efbrindley

Reconstructing Judaism Through the Lens of Dreaming

Why questioning, creativity, and shared experience matter to me as your rabbi

By Rabbi Gabrielle Pescador

---

---

I recently had a powerful dream that has stayed with me—not because it was comforting, but because it was clarifying.

In the dream, there was an image of a lion hanging high on the wall of an attic. The attic was tall and narrow, almost chimney-shaped, with brick below and white walls only at the very top. A tall wooden ladder was required to reach the image. Facing the image was a small window.

A man and I were standing on the roof peering through that small attic window from the outside. The man shared with me that the previous evening, he saw a terrifying monster lurking inside.

I told him I would investigate the situation and began climbing the ladder. I was cautious and tentative at first, but with each step of ascent, my curiosity grew stronger than my fear.

As I moved from rung to rung, I noticed changes in the light that interplayed with the changes in distance and proximity to the top. These effects played tricks on my eyes and caused the image of the lion to change. From certain angles and degrees of light, the lion appeared animated, almost as if it might leap off the wall. When I finally reached the top of the ladder, however, I could see the two-dimensional image clear and stable in full light.

I shared my experience with the terrified man on the roof. I explained that the image itself wasn’t changing, but our perception of it was, depending on the amount of light and how close we were willing to get to the image.

When I reflected on the dream, I was struck by how explicitly Jewish its symbolic language was.

The lion evokes the symbol of Judah—strength, responsibility, sacred power. The image
functions like a shiviti: a visual practice meant to help us focus on and recognize the Divine Presence in our lived experience. Many traditional shiviti images are flanked by lions for precisely this reason. They are not meant to soothe, but to orient us toward truth and meaning.

The ladder, too, has unmistakable Biblical resonance, pointing to Jacob’s dream of the ascending and descending angels. The rabbinic imagination associates Jacob’s dream with spiritual inquiry and connection. We ascend rung by rung and sometimes need to step back down again. We investigate and then back off for a bit and retreat. The search for meaning has stops and starts, but the ladder remains—stabilizing us on that journey.

And the light—its changes, its timing, its absence and return—may be the most Jewish element of all.

Light, prayer, and living with change

Jewish prayer is structured around shifts in light: morning, evening, Shabbat candles, the Havdalah flame, the waxing and waning of the moon. The same references to light and darkness feel different at Shacharit (the morning service) than they do at Ma’ariv (the evening service). Those references can inspire awe in one moment and fear in another.

Judaism does not deny this instability of perception—it ritualizes it. Prayer trains us to live in liminal space, to notice how meaning changes as light changes, and to remain present anyway.

In the dream, the lion was most terrifying in the dark. That is not a failure of faith. It is a spiritual truth. Awe arises not from eliminating darkness, but from staying in relationship long enough to let light return.

Why this leads me to Reconstructing Judaism

I share this dream because it reflects why I am drawn—again and again—to Reconstructing Judaism, and why I feel at home in it as a rabbi.

Reconstructing Judaism is often described as “the intellectual denomination.” And yes—ideas matter. Thought matters. But that label is far too narrow.

What draws me to Reconstructionism is its insistence that Judaism is not sustained by intellect alone, but by the fullness of human experience: imagination, creativity, emotion, memory, art, ritual, culture, and shared communal life.

Mordecai Kaplan emphasized that Judaism is a living civilization—one that expresses itself not only through belief, but through creativity. For Kaplan, culture, art, music, and evolving human experience are not secondary to religious life; they are among the primary ways Judaism stays alive, meaningful, and responsive to the world we actually inhabit.

That insight continues to feel radical—and necessary.

Art, dreams, and communal meaning

Artistic and creative pathways are not “extras.” They are interpretive tools. They help us
metabolize power, change, grief, joy, and awe. They allow us to encounter Judaism not only as something we analyze, but as something we live.

Dreams belong here, alongside poetry, music, ritual, and visual art. They are symbolic languages through which the soul processes truth. They are not arguments to be proven, but experiences to be attended to—especially when they resonate with our tradition’s deepest patterns.

Reconstructing Judaism makes room for all of this. It refuses to reduce Jewish life to certainty or conformity. It invites us to question—not to dismantle Judaism, but to keep it alive. To climb the ladder. To let in more light. To expect surprise not as disruption, but as a way of understanding.

An invitation

I share this not as doctrine, but as orientation.

As your rabbi, I am drawn to a Judaism that is brave enough to keep becoming.

The lion in the dream is not meant to be feared. It is meant to be encountered—with curiosity, with courage, and with awe.

But the ladder may hold the deepest meaning.

A ladder is not self-sustaining. It must be steadied. It must be held. In the shiviti image above, two lions stand on either side, gripping the ladder between them.

We do not climb alone.

We hold the ladder for one another — through study, through art, through questioning, through shared prayer and shared experience. When one of us is afraid of what we see in the attic, another climbs. When the light shifts, we help each other interpret what is revealed.

The ladder remains between us — steady, imperfect, necessary — inviting us upward, together.

That, for me, is the promise of Reconstructing Judaism.

I chose Reconstructionism via process of elimination. I know that sounds like a left-handed compliment at best, but stick with me.

