By Rabbi Ysoscher Katz *
The Ponevezh Yeshivah is one of the largest and most storied yeshivot in Israel. Located in the center of Bnei Brak, it sits on a large and impressive campus spread across a hill. On one end stands the main beit midrash, with room for roughly one thousand students. Opposite the beit midrash is an equally large dining room, built to accommodate the student body. Along the sides are dormitories, a library, and everything else needed for a large Torah community to flourish.
The yeshivah was built in the early years of the State by its Rosh Yeshivah, Rabbi Yosef Kahaneman z"l. Before it was built, the site was a barren hill, overgrown with weeds. A story is told that one day, when the hill was still desolate, R. Kahaneman took a friend for a walk in Bnei Brak. When they reached that empty, neglected hill, he described his plan to turn it into a sprawling Torah center in Eretz Yisrael.
His friend thought he was getting carried away. He looked at him and said, “Yosef, you are dreaming. There is no way this elaborate plan for an empty lot will come to fruition."
Without missing a beat, R. Kahaneman responded: “Indeed, I am dreaming. But I am not asleep.”
It was a dream, yes, but not a fantasy. R. Kahaneman was fully awake to the difficulty of what he was attempting. He understood how ambitious, perhaps even improbable, his vision was. But he also understood that certain sacred projects are only built by people who refuse to allow the present to define the limits of the future.
This message is also at the heart of this week's Torah portion, parshat Shelach. In the parsha, we read the story of the meraglim, the spies sent by the Jewish people to scout out the land while they were still in the midbar.
In a painful and sobering turn, the spies return overwhelmed by what they have seen. Giants roam the cities, the soil produces enormous fruit, and the land is fortified with seemingly impenetrable walls. Conquering the land appears impossible. They report all this to the people. Strikingly, much of what they say is true.
When the people hear this grave report, they break down. They turn their fear against God and Moshe, and in their despair they claim that they would have preferred to remain in Egypt rather than be brought to this point.
Yet what happens next is surprising. Despite what seems, on the surface, to be an honest report, God reacts harshly. The spies are punished, and the generation that accepted their report is condemned to remain in the wilderness, never entering the Promised Land.
The question almost asks itself. If the spies merely reported what they saw, why was their sin so severe?
The failure of the meraglim was not that they lied about what they saw. On some level, they described reality as it appeared to them. But they lacked what R. Kahaneman later understood: that one can dream without being asleep. Their failure was that they allowed the visible facts to become the full horizon of possibility. They could see the giants, the fruit, and the fortified cities, but they could not imagine a future larger than the obstacles in front of them. [emphasis added]
The meraglim were not punished simply for being realistic. They were punished because they allowed the obstacles they saw to overwhelm the promise they had heard. They saw the challenges accurately, but they could not see beyond them. They could not imagine that God's promise might demand more of them than the sober calculus of what seemed possible.
One can even argue that their punishment was not merely retributive, but the natural consequence of their failure. A generation unable to imagine that this frightening land could still become their promised future was not yet ready to enter it. Their inability to see beyond the obvious meant that they were not ready to build a future shaped by promise rather than fear.
To cultivate a life of Torah, to create community, to mend what is broken, one has to be able to dream beyond the immediately plausible. Facts matter, of course. But one must refuse to let facts alone determine the boundaries of hope. Religious life requires seeing the world as it is, while still believing that what seems impossible today need not remain impossible tomorrow.
A similar dynamic appears earlier, at the beginning of Moshe's mission. When God told Moshe Rabbeinu to tell the Jewish people that after years of enslavement Pharaoh would finally release them, Moshe was skeptical. Such a reversal of fortune did not seem likely. Moshe tried to reason with God, arguing that a people worn down by slavery would not believe him (Exodus 4:1). Here too, Moshe's argument makes sense. And yet God still sends him.
The failure of the meraglim helps clarify what God was demanding of Moshe. At that crucial juncture in our history, Moshe had to learn that there are moments when one must transcend the limits of what seems reasonable and follow the deeper demands of faith and responsibility. It was his task to help unshackle the Jewish people from Egyptian bondage, even when redemption seemed unimaginable. [emphasis added]
That is often how meaningful change begins. Not with certainty. Not with proof that success is guaranteed. It begins with the ability to look at a barren hill and see a beit midrash; to look at a frightened people and see a nation; to look at a broken world and still believe that it can be made more whole.
The point is not to ignore reality. R. Kahaneman's formulation was precisely the opposite. We are asked to dream while awake: to see reality clearly, with all its challenges and constraints, and still refuse to surrender the future to the present.
* Chair of the Talmud Department and the Director of the Lindenbaum Center for Halakhic Studies, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, Bronx, NY. [note: some Hebrew text omitted because of software issues]
https://library.yctorah.org/2026/06/parshat-shelach-dreaming-while-awake/
