Kislev is a month on the Jewish calendar that falls in late autumn, as the days grow shorter and the nights get longer. The month brings the beginning of Chanukah on the 25th, as we bring more light every night into our homes in remembrance of the rededication of the Temple and spiritual freedom.

The weekly Torah readings this season are filled with dreams: Yaakov’s ladder, Yosef’s sheaves and stars, the cupbearer’s vine, the baker’s baskets, and Pharaoh’s cows and grain. People close their eyes over and over again and encounter something they could not see while awake. At this point in the year – when many of us rush from our cars into our homes, feel the dreariness of darkness creeping in earlier each day, and encounter winter holidays that can elicit both joy and longing – Jewish tradition invites us to imagine possibilities we cannot yet see. Sometimes a dream gives us access to a hope we struggle to name while awake.

Rav Kook writes, “Great dreams are the foundation of the world.” He describes prophets dreaming, poets dreaming while awake, and thinkers dreaming of repairing the world. Dreaming belongs to the work of building a world. In the Torah, Yosef eventually turns Pharaoh’s dreams into a plan to feed people through a famine. What might our dreams ask us to do when we wake?

That is the blessing I take from this month: we are allowed to imagine more than our present circumstances suggest, and we have a way to begin.