omen,

it being so late in the day,

and in the year,

and in the time.

 

My grandma, pulling herself up by another

vine like mine, paler in color

but with a rainbow plaited

in the strands, told me

this part of the hill was the hardest,

but the song would draw us on,

and if a holy person dreamed

a verse of Psalms that night

we'd get to stay.

And I believed her,

hoping it would help.

 

The moon was risen in the east,

a full moon of Heshvan poised above

the mountains of Gilead,

its bone-hued silver gleam

bled from the substance

of another dream.

 

I dreamed

I was in Safed, at the fringes

of the holy Lion's

mane, Jerusalem sunk in shadows

to the south, with all the

moonlit apple fields

of history pulling me away

as Sabbath drew me near.

Joel Rosenberg's poems, translations, and articles have appeared in numerous magazines, journals and anthologies, including Response, Moment, Ploughshares, 20 New Wilderness Letter, Kerem, and Voices Within the Ark. He is translator of Kol Haneshamah, the Reconstructionist prayer book, and is presently writing Crisis in Disguise, a book on the cinema of Jewish experience.