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Rabbi Hisda said: A dream which is not interpreted is like a letter which is not read.
Rabbi Bana'ah said: There were twenty-four interpreters of dreams in Jerusalem. Once I dreamt a dream and I went round to all of them and they all gave different interpretations, and all were fulfilled, thus confirming that which is said: All dreams follow the mouth [a dream follows its interpretation].
But there remained enough other things to make the attraction of Judaism and Jews irresistable—many dark emotional forces, all the more potent for being so hard to group in words, as well as the clear consciousness of our inner identity, the intimacy that comes from the same psychic structure.
… the Talmudic rabbi takes a clinical attitude towards his own ideas, and certainly towards those of his fellows…. By its stress on the unfolding possibilities of reason and its relentless testing of all propositions against the measure of skeptical reason, the Talmud prepared the Jews to recognize the relativity of successive truth claims, the probability that each in its turn would have to give way to the next…. The Talmud's persistent dubiety disciplined the Jewish intellectual to speculate about the unthinkable—“Perhaps things are the opposite of what they seem?”—to investigate the forbidden, to reconsider the commonplace, and so to reshape reality.
We have attached no less importance in interpreting dreams to every shade of the form of words in which they were laid before us…. In
Page 201short, we treated as Holy Writ what previous writers have regarded as an arbitrary improvisation.
And lastly, it is not attractive to be classed with scholastics and Talmudists who are satisfied to exercise their ingenuity, unconcerned how far removed their conclusions may be from the truth.
Freud may not have liked being cla