The Gamarah in Masechet Berachot ( נה, בsays the following:
If a person has a dream that is upsetting, he should go and make it good in front of three people.
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He should tell them the following words: חלמא טבא חזאי חלמא טבא חזאי חלמא טבא חזאי I had a good dream, I had a good dream, I had a good dream They then respond to him in a similar vein. They say, You had a good dream, you had a good dream, you had a good dream G-d should decree from above seven times that it’s good, it’s good, and it will be good. |
That’s called הטבת חלום
This is the shorter version and it’s brought down in many siddurim.
What does this have to do with us? This is not a talk about your bad dreams.
It’s very interesting that for the past 3 to 5 days that we’ve been giving zoom classes to our synagogue members, we have been learning the sugya of Berachot that discusses the the topic of dreams. If anyone has learned the daf yomi recently, it may have seemed tedious, going through a lot of dream information, without seeing a connection to yourself. But with Hashem’s help, when learning this together in our morning class, we came up with the following concept: if you look through the Gemara when it comes to dreams, there is one basic theme: It’s all about your approach and attitude. If you look at it positively, then it’s positive, and if you look at it negatively, then it’s negative.
Furthermore, the Gemarah goes to lengths to tell stories of dream interpreters, that were able to take the same dream and for one person, when they said it was good it turned out good, while for another person, it was said that the dream was bad, and it would turn out bad.
Rava and Abaye went to a dream interpreter with the exact same dream - that their sons and daughters would be taken captive.
That sounds like a horrible dream. One rabbi was told that the dream was actually what was going to happen- his sons and daughters would be taken captive, lo Alenu.
The other rabbi was told it would mean that he’d marry off his sons and daughters to people from a different state. All his children would live in Israel. That’s not the end of the world. He took a bad dream and turned it around.
In the longer version of הטבת חלום, which comes from the Gemarah as well, the Gemarah says we say pesukim of three different themes: Pesukim of turnaround, pesukim of healing and pesukim of peace.
One of the pesukim of turnaround is
הפכת מספדי למחול לי
You turned my eulogy into a celebration
What can be more distraught than a eulogy? And yet G-d can turn it around.
Another pasuk:
פדה בשלום נפשי
You Redeem me in peace
Lastly,
בורא ניב שפתים שלום שלום לרחוק לקרוב
G-d will bring peace and healing.
So, G-d can turn around or fix anything.
That’s the message of the bad dreams.
But it’s not only means about bad dreams. It’s a lesson for life. The way you look at things can turn them around. Whether you look at things positively or negatively. That sounds like a poetic license to apply dream interpretation to life. Are we applying the nursery rhyme… Row, row your boat.... life is but a dream?
What does this mean?
Actually, we can apply this Gemarah of dreams to real life. I have a very strong source for this. Someone that I know was going through a very difficult challenge in his life. He had a daughter that was divorced, and she had much difficulty, in the aftermath, and when trying to remarry. This man went to Rav Chaim Kanievsky, for a beracha. Sometimes Rav Chaim reacts in ways that people don’t understand.
(I know another person who went to him for problems with his eyes. Rav Chaim him to learn the book Ein Yaakov, by Yaakov Ben Chaviv- as it has the term “eye” in the title. He learned it, and sure enough his eyes got better)
Rav Chaim has certain understandings and Segulot that we might not understand.
And he told this man with the divorced daughter to make a הטבת חלום
A dream rectification.
And he said 3 times
חלמא טבא חזאי
חלמא טבא חזאי
חלמא טבא חזאי
You had a good dream,
You had a good dream,
You had a good dream
Rav Chaim told the man to look at the situation as if it was a dream that was good, and it would turn around.
And sure enough, the person is now happily married with children, Baruch Hashem.
That’s the yessod of life- life is a dream- And bad or good, it all goes the way you look at it.
There are other things to do when a person has a bad dream.
One can be found in Sephardic siddurim, in Birkat Kohanim, where it says that the person should say,
“Master of of the universe, My dreams are Yours. I had a bad dream and I don’t know what it meant.
Let the good dreams strengthen like the dreams of Yosef. If they need to be healed,
heal them like the bitter waters of Marah... ( G-d turned around the bitter waters)
Heal like Miriam from Tzara’at... and there’s a whole list.
וכשם שהפכת קללת בלעם הרשע לברכה
Just like You took Bilaam’s curse and turned it over to a beracha,
כן הפוך כל חלומותי עלי ועל כל ישראל לטובה
Turn all my dreams over to good
Bilaam wanted to say the word כלם - kalem curse them.
And G-d turned it around to spell מלך- Melech King
G-d can turn around any word or situation, like we said yesterday:
צרה Tzarah crisis, can become רצה Retzeh- favorable
פשע Pesha, sin, can become שפע Shefa,bounty
נגע Negah- plague, can become ענג Oneg delight
G-d can turn everything around in a moment.
That’s the power of our attitude. We have look at these situations as opportunities for growth. More people are learning than ever, people are giving charity....
Yes, there are people hurting, and in pain, and we can’t forget about them. We have to feel for them. But we always must have the attitude that it’s good.
People once came to Rabbi Miller ah, and told him terrible things that were happening and he said, “but Hashem is good.”
Of course, we can’t be callous. We have to feel for people. We do feel for them. But our positive attitude will help them as well. We must have the attitude that Hashem can turn everything around. He can make it better than ever for everybody.. And even for the people we lost, we have to say we believe in Tehiyat HaMetim. Everyone will come back.
We have to know this very important rule of dream amelioration, הטבת החלום, that you can undo or turn around a bad dream.
If you have time, take out Masechet Berachot, (or an Artscroll if you can’t read Hebrew נה, נו - and read story after story, lesson after lesson. You can take the same dream and flip it either way.
The pasuk says that when G-d took us back to Tzion, it was like a dream.
Life is a dream- it’s not just a nursery rhyme. And it’s up to us to turn even a bad dream into a good dream.