Getting It Moshe Dor’s "Solutions"
By Joseph Lowin

What is the connection between poetry and prophecy, and between these two and the interpretation of dreams? In the complex world of Hebrew poet Moshe Dor, these three activities are bound together with the glue of Jewish identity.

It matters little that Moshe Dor was born in Tel Aviv in 1932, that he did undergraduate work in history and political science, that he worked as a journalist, and that he has published more than thirty volumes of poetry, essays, children’s books, memoirs, and interviews with other writers.

What does matter is that, by his own account, Moshe Dor has spent many years and much effort trying–unsuccessfully–to run away from his Israeli and Jewish identity. Describing his stint as Cultural Attaché at the Israel Embassy in London, Dor tells an interviewer from Ma’ariv how he tried to hide in the foreign landscape of the English countryside. He found that, like all Jews trying to escape their destiny, however, he had been "infected by the prophet Jonah," who "did not want to carry out the mission he had been burdened with" and "tried to free himself of all the troubles of his people and country." Jonah, says Dor in an interpretive riff, "wanted to be a citizen of the world. He didn’t want to be asked, "Who are you?" . . . And then came that terrible storm. And Jonah was forced to answer, "ivri anokhi, ‘I am a Hebrew.’"

If Moshe Dor has been inpired by the prophet Jonah, he has also, in the poem presented here, been influenced by the biblical image of Joseph–both the dreamer and the interpreter of dreams. The twelve-line, one-stanza poem, "Pitronim," "Interpretations," which appeared in Dor’s 1993 collection Ahavah U-sh’ar Puraniyyot ("Love and Other Calamities"), divides itself neatly into four parts.

The first two verses set the scene.

(1) In the mornings, I present to you (2) a catalog of the night’s dreams for interpretation.

Although these lines hint at an intimate relationship between the poet and his beloved, that is not their subject. One can imagine the poet in real life describing his dreams matter-of-factly and then asking, like anyone else, "What do you make of my dreams?" It is the Hebrew word le-fitron that engenders, on the part of the reader familiar with the biblical story of Joseph, a plethora of associations.

And, indeed, in the second section of the poem, the poet compares his companion to Joseph the Interpreter. Like the archetypal four sons in the Passover Haggadah, there are, for Moshe Dor in this poem, four archetypal dreams, which reveal four sides of one’s identity.

(3) And you, like Joseph the Interpreter, sometimes find (4) in me a Chief Butler and sometimes a Chief (5) Baker, and at times even Pharaoh or (6) the last of his slaves, with a wicker basket on his head.

Sometimes one’s destiny is to flourish (like the Chief Butler); in some instances one is doomed to perish (like the Chief Baker). At times, one’s dreams presage a Master of the Universe (like Pharaoh); and at other times one is a slave wearing a ridiculously meaningless wicker basket on his head (in contrast to the doomed Chief Baker, who, on his head, in his dream, wore three meaningful baskets of bread).

The third section of the poem complicates matters further.

(7) And after that you breathe into the dreams so that (8) they will drift aloft like multi-colored balloons (9) to these alien skies, scrubbed thoroughly clean, (10) like decorations at a supermarket sale.

Something appears wrong in this segment; verse 9 seems completely out of place here. One would have expected verse 10 to follow directly verse 8. The inflated dreams are like balloons and the balloons are like those that create customer interest at a sale.

Paradoxically, verse 9 and its placement provide a clue to the interpretation of the whole poem. Here, the interpreter becomes an active participant in the poet’s dreams. After she has interpreted the dreams in a down-to-earth and yet wholly Jewish way, she then tries to breathe a new life into them, a universalist life. For the poet, however, the new setting is foreign to Judaism–shemei ha-neikhar ha-eleh–and divorced from everyday life–memorakim le-mish’i–immaculate. Let us return, says the poet in verse 10, to the kolbo (literally, "everything within"), the ordinary Israeli store that by its very name contains all of Jewish destiny within it.

In the last two lines of the poem, the poet addresses the reader directly. His job is to catch the balloons and bring them back to ordinary Jewish existence.

(11) Whoever gets it, gets it, and whoever doesn’t get it, (12) where is he, and where are his dreams.

The reader must not only catch the balloons; he must also "grasp" the meaning of the poem. It is not given to everyone to "get it"; only those who understand that the interpretation of dreams is tied to the story of the reluctant prophet Jonah can interpret the poetry as well. There are therefore two types of interpretation here–pitronim, in the plural–the interpretation of dreams and the interpretation of a poem about dreams.

The poem does not end with a question (note the lack of a question mark), but with an answer. The poet has already told the reader who doesn’t grasp the poem "where he is" and "where his dreams are." He is under foreign skies and his dreams are as meaningless as the wicker basket worn by the last of Pharaoh’s slaves. Understanding the poem means, like Joseph in Egypt, returning to one’s Jewish identity.