The Mystery of Words

In Plato's Theaetetus, a dialogue that attempts to answer the question, "What is knowledge?" truth is compared to a word. A word, after all, on a mere material basis, consists of letters, which together form syllables. The word "Socrates" is nothing but the conjoining of So-Cra-Tes. Yet, Socrates is not the same as Crasotes or Tesocra. And it is not the same, not simply because the arrangement of its parts are different, but because such a rearrangement tampers with its very essence, turning its significance into nonsense. Mathematics posits that A+B=B+A. But, words show that this transitive property of addition work only on a material level. On a more "spiritual" plane, if one may use the word "spiritual" without conjuring up the spirits, it is precisely the uniqueness of the arrangement that lends identity to the whole. The Talmud teaches that each person comes from Adam, and that as a result, we are at once unique, alone, in the image of the divine, etc., and, at the same time, are earthly, commonplace, and in the image of man. None of us can claim nobler birth than anyone else, since we all share the common ancestors of Adam and Eve. This tension, the Talmud argues should be embodied by two slips of paper, one of which we should keep in one of our pockets, the other in the other. One slip says, "For me alone was the world created." The other reads, "I am but dust of the earth."

Words, too, reflect this tension. But in our modern/post-modern world, our danger is not in realizing that we are dust of the earth, but in forgetting that our dust is filled with the breath of life. Words are just bags of sounds, and musical notes are just vibration frequencies. And yet the words we speak carry meaning, and the notes we bellow movement. Why? It seems that from the chaos and the void spread over the face of the dark and the deep, existance raises its mighty paw against existence (Here, I am indebted to Rav J. Derrida's essay on "Differance"). This resistance, which cannot perhaps be heard, emerges as the still small voice, the last echo of the shofar blast, which The Holy One blew on the primordial Dawning of the first of days. We can hear it only in the discrepancy between the syllables that compose the word and the word itself.

Poetry and History

“The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse—you might put the work of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a species of history. It consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are of singulars.”
--From Aristotle’s Poetics

Though Thucydides famously stated at the beginning of his History of the Peloponnesian War, “My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever,” (I.22) it is clear that in order for Thucydides’ work to have lasted and to have remained a possession for all time, it also had to please its audience. That Thucydides, despite his lambasting of romantic embellishments (I.21), could have produced something as dramatic and ahistorical as the Melian dialogue attests to what must have been his profound recognition that history is far more than simply a true account of the past. Indeed, if we are to understand what truth was for the Greeks, a Heideggerian scrutiny of their word for it, Aleitheia, will reveal it to mean un-concealment or un-forgetting. That the word is etymologically given only in negative terms, with an alpha-privative, demonstrates the Greek’s underlying view of the kinship between truth and memory. This view pervades the dialogues of Plato, especially Phaedo, Republic, and Phaedrus, where Socrates argues for the soul’s immortality on the very grounds that all knowledge is recollection (Anamnesis). But if history’s object is truth and truth’s source is memory, it becomes apparent why even someone as driven towards scientific objectivity as Thucydides could not have resisted dramatic interpolation and invention.

Yet the lack of reliable source-keeping in ancient times forced historians like Herodotus and Thucydides to write histories only of their recent times, histories of wars through which they had lived and in which they had fought. But this writing about a near-past coupled with the fact that the subject of that past was war, ensured that history would blur with epic.

But in any event, could Thucydides have claimed his book to have been a possession for all time if it hadn’t been of epic and tragic proportion? Assuredly not. For, so the argument seems to run in ancient historiography from Herodotus to Polybius, not everything that happened in the past is worthy of being called history. Only those events from which we can draw universal lessons are ultimately important. Herodotus does not write history to preserve the miniscule deeds of insignificant men from the blackening of time, but to preserve those belonging to great men, political leaders, emperors, generals, etc.
But in this way history and poetry converge. For Aristotle argues in Poetics that a tragedy must take as its subject a person of high birth and exalted stature. And Homer, in the Iliad and Odyssey, when not slandering the gods, sings almost exclusively about "the best of men." Both the ancient poets and the ancient historians sought to impart lessons to their audience, and both realized that the most effective way to do this was through dramatic art.

