I had a dream last night about a guy I’ll call David, who is a lawyer in a New York firm with a strong Jewish character. He’s a Zionist, and does some pro-Israel work, on the side. In the dream I was visiting David in jail. I was not allowed to see him, but I could phone him. I wanted to leave him a note. They would not allow that either. They wanted me to talk to him on a bugged phone, I just wanted to leave him a letter.
He’d been charged with dual loyalty. He was representing the U.S. government on a real estate deal with the Israeli embassy. The Americans wanted a certain price, but he was secretly in cahoots with the Israelis. Then the price dropped and it was right what the Israelis were hoping to pay. Then the U.S. government had found out he was actually working for Israel, and now he was in jail. He had been brought into the prison in camouflage with head covered, almost like Guantanamo. Along with another man.
It was a scary dream, about the treatment of Jews in the financial crisis. I had loving feelings toward him and conveyed them in the letter they wouldn’t deliver. So I called him on the phone but I didn’t hear his voice. Maybe he didn’t trust me. I certainly felt guilty, like an informant. His family very afraid, but I was walking thru the corridors of the jail, then I left. Unscathed of course. And I have to say I didn’t feel bad at the end, almost like it wasn’t my problem.
The dream gets at my guilty feelings around my exposing dual loyalty, this hidden allegiance in many Jews. Per my wife, who studies this stuff, I am all the people in the dream, the jailers, the informant, and David too. Though there are some feelings like Esther Rosenberg’s brother in it, about being Greenglass, the fink.The dream would also seem to be about the financial crisis and the fears some Jews have that Jews will be blamed.
