In the early hours of this morning I dreamt I was in some sort of backyard, perhaps not unlike the one that I had grown up in. There were three burly, hard faced Russian men, in white overalls, who had caught a large terrified rat, and were holding it tightly as they prepared to kill it. The rat was about the size of a large cat, but tiny compared to the three large men. Although they were the ones hurting it and preparing to kill it, they had made up that the rat was bad and the agressor. They were standing next to an opaque small bathroom window, and had some methodology they always employed, which involved driving a sharp metal skewer through the rat's ear and then through its brain and out the other ear, and somehow this was necessary, and then to allow the rat to bleed out. They discussed the process, all the time one of them squeezing the rat tightly, so I could only see its face and small brown eyes.
I watched horrified, but certain there was nothing I could say or do that would stop or change what was happening. I felt unbearably sad for the poor rat and oppressed by their violence and projection of their own murderousness onto the animal, which, even if it had done some rat-like thing like chew through cables or eat from a grain store, was just going about its business as G-d had created it. (And perhaps those who come to murder are also just going about their business as G-d has created them. I don't know.) But I was certain I would not be heard or listened too if I spoke up, perhaps would be jeered at or even attacked myself. And so in fear and helplessness I hovered. And then either they drove the spike through the trembling rat's ear, or were just about to, and I woke up.
A great sense of heaviness and weariness and oppression filled me, about my helplessness, my crime of commission and omission as a bystander, and about the evil that men (yes men) do under the sun.
