The Dream Island

October 19, 2007
Rabbi Seymour Rossel

On the small volcanic island of Hiva, a man named Hau Maka had a dream. His spirit traveled far, in search of a new residence for his king Hotu Matua.* Across the waves, he came upon three tiny islands and found the eighth, the last, larger island in the dim twilight of the rising sun. He named the eighth island, with its volcanic crater, "Te Pito O Te Kainga" ("The Little Piece of Land"). His spirit crisscrossed the island naming twenty-eight places.

He told his brother about the dream and his brother said, "Tell King Hotu Matua about the new land."

Then King Hotu Matua ordered his two sons and the five sons of the dreamer to build a canoe and follow the directions given in the dream. The seven men named their canoe "Saved from the waves." They stocked the canoe with yams, sweet potatoes, bananas, and other foods and left in the spring. In early summer they arrived--a voyage of five weeks. They explored and planted yams and gave names to many places. When it was autumn, they set out to return to Hiva., leaving behind Makoi, a son of the dreamer, and a few others. As the canoe departed, Makoi chanted a warning: "Beware! The island of the dream is the eighth, but once it has been lost, it cannot be found again!" And he chanted the star course telling them how to find the dream island again.

The father of King Hotu Matua was dying. He told his son that the island of Hiva was being swallowed by the tide. "Arise and leave!" he said. King Hotu Matua had a great double hulled canoe built for the journey. He took all he could: the families of his people, banana shoots, taro seedlings, sugarcane, yam, sweet potatoes, hau trees, paper mulberry trees, sandalwood trees, toromiro trees, ferns, rushes, roots, and plants, birds, pigs, and chickens. He even took flies, since it was well-known that the number of human beings depended on the number of flies. To farm the land he took slaves. Six weeks they traveled across the wide seas.

One morning the advance party on the island awoke to see two canoes approaching. The canoes were bound together into a double canoe, but as they came near land the lashings which united them were cut. One boat carried King Hotu Matua and his wife, Vakai-a-hiva; the other boat carried Prince Hineriru and his wife, Ava Rei Pua. The canoes traveled in different directions around the island and King Hotu Matua and Prince Hineriru established separate fishing grounds.

In 1722, the Dutch captain Jakob Roggeveen, sent to find Australia, accidentally encountered the island of the dream, Te Pito O Te Kainga. The islanders welcomed them and gave them food and fresh water. As the first to place this island on a European map, Roggeveen named it "the isle of Pasaache," which we might be tempted to translate as "Passover Island," but of course, the day of his discovery was Easter Sunday and this was just the Dutch way of saying "Easter."

When I say "accidentally encountered," that is an understatement. Easter Island is a tiny outcrop of land some 2,300 miles from Chile and nearly 1,300 miles from little Pitcairn Island. It is among the most isolated places in the entire world, a five hour journey by plane from the nearest airport. Nearly every expert agrees that Easter Island, now called "Rapa Nui" by its natives, was first populated by Polynesians who slowly spreading their claims ever eastward across the Pacific Ocean, even as early Americans once spread ever westward. The story of the dream and the tale of King Hotu Matua, on the other hand, is generally considered legendary.

What fascinates me is the parallel between the legend of Hotu Matua and the legend of Abraham which we read this week in the Torah. Abraham experienced a call from God, a dream we might say, that required him to put together a caravan and travel to a distant land. Like Hotu Matua, he gathered together whatever he thought he would need, the families and people loyal to him, camels and provisions, and even servants and maidservants. Like the Polynesians, Abraham's people would be isolated for many years, though  his was mainly a self-imposed isolation. He left his homeland to distance him from idolatry. Like Hotu Matua, Abraham also had a "royal" relative with him, his nephew Lot, and when they reached the Promised Land, they too separated, each settling his own portion of the land.

In the sparsely settled Promised Land, travelers came upon Abraham just as accidentally as those Europeans who discovered Rapa Nui. They found welcome and hospitality, because welcome and hospitality were Abraham's trademarks.

The story of Hotu Matua is legendary and many believe that the story of Abraham is legendary, too. But the point is the same. The heroic journey begins when we leave our homeland, separate ourselves from our old ways, and seek out a new place. This is the way of spiritual progress. If we stand where we have always stood, we know only what we have always known.

Our Bible celebrates those who changed us by being courageous enough to cut a new path or conceive a new idea. We call them by name: Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, Jeremiah, and Ezra. We celebrate them because we are in constant need of people willing to cut away from the way things are and find a path to the way things ought to be.

If Judaism was only a set of laws to be obeyed, a constant and unchanging traditional way of life, it would have become outmoded and disappeared eons ago--long before our time. No stagnant Judaism would ever have survived to this day. That is where you and I come in. We are not supposed to preserve the Jewish way of life by putting it in Mason jars and handing it in glass to our children. Maybe the new idea and the new journey that you dream will be the one that sets a King Motu Hatua venturing forth or sets an Abraham on his way. So we sing, in the present tense, Am Yisrael Chai, "The Jewish people lives!" And what we are saying is, "The Jewish people lives now depending on what we do and what we see and how we make it our own."

Every person lives the journey of a potential hero. You always begin by gathering everything you need from the old ways and then venturing forth with courage and even with blind devotion into a new place. As you live, you build the canoe of your faith, you make the spiritual journey of your lifetime, you shape the future of the Jewish people. That is why I believe that something sacred is always happening. Not because of a place like CJCN, but because of your dreams and your visions and how you shape this place and time. And let us say: Amen.