Moses stood on a mountain overlooking the Promised Land and sobbed. But his tears, contrary to popular opinion, did not signify a sadness at his inability to enter the land, to realize his full potentiality as a leader, to defy mortality, or to defy even the patriarchs. Rather, Moses cried, because he couldn't even see the Promised Land. Though he stood on the tallest mountain not more than half a mile away, Moses’ sight had been fading ever since he stood in the light of God at Mount Sinai. By now, he was almost blind. It was bad enough that he couldn't speak, except with a stutter, but now the old man had, by no choice of his own, lost his ability to see the world as it appeared. Trapped in insight, seeing only what the Lord himself sees, Moses could distinguish little. When he peered out of his eyes, he saw himself peering out of his eyes. And when he cried, he could see the tears only before they dripped down his face, when they were nesting in the backs of his eye-sockets.
Poor Moses! If only he had known that receiving revelation would have cost him his vision— would have supplanted his world of details and differences with a spirited blur of holiness, would have exhumed the parts of his existence that he wished to remain invisible and covered over the physical world that his eyes used to feast on in a blanket of mystical darkness— he never would have hiked up that mountain for forty days, but would have remained at the foot of it along with everyone else. But alas for Moses, the man who accepted the commandments with blind obedience!
Now Moses is buried somewhere, God knows where, on a mountain as lacking in a name as the Holy One Himself. And why does nobody know where the great leader saw his last sights? Surely, it is because Moses himself died not knowing. Who knows if Moses even died? Perhaps he never died, but simply stopped seeing, a fate far worse, and wanders to this day, blind, amongst the mountains, seeking not to enter into the land of milk and honey but simply to glimpse it, to see it as a land distinct from Egypt, from the desert, from the wilderness, from the soul.
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Into Life
The Messiah will come only when it is too late
The Messiah Ben Joseph Contemplates the Eschaton
Franz Rosenzweig
Into Life
Posts
Welcome to my blog
I like to write theological musings and parables and ditties. Here they lie awaiting your interpretations. More forthcoming. Below are pictured two great modern secular Jewish thinkers who inspire me and haunt me to give color to the page.
I've named the blog after a Kabbalistic concept, according to which, the truth exists not in names, not in letters, but in between them, in their interrelationship. Truth dwells not in the ink, but in its absence. Schlegel, a German Romantic theorist of irony puts the idea nicely when he says, "Words understand themselves better than we who use them." On such a view, the idea that God's name is unpronounceable is not a negative statement. For God's name is not a word. Rather God's name is language itself. In every breath and every pause, in ever noun form and verbal utterance, lingers the conspicuously inconspicuous stage upon which meaning discloses itself. Our aim is to seek out the meaning, to reverse the shattered world order, to elevate the sparks, to overturn the fallenness of language and the schism between signifier and signified that is just another name for the abyss between heaven and earth, being and nothingness, perception and reason, body and soul, time and space, me and you, and dare I say, good and evil.
The story, the parable, the musing, the rambling, the ditty, are ways through which we can attempt to unconceal the primordial letters out of whose fire we sprang. For by making the strangeness of life stranger, we exalt it and bring it back to its origins.
I've named the blog after a Kabbalistic concept, according to which, the truth exists not in names, not in letters, but in between them, in their interrelationship. Truth dwells not in the ink, but in its absence. Schlegel, a German Romantic theorist of irony puts the idea nicely when he says, "Words understand themselves better than we who use them." On such a view, the idea that God's name is unpronounceable is not a negative statement. For God's name is not a word. Rather God's name is language itself. In every breath and every pause, in ever noun form and verbal utterance, lingers the conspicuously inconspicuous stage upon which meaning discloses itself. Our aim is to seek out the meaning, to reverse the shattered world order, to elevate the sparks, to overturn the fallenness of language and the schism between signifier and signified that is just another name for the abyss between heaven and earth, being and nothingness, perception and reason, body and soul, time and space, me and you, and dare I say, good and evil.
The story, the parable, the musing, the rambling, the ditty, are ways through which we can attempt to unconceal the primordial letters out of whose fire we sprang. For by making the strangeness of life stranger, we exalt it and bring it back to its origins.
Joseph K.
The Messiah will come only when it is too late
Walter Benjamin
The Messiah Ben Joseph Contemplates the Eschaton
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