Minnesota Dreams? - Or a Warning for September?

בס''ד

Posted originally as a "note" in Facebook
6 July, 2011- ה בתמוז, התשע''א
Copyright © 2011, R. Kossover


My wife, a Minnesota girl, woke up from a dream not long ago.  She was dreaming of the Great Minnesota Get-together, the Minnesota State Fair.  Or so it seemed at first.

She was trying to get home from the Fair, which is right on Snelling Avenue in Falcon Heights, a small suburb on the northwest edge of the city.    She was trying to leave the Fair grounds, to get to Snelling Avenue, presumably to take the bus south to our home in St. Paul.  Then things started to get strange - and my ears perked up.

She was telling me she had lost her teudát zehút and her medical card, which was in her purse along with all of her money.  In Minnesota, nobody uses a teudát zehút, and if you asked most of the four million Minnesotans what it was, they would look at you as if you had dropped off Mars or something.  Minnesotans are polite.  They wouldn't go "say what?" like a Californian might, or "whaddayatawkinabout?", the way a New Yorker would.  But you would get the distinct impression that you belonged locked up in Moose Lake (Minnesota's version of Belleview Hospital for the Insane or Bedlam [originally the Bethlehem Hospital]).  A teudát zehút  is the Israeli national identity card. 

When we lived in Minnesota we did have cards for health insurance.  But we always referred to them by the name of the health provider, like Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Physicians Health Plan or what have you.  We never called it a "medical card" which is the term we use here (even though some other people might use the name of the health care provider in Israel  describing the card).

Other strangenesses appeared in my wife's description of events as they transpired in her dream.  Apparently there had been a big storm, and it left lots of debris laying around.  My wife was trying to get to Snelling Avenue though a hole in a building, when she realized that she could step over some debris off to the side instead. So she did, and began to walk south on Snelling Avenue to go home.  Then she woke up.

To my ears, there was something distinctly wrong with this dream.  Storms in Minnesota, which can do lots of damage, generally do not leave holes in buildings or pavement torn up.  Roofs might be hit by trees (as happened in a windstorm in May 1998), small wooden buildings might be destroyed by tornadoes (as happened in a tornado in Falcon Heights in 1981).   But torn up pavement?  No.  Holes in cement building buildings?  Definitely not.  Then there was my wife worrying about her Israeli identity documents and her Israeli health care card.  Minnesotans are concerned with drivers' licenses and credit cards - even if they are not driving.  I remember.  I used to be one.

Finally, there was the timing of all of this.  The Minnesota State Fair takes place for the 10 day period immediately preceding (and including) the Labor Day holiday.  This is the end of August towards the very beginning of September.  Then the kids go back to school, the adults go back to work, and the summer is officially over in Minnesota.

That's in Minnesota.

This coming September, here, a plan is supposed to go into effect to create an Arab terror state in Gaza, Judea and Samaria, with the capital in Ramallah (the Arabs will say Jerusalem, but they are not getting that).

It dawned on me that perhaps my wife was not dreaming about the Minnesota State Fair at all - but rather about an event that may take place in place in late August or early September in Israel, at a spot where a lot of people get together - like Jerusalem at say, the Central Bus Station, or downtown at King George V Street, or some place of that nature.  A place where a bomb or missile can create a hole in a building and leave pavement destroyed.

Why?

I remembered a video I had seen about NaHman PinHas, a 12 year old boy who died in the Galilee some 1,500 years ago, after making a number of prophecies.  NaHman PinHas is known in Jewish religious literature as Rav NaHman Hatufá (or NaHman the snatched).  The video at this link is 19 minutes long and explains the first of the prophecies to be unraveled, about the fall of the "Statue of Rhodes".   It is well worth watching, even though the video is in Hebrew with English subtitles, and can take a bit of time to load.

Written in Aramaic, the prophecy declaims that when the Colossus of Rhodes falls, then Rome will also be at an end.  The problem with the prophecy, when it was declaimed, was that the Colossus of Rhodes had already fallen seven centuries earlier, and the city of Rome had already  been sacked by Vandals about a half century earlier.  So, the prophecy was nonsense, right?  Not quite.

NaHman talked of what he saw, and what he saw looked like the Colossus of Rhodes.  In 1876, the top portion of a statue was presented to the United States (often viewed as "Rome" in Jewish prophecy) as a gift for its 100th anniversary of independence, and the statue was called the New Colossus.  When finally fully paid for (this was not really a free gift) it was erected on one of the islands in New York Harbor, an island now known as Liberty Island.  And the Statue of Liberty has been for over 100 years, the symbol of the United States.

Now the prophecy of the 12 year old boy makes a lot of sense.  'When the Statue of Liberty falls, the United States will be at an end."

Why explain all of this and how does this relate to my wife's dream?

Just like Rav NaHman Hatufá, she needed to mediate this idea through something she understood.  My wife, the Minnesota girl, saw in her dream something she could understand - the Great Minnesota Get-together, the Minnesota State Fair, which has always been very important to her.  In attempting to leave this fair, she had to go through rubble to get to Snelling Avenue, the street that would get her on her journey home.  And the timing of the Fair was a clue to the timing of the event she was dreaming about.  A terrible event that has not yet taken place - but which will force her - or someone else -  to go through rubble to find their way home.