I had a Jewish childhood that was confusing and unpleasant in ways that will be familiar to many Jews born in the 1970s or before: 

When I was small lots of folks had lots of opinions about Jews. These opinions were rarely accurate, and mostly either callously (if inadvertently) cruel or awkwardly and unjustifiably admiring (to your face, at least). 

My earliest memory of public school was being relentlessly bullied on the bus by a kid nearly twice my age who didn’t like Jews, but did like detailed descriptions of Jews being tortured and murdered throughout history. At home in the neighborhood, a friend’s parent interrupted our game of touch football to pointedly insist that my parents were “real top-drawer people.” It was the only time I recalled him saying anything to anyone, apart from yelling at his own children to cut something the hell out. Years later I finally put together the puzzle when I began to notice how often someone would learn I was Jewish (“Oh!? You don’t look Jewish!”) and then abruptly opine that Sandy Koufax had been one helluva ballplayer, or that Mel Brooks was a real funny guy, or that Carl Levin was an honest politician and that was really saying something.

But clumsy or mean gentiles were only half the unpleasantness in my unpleasant Jewish childhood. The other half was Jews who took offense to me calling myself a “Jew” when only one of my parents had been born Jewish (…and the father, no less!). 

Unsurprisingly, I had my bar mitzvah and didn’t set foot in a temple or synagogue again for nearly a decade. 

When Cara and I got married, the rabbi who officiated was lovely, but was not from the large Metro-Detroit Reform temple where my parents were members and I had been bar mitzvahed; that congregation was uninterested in officiating an interfaith ceremony in West Michigan. The rabbi who did officiate (semi-retired from a tiny West Michigan congregation) had only one condition: that we promise to raise any children as Jews.  Cara and I agreed without thinking much of it. My wife was raised Catholic, and was more than happy to raise Jewish children instead of Catholic ones. I didn’t object because I didn’t have any problem with being a Jew; I had a problem with being treated poorly by people who had unresolved issues with Jews and Jewishness.

Then we had kids, and those kids got old enough to need religious instruction in order for us to make good on our promise to the very nice man in the very thick glasses who’d officiated our mishugina wedding in a Saugatuck gazebo.

One of my freelance gigs at this time was copyediting the Washtenaw Jewish News, which meant I read every word about every Jewish organization in town at least twice each month. This made me oddly well-informed about local congregations and their programming, given that I had been avoiding Jewish organizations for going on two decades and had never intended to ever join one again. 

Being well informed wasn’t encouraging. This was 20 years ago, and some of what I saw local congregations promoting was too close to what had stung me when I was a kid: workshops on how to “cope” with your child’s or grandchild’s interfaith relationship, talk about how they “tolerated” people from all traditions, and so on. 

I didn’t want my wife and children to be “tolerated.” I wanted them to feel welcomed. (Never mind that this was also an extremely convenient reason to keep avoiding the Jews I’d been avoiding since I was a teen.)

Cara—who was stuck leading this charge, because she makes good on her promises and her husband was refusing to productively process his childhood trauma—asked what about these guys, these Reconstructionists? Did I have a beef with Reconstructionists?

I did not. I’d never heard of them. I’d been bullied by Reform Jews and Conservative Jews and Humanist Jews and just sort of ignored by Chasidic Jews, but never to my knowledge even met a Reconstructionist. The word wasn’t even in spellcheck! 

  So we came to AARC Kabbalat Shabbat. I didn’t really know what “Kabbalat Shabbat” was at the time, and when it was over I still didn’t really know what it was: The liturgy and order of service and songs seemed almost entirely foreign. For me, this was a feature, not a problem: nothing about AARC reminded me of the Judaism that had excluded me when I was small.  Besides, everyone was very friendly and helped me find which page we were on, and there was plenty of kale and quinoa to go around afterward.

All of that was nice. But what has kept me choosing Reconstructionism with the AARC is the religious school. 

I’d gone to religious school for years, and it had taught me to at once be ashamed of not being a “real” Jew while also being conceited about my natural superiority as a Jew moving through a goyische world (“when the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon,” and so on).

At AARC my children learned to be comfortable and confident as Jews without any sense that this made them better (or even really meaningfully different) from anyone else. Over the years we’ve had different Boards, different Rabbis, different teachers and curricula, different members, but the heart of it has remained the same—which is good, because my children have learned this, but I still have a lot of work to do.

Many of us have expressed the desire to take social action together as a congregation and also to connect more with other Jewish groups in our area. As yet another Hannukah miracle, we have a unique opportunity to do both this season. Because hundreds of newcomers and neighbors in need are counting on us this winter, AARC has partnered with JFS, Beth Israel Congregation, Temple Beth Emeth and others in organizing a “Community Needs Drive” to spread warmth and dignity to our local newcomers and neighbors. You can participate by donating needed supplies and/or helping to prepare the goods for the needy families.

Our goal is to collect donations of essential supplies—like soap, diapers, shampoo, toothbrushes, cleaning items, feminine products and grocery or gas gift cards—to bring physical comfort and a sense of belonging to hundreds of families in our community. When you come to services, or any other time you are at the JCC between now and December 22^nd, you will find a large, labeled box to receive your donations.  We are grateful to the JCC for their support of this important work.

Thank you!