Although Aristotle distinguished between history and poetry, this distinction did not hold up for Herodotus and Thucydides. History was, of course, the study of what had happened, yet it was this very fact that also made it a study of what might be. The kind of plague which Thucydides describes could have just as easily been the subject matter for a Sophoclean play (while the plague of Thebes in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannous could well have been a historical reality), yet the important thing is that it actually occurred, and that moreover, it actually occurred in the live memories of the Athenian people.

Even when Polybius strongly writes that history without the truth is but an idle tale (a sentence that resonates with Shakespeare’s admission that “Life is a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing”), it is important to remember that truth was a much more malleable concept for the Greeks, and one deeply tied to memory. Even Polybius, who himself attempted to write a universal history of epic proportions, consigned himself to focus on the Roman Empire, an empire that had altered his personal life by taking him away from his Greek homeland. And even Polybius could not help but invoke throughout his work the epic force, who later came to be a Roman deity, Fortune (Tyche).

History, as conceived by Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius, was at once the study of singulars (both Herodotus and Thucydides argue for the unprecedented nature of the wars on which they write, while Polybius emphasizes the unprecedented character of the Roman people, the unprecedented accomplishments of their constitution, and the unprecedented reach of their sphere of influence), yet it is also the study of universals (Herodotus tells stories of the great deeds of all men and shows hubris to be a condition that affects all leaders, Thucydides sees history as a possession for all time, and Polybius understands all world events to effect each other in an intricate nexus). This deep knowledge of history’s essence underscores why for all three, history could be at once theatrical, epic, tragic, and objective, disciplined, true.

A Post-Yom Kippur Poem

“Who is like you, God amongst the gods?”

When at the heights of ecstatic glory,
And connected to a still small Nothing,
I did enter through the gates of being
Into Life, seeing the emptiness of truth,
Feeling the fullness of the Almighty,
And burying my head e’er so humbly
In a shroud of omnipresent rocking,
When, in short, I looked upon the visage,
That intimate blackness beloved by death—
Instead of vanishing I rescinded
Into the sweat beneath my testicles,
And worse, since more distracting from the Source,
To unwelcome yet no less present thought,
Thought not of the nullity but of me—
How holy I had been to feel humble,
To sway possessed of a divinity,
To mutter words that seemed to move the stars.
Ah, dreadful thoughts reminding me I am,
Would you not disperse and leave me alone?
Body guards of the king, did you trust me?
Why, when rising from the ground did you ask,
“What will others, less seized by muses think?”
Why, after my head had bowed to YHWH,
Did you petition me to look around
To see who else had bowed and for how long?
Why, when wailing words by heart, did I turn
My gaze to my book’s ensnaring bosom,
My now opened eyes weighed down with writing?

Why, Great Presider of this world and next,
Did I return from You unto myself
If not by your divine decree, now sealed?
Why, being imperfect, am I not to sing,
Exalting not in sin but that I sin,
And yet am still forgiven being dust?
Indeed, I know, thank God for that I know,
I am but a figment of creation,
And as a piece of work, a masterpiece,
A piece of your hands, a work in progress.
And thus I end, though it is up to you
When I’ll expire and become a ruins.
For now, thank you for crafting me a self
And yet giving me a preview of why,
In the midst of becoming I can see
My limbs as coextensive with the moon’s,
My heart a life-source of our universe.

What is It like?

