Torah Readers Reflections

Have you ever had an experience that you find that you don’t have the words to describe? Maybe a dream, a vision or trying to explain to someone else a beautiful view in nature that you have experienced but can’t quite find the words to describe it? Maybe the right words don’t exist in our lexicon in order to describe your experience? Imagine trying to describe the world around you to a blind person who has never seen, or how would you describe the differences between red and green to a blind person? How would you describe the works of Mozart to a deaf person who has never heard?

This was Jacob’s problem at the end of his life:

Then Jacob called for his sons and said: “Assemble yourselves and I will tell you of what will befall you in the end of days.”
(Genesis 49:1)

What Jacob ends up telling his sons has nothing at all to do with the end of days. He tells them about their immediate future. At best he looks a few hundred years into the future to tell them about the exodus from Egypt, slavery to redemption, nationhood. Why then does he promise to tell them about the end of times - the “ketz”, but instead tells them something else?

Sharing our Experiences

It was certainly Jacob’s intention to tell his sons about the end of times. God had shown him what will befall his ancestors, He has shown him what the end of times will look like. Jacob has been exposed to something that has had a profound effect on him and he wishes to share that experience with his sons. He wishes his sons to know the importance of the things that he has seen. It is for that reason that he gathers them - to tell them everything he knows about the end of times.

Communicating with limited tools

We, as humans, have a need to share our experiences, whether we do this through stories or through casual chit-chat at a social gathering or on social media, we love to share what we have experienced. Half the fun of an experience is reliving it with other people, sharing it and attempting to recreate the feelings we had, describing our experiences to other people. The greater the experience, the greater the need we have to share it - thus it was with Jacob, he had experienced something that was not of this world, something that was so profound, so important and so life changing that he felt that he must share it with his closest companions on his life's journey, his sons.  

What is therefore preventing Jacob from revealing the “Ketz” - the end of times to his sons? The answer is simple, he lacks the vocabulary to describe what he has seen, he can’t put into words what he has been shown by God. He is trying to speak of a phenomenon that is beyond his audience's range of perception. There is a real barrier of communication to convey the concept of the end of days to his sons. How do you describe the incomprehensible? At that moment when he tries to convey the essence of what he knows, there is a curtain blocking the audience’s view. It is not a matter of finding the right words because the right words simply don’t exist in any language.

Events can only be communicated using the range of concepts that people have. We can make an effort to describe an event using the most beautiful words that exist but the message will only be successful if it is couched in terms that are meaningful to the audience. When we have to transcend these bounds, anything we say will be incomplete. We are unable to describe things that are not within the range of human imagination; even if we are able to comprehend these things, the concepts turn out to be meaningless without the proper tools of expression.

The end of days and the Messiah

The end of days is a period that “no eye has seen” - it is beyond our perceptual range, beyond the human conceptual ability that exists in the reality of the present day. When we speak of what will happen in the future, we may reach a certain point until we are stopped by a thick curtain. Even those who might be able to see through the curtain cannot bring back a report of what they have seen. They cannot relate to what they have seen because there is no point of comparison to it, nothing in their lexicon to describe it.

There is a puzzling talmudic statement: “Three come unawares: the Messiah, a found article and a scorpion” (Sanhedrin 97a). At first glance the statement raises a question: What does it mean that the Messiah comes unawares? After all, there are Jews who pray for, talk about and concern themselves with his coming. The entire Jewish people mention the Messiah in one form or another in its prayers. So how can it be that he comes unawares?

The answer is that the Messiah whom everyone talks about, and who's coming everyone prays for, is not the Messiah who will actually arrive. We have no way of knowing or imagining what will happen when the Messiah comes, because his coming is something that “no eye has seen.” It is inevitable then, that the Messiah will come unawares, because no one really knows what to expect.

How do we communicate what's in our Hearts?

The inability to define certain things has ramifications beyond discussions regarding the end of days. The expression, “the heart cannot reveal to the mouth” (Ecclesiastes Rabba 12:10), appears in connection with all sorts of subjects, for not everything that a person thinks can be expressed easily in words. There also exists a much more complex and difficult situation when “the heart cannot reveal to the heart”, that is, the heart cannot reveal even unto itself. These are difficulties that every person experiences at one point or another in their lives.

The Talmud (Pesahim 54b) presents a list of things that are concealed from us: the day of a person's death, the day of consolation, the full depth of justice, that which is in another's heart - and the list goes on. The connection between these things is that they are all impossible to determine.

Why is it impossible to know what’s in another’s heart? Because everything that a person draws from deep inside him he must communicate through an intermediary mechanism, the translation from thoughts and feelings into words. The listener then transfers the matter from those words into his own heart. My contact with another person's heart is at best, twice removed from the source; there is no possibility of direct contact, of one spirit truly connecting with another.

We constantly try to solve the difficulty of communicating what is on our heart to the best of our ability, since that is the only way that a person can have an impact on the world around them. We hope that the other person not only hears our words, but is able to translate them back in his own heart while maintaining some of the purity of the original emotion. To be sure the content of a person's heart is difficult to formulate into words, but if there is true resonance between two people, between two being who are otherwise entirely separate, then while perhaps it cannot be said that each person knows what is in the others heart, at least they are on the same wavelength.

What about faith?

In matters of faith, anything that can be studied or articulated in words is irrelevant and unhelpful. If only we had a kind of window that would give us a direct view of God’s glory! But there is no such window. What remains is the responsibility to learn, to intuit, that something exists that is beyond our comprehension, beyond the range of man's ordinary perception, and to learn to relate to it. We must reach a point where we have in addition to the vague awareness that such a thing exists, the maturity to understand that there is more to explore on the other side of the curtain, a continuation of our path. There may be no way to reach it, see it, or explain it, but it is possible to sense what lies on the other side of existence.

Our task in any form of faith, is to develop an awareness that beyond the place that I know lies a place that I do not know. If we can accomplish this task, we can truly claim to have experienced even that which “no eye has seen.”