The great poet Langston Hughes once wrote, “A dream deferred is a dream denied.”
Our rabbis would respectfully disagree. Nothing makes this clearer than the Akdamut prayer, recited only on Shavuot. Shavuot is the anniversary of G-d giving us the Torah, and, appropriately enough, the Torah reading for the first day is the Ten Commandments, bringing us back to Sinai.
Before the reading, the Cantor chants the poem Akdamut. It is a powerful narrative poem. It begins with praises of G-d as the Creator, and then shifts to praise of the people of Israel, in particular our loyalty to our tradition. Even if we were offered all the riches of the world at the price of giving up our tradition, the poem proudly boasts that we will instead persevere and maintain our loyalty to G-d, regardless of the consequences.
And why? Because the day will come when we will sit, and celebrate, before the Presence of G-d. The poem waxes, well, poetic about the golden thrones upon which we will be seated, enjoying a sumptuous banquet with the main courses composed of delicacies of the great mythological beings Leviathan and the Wild Ox of the Mountains. We will “sit at tables of precious stones/Rivers of balsam shall flow before [us/We] will drink the precious wine/ That has been aged for [us] since the beginning of time….”
And in the meantime? While our dream is deferred (as in, deferred for thousands of years), is it denied? Not at all. Because the whole point of this glorious dream is that we will be rewarded for doing exactly what we should be doing now and always—studying torah. “Chosen to be the faithful servants of G-d’s will/[We]continually rehearse G-d’s praises/Who summoned [us] in love/to pursue the labors of Torah/And accepts [our] supplications and entreaties/Which weave a crown of glory for the Almighty.”
Put another way, the dream may seem deferred if what you are dreaming about is eating the flesh of Leviathan and the Wild Ox. But knowing that G-d “conferred true love upon us/By entrusting to us the torah,” we can make our dreams come true at this very moment.