The alarm interrupted a dream about my son (Jonah) surprising me at home. In the dream he wasn’t feeling well and decided to come home from college for a little TLC. The dream made me smile; it felt comforting, somehow.

Later in the day, I texted him. “I dreamed about you last night,” I wrote. “That you weren’t feeling well.” “That’s amazing,” came the response. “Because I’m sick.”

The coincidence made us laugh. It also made me wonder.

Just a few days after Jonah was born, the pediatrician asked us, “What’s he like?” We had no clue how to answer the question. New parents, we were in a sleepless stupor of complete shock. He was a baby, an actual human whom we loved more than life itself, who depended on us to keep him alive, and we had no clue. We were in over our heads, that much was clear. Sensing our panic, the doctor smiled. “Just trust your instincts,” he said. “You’ll be fine.”

Instincts?! Our pediatrician – not an alternative-medicine, holistic-homeopathic guy, but an old-school MD – was telling us that our best hope was our instincts?! We agreed on our way home that we – and our newborn child – were in some very deep trouble.

So now here it is, all these years later. Jonah turns 21 this week. And somehow… those instincts are still what it’s about. Kicking in at some subterranean level, to have me dreaming about what’s going on with my child even when he hasn’t actually told me what’s going on. How does that happen? How does that work? Is it real, or a coincidence?

On Wednesday night, the Bible discussion group kept coming back to the question: did these stories really happen? Is there evidence? Is it history or legend? Accurate, or fables woven long ago and handed down as history? It was a repeat conversation in some ways of the ones we had around Pesach (Passover), too: did the Exodus really happen? Were we really slaves in Egypt?

Causing me to wonder aloud with you all: why does it matter so much? Why does this question keep nagging at us? What is our need for veracity with our stories, our history, these texts? Is it the flotsam of the “fake news” era, a defensive posture protecting our authenticity as Jews? Perhaps it is born of some nagging insecurity, that if we don’t have a historical claim to realness then… we aren’t real, valid, or worthy?

I wonder: what if we shifted our question away from “is it true?” What if we become like the Velveteen Rabbit, made real not by proof of fact, but by the depth of our love? Like, if it were all made up – if the whole Torah and our most ancient history is “fake news,” chas v’shalom – but we still lived it and loved it for three thousand years, or two thousand or one thousand… wouldn’t that be enough? Enough to justify our own attachment to the stories, the teachings, the morals? Do they also need to be true to matter to us?

What if part of what matters is our instinct? I would posit that that, too, is a form of truth. That our instincts are also real. Go ahead, Google the psychology studies, they’re there; and laugh as you do for wanting data-driven knowledge about the non-data-driven knowing. Intuition is part of how we know things as Jews and as humans. As Jews, our instincts urge us to learn the stories, live the rituals and values, and pass them on to the next generation. As parents, as friends, in our casual interactions with strangers around town as well as in our most intimate relationships, we do best when guided by our instincts. Sometimes we get a “gut feeling” that turns out to be exactly right. Sometimes we have a “sixth sense” that gives us information we need. Sometimes we dream something, like I did just days ago, and sometimes we think of someone just as the phone rings, because they were thinking of us, too; our instincts and subconscious connecting us faster than our fingers can get to the phone. 

There is more than one way of knowing. Knowledge – דעת da’at in Hebrew – has many layers. We can know something intellectually. We can also be filled with ru’ach hakodesh, the holy spirit, to know something in a different way. In the Talmud (BT Sanhedrin 11a), the bat kol, or divine echo, is described as a subtle, intuitive “voice” that guides our decision-making. Elsewhere (BT Brachot), the rabbis discuss dreams as a form of communication with the holy spirit, often reflecting intuitive insights about one’s life or the future. In the daily liturgy, as part of the weekday Amidah, we ask for “grace to receive wisdom, understanding, and knowledge” (chochmah, binah, and da’at). Barukh atah adonay, the blessing concludes, chonen hada’at. Blessed are You, who graces us with da’at – knowledge. Not just the kind you go to school for, but the deeper, wordless kind. 

I share this as a reminder to trust your gut and to work on that, as part of your psycho-emotional-spiritual toolkit.  There is more than just what we see or know with our eyes, or by logic, reason, and book-learning. There is also what we know in our kishkes. Truth matters – and right now that feels like a super important value to keep repeating over and over, to ourselves and our children. Some things really did happen and others did not, and our ability to honor the difference constitutes the bedrock of civilized society as well as our own integrity. But there are some aspects of life which depend not on that kind of knowing, but on the other kind. On intuitive knowing. Like parenting, like friendship, like showing up for one another with big hearts. Like making decisions and feeling good about them. Like reaching for faith and hope and brightness to shine us through our days. For all of these, we need more than just intellectual knowledge. We need to know that our instincts are a form of grace. We need to honor that our work as humans, part of it, is to come closer and closer to hearing the whispers of the ruach hakodesh, the holy spirit, in our dreams and in our hearts.

P.S. Part of how I work on intuiting is through meditation, song, and prayer. That’s why Cantor Kissner and I are leading a renewal-style Shabbat morning experience tomorrow and regularly over the next several months. Click here for the line-up of when we will be doing what tomorrow morning at Soul Refresh.