It is like a man of noble-birth, who has, by a series of turns, been reduced to a wandering beggar. Aware of his nobility, and thus ashamed of his poverty, the beggar dares not beg, but instead, waits for someone to recognize him as a son of greatness and restore him to his former life. Dying slowly of starvation, the beggar is too weak to speak or move, yet along comes a man who knows him from childhood, and crying out his name, falls upon him in recollective tears. But, not having any food on his body to offer his dying friend, he runs off to find some, and on his way, either gets distracted and never comes back, dies, or returns with food, but with food that is either not enough to sustain the dying man or food to which the man is allergic, and some would go so far as to say, simply not in his taste, thinking such food beneath him. In any event, the beggar dies, or if he lives, dies, returned to his nobility. Yet his death is not without spectacle and his spectacle not without story and his story not without questions. Who is this man to which “it,” that impersonal filler, is compared? And what is this “It”? These questions are the food which I offer to you as you starve.

"The mediator between the mind and the hands must be the heart"

This epigram, which recurs as a central theme in the Fritz Lang film Metropolis, is valuable for the Creature of faith, for whom either the mind leads to atheism while the hands lead to worship, or the mind leads to divine contemplation while the hands lead to Bacchant behavior. The heart alone is able to reconcile the schism between action and theory signified by the hands and by the mind, and it is able to do this through love. For Love involves passion, spontaneity, ecstasy, and growing in the sense of becoming and blossoming, but it also requires commitment, trust, steadfastness, and loyalty. It requires, that is, on the one hand, faith, and on the other, faithfulness. And while the mind may be more prone to faith while the hands to faithfulness, the heart does not see these as being in opposition, but readily pumps its life blood all around. For this reason, it must be said, as it does in Pirkei Avot that a good heart is better than a good eye or a good ear. For as the text teaches, a good heart contains a good eye and a good ear, while a good eye and a good ear do not necessarily include a good heart. And Let Heidegger's life be proof, of whom it was said that he could not finish his training as a priest in seminary because he had a weak heart.

The Coat of Many Colors

Sing, whence that much colored coat and whither,
That coat which saw deceit and love and hope,
That torn gifted garment which Joseph wore,
And which his father, Jacob, before him
donned, when he conned his blind father, Isaac,
Into blessing him with the great command:
"Be a blessing," which subsequently he
Did follow, marking himself with destiny,
Tragedy, providence, as well as guilt!
His mother, Rebbecca, had designed it
In spite of the stars' much accursed will
That he should be the father of greatness.
Alas, that he had cast the coat upon
His Son, God-like dreamer sprung from Rachel's
Womb, which barren, had opened to give life
To the world's most luminous face, a trace
Of the Face, which masquerades as surface,
But is really surface and pulse at once
And the dynamic otherness that calls
The I out from under itself to dance and praise
The grand Unrecognizability
Whose footsteps can be heard when the earth quakes,
Whose dynamic breath blows being, language,
Fantasies and ambiguities home.
For had he not bestowed and transferred it,
His most favored God-child would not have passed,
At the hands of his envious brothers,
Into the hands of other o'er-looked brothers,
The Ishmaelites, descendants of Abraham
And Hagar, a war-prize won in battle,
With the help of Elohim and Good Luck.

Stories of a House

A glimpse at the words "house" and "story" opens up some interesting thoughts:

The word "house" often enough, both in the Bible and in Homer, refers not only to a physical house in space but to a genealogy or a lineage across time as well. The House of Atreus and the House of David are prime examples. Whereas in a physical house, the entrances and exits of its residents do not affect its fate, in a genealogical house, if the members of the house leave the house or die out, the house itself crumbles. Thus, while in one sense of the word "house," the residents do not constitute the house as house, in the second sense of the word, they are the very materials out of which the house is built.

Now, we all know that a large house tends to have several stories, and that the residents of such a house rarely sleep on the first story. Taking "story," then, in its two senses, we come to the following: A large house possesses stories. As a physical fact, this is no marvel. The number of stories and even the plurality of stories does not impact the being or non-being of the house. But on a deeper level, on the level in which the house is not just a shelter from the elements but a shelter from the decay of time, stories are the mortar and cement that keep in place our lives which are the very bricks of the great structure.

The story/stories of the Jewish people, for example, is/are largely what keep/s the Jewish people alive, and what ensure/s that the house of David does not crumble. Physically and logically one would say that a house must exist for there to be stories, but temporally and thus existentially, one should say that for there to be a house there must be stories.

A story is never original, and yet it is always new. This is the metaphorical meaning of why the master of the house sleeps on the second floor. A story is always a commentary, and thus can never be the foundation, the house, but only a part of the house. A story is always grounded, framed, contextualized, inspired, etc. In the beginning, after all, was not a story, but a word, the word. The word is the house. (Heidegger states that "Language is the house in which Dasein poetically dwells). And it is no coincidence that in Hebrew, the Letter Hay which is said to be a holy letter because it frequently appears in the divine name/s also looks like a house, and comes from other Semitic alphabets in which the letter itself stood for the word "house." Yet the assembly of words, the ordering of them in chiasmus, antithesis, synthesis, or what have you, is the story without which the house could never stand. Words after all, only exist, because of the need and desire to communicate. And communicating is nothing less than storytelling. Even when I say, "Go to the store!" or "Did you go to the store?" I am telling a story. In the first case, I am telling the story of something that has not yet happened but something which I hope, through speech, to make happen. In the second case, I am telling the story, whose end awaits a response from the Other. For if the Other responds in the affirmative, then I have told a story whose conclusion is affirmative, and if negative, negative.

Thus, we see that the story, although it is not original in the sense of being primordial, functions as the ever dynamic layering of the house, whose continuous existence breaths life into its darkest corners, shielding it from demise.

The tower of Babel fell down. Yet, though the house of Babel fell, its stories continue. And thus, the house hasn't fallen, it has simply proven to be a house not of bricks, but of words. It is a house which extends not to the heavens but, even more miraculously, across time. Since languages continue to change, to grow, to die, but also to emerge, we can see that the tower of Babel is still being constructed, that the workers have not yet thrown in their working cards, but continue to toil. Each story builds upon the next, and thus the house that is humanity sits enthroned on the layers of its past. Proust says that the self is but a graveyard of all of its deceased selves, and archaeologists apply this very idea to the study of civilizations when they excavate the layers of history buried below ground. The tower of Babel towers over us in the towering image of history, a towering image, because it is imageless, as imageless as the imageless God. For that which is imageless, ungraspable, unfathomable, is also towering, the way that the galaxies millions of light years away tower over us, not because they appear big, but precisely because they don't, and their smallness, and invisibility (at least to the naked eye), suggests our own smallness.

In any event, we can see now why though the Jews have been homeless, they have not been without a house. The House of David (beit david) endured even when Jewish houses of worship and study (beit midrash and beit knesset) saw their fiery destruction, and even since the destruction of the Second Temple (The Beit Hamikdash, literally, the House of Holiness). Stories, therefore, are the lifeblood of the House. But stories are not mere words. They are the dialectic of words and memories.

Though I have seemingly asserted a dichotomy between the two notions of house and the uses story, it is not without saying that their difference is grounded in a unity, a unity which ambiguates the difference between body and soul, or existence and essence. For, on some level, it has been shown that all language, and thus all stories, are deictic. That is, are physical, are demonstrative and gestural. Every statement we make refers to a this or a not this, and every time we speak, we open our mouths. Indeed, every time we speak, we presuppose ourselves as selves and our interlocutors as not selves, and both require that we have an image of ourself and of the other. I, when I think about who I am, do not simply come up with a list of activities or attributes, but a picture or a video, at any rate, a characterization that not only includes but assumes my identity as a body, as a brown haired, brown-green-eyed, 180 lb. male with the build and glare of a 20 year old.

Thus, we see that the story and the house, in the sense in which I have expounded them, are not mere concepts, but things. And it is fitting that in Hebrew the word for word is the same as the word for thing. A world without words, without stories, is literally nothing.