We’ve seen many times already in the Language of Life Series:

A whole lot gets lost in translation.

Words get flattened when they’re transposed from one language to another. When they are moved from one cultural context to a different one, their meaning inevitably changes. We’ve made the argument that Hebrew especially suffers from translation because its source is so Divinely rich in meaning.1

There are two other phenomena that take place even within a language itself: semantic “drift” and semantic “erosion.”

Words can drift in meaning over time. Take the word “nice,” for example. It sounds lovely to the 21st-century ear to call someone “nice,” but 800 years ago, it would have been an insult.2 Language, as a system of agreed-upon sounds and symbols, has a life of its own. It evolves as people use it, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that.

But what happens when technology dramatically accelerates the pace and volume of our communication? Our hypermodern times have brought an unprecedented flood of information and language. A 2009 study at UC San Diego estimated that between 1980 and 2008, the average American’s daily “word diet” increased by a factor of 2.5. With the rise of social media and ever-increasing screen time, that figure has presumably climbed even higher. Yet as the volume of language we consume grows, the depth of our engagement with it often diminishes. Much of what we consume today is fragmented and fast-paced—listened to at 1.5x or 2x speed, and when “read,” more likely scanned than studied.3 Meanwhile, the language itself seems to evolve at a dizzying pace. Talk to a teenager today, and you may feel that you speak a different language altogether.

Things become more complicated when words carry moral weight.

Consider words like “theft,” “marriage,” “truth,” or “morality.” These aren’t mere social conventions. They refer to concepts that inform how we understand ourselves, our relationships, and our obligations to one another. Their definitions define our lives and our world. As their meaning shifts, the ground beneath our feet can feel like it’s eroding.

Let’s start with a more innocuous example: It’s not uncommon to hear someone use the word “steal” when asking to take something from another person.

“Do you mind if I steal a potato chip?”

In reality, they’re not stealing. They’re asking for permission.

Alternatively, people may use the word “borrow” when they have no intention of returning the item.

“Can I borrow a piece of paper?”

My point here is not that we should be up in arms when people say either of these. But words carry notions, and when we become accustomed to using them in ways that blur the distinctions they were meant to preserve, we risk blurring those distinctions in our own minds as well.

After all, how we speak about something inevitably influences how we think about it. And how we think about it influences how we behave.

And unless we periodically refresh our understanding of the words we use, we risk experiencing a sort of semantic erosion. What begins as a linguistic degradation can become a conceptual degradation, and eventually, a moral one.

Let’s look at an example that is more consequential: marriage.

Classically, marriage has an element of exclusivity and lifelong commitment baked into it — certainly in the Jewish conception of it. Otherwise, what exactly changes at the point of marriage?

Then there's a modern term that, even if we don't subscribe to it, can slowly seep into our consciousness: “open marriage.” How can the word “open,” meaning “non-exclusive” modify the word “marriage” that is intrinsically exclusive? By accepting that combination of words, have we not also blurred the clarity of the word “marriage” itself?

Words aren’t merely sounds we use to communicate ideas already formed in our minds. They help give those ideas form in the first place. Language gives shape to experience. And because language is shared, the words through which we organize our individual experiences become the building blocks of our collective understanding of reality.

In other words, words do more than communicate meaning. They preserve distinctions. Between right and wrong. Between mine and yours. Between one kind of relationship and another. And when those distinctions begin to dissolve, something much larger than language is at stake.

A Container for Language and its Values

In Parshat Noach, the Torah presents two extraordinary episodes involving the breakdown of the structures that make civilization possible.

The first is the Mabul (מבול), the Flood, and the Teiva (תיבה), the ark—or, more literally, the container—that is its remedy.

The second is Migdal Bavel (מגדל בבל), the Tower of Babel, where humanity’s unified language breaks down, leaving people unable to communicate with one another.

(The story of Babel deserves an exploration of its own, which we’ll save for next week.)

Rashi explains that the word Mabul (מבול) relates to Balah (בלה), wearing away, Bilbul (בלבול), confusion, and Hovil (הוביל), carry away.

Water, ordinarily a source of life, became the force that eroded the structures of civilization, dissolved the boundaries between things, and stirred everything up. Language, normally a source of connection, can also become an agent of dissolution.

And yet, in the middle of this chaos, God instructed Noach to build a Teiva (תיבה). The word “teiva” means simply a container or box. But it is also the Hebrew word for a “word.”

What’s the connection between a container and a word? A box keeps out what doesn’t belong, but it also contains what’s within it, preserving its identity.

Words are meant to do precisely the same thing. A word gives an idea a recognizable form, distinguishing it from other ideas so that it can be contemplated, preserved, and communicated.

The Mabul dissolved boundaries. The Teiva was meant to preserve them.

The Torah prescribes very specific dimensions for the Teiva: 30 cubits tall, 300 long, and 50 wide (a cubit is about a foot and a half). These measurements are so specific. We have to ask ourselves what we’re meant to do with such trivia.

Assuming we’re not going to be asked to build a flood-ready ark anytime soon, these numbers are ostensibly not very useful to us. But there is a fascinating allusion hidden within them. In gematria, the numerical equivalencies of Hebrew letters:

• The letter ל equals 30.

• The letter ש equals 300.

• The letter נ equals 50.

Together, they spell לשן—the three principal consonants of “lashon,” language.4

As if the ark was preserving not only the physical bodies of the humans and animals it carried, but something else entirely: the language through which those humans understood their world. And with it, the notions, distinctions, and meanings through which they made sense of reality, what we traditionally refer to as “Lashon HaKodesh,” the language of the sacred.

Unlike ordinary languages, whose meanings develop through social consensus, Lashon HaKodesh, a language given by God Himself, is traditionally understood as a language whose words express objective truths about the reality they describe.

What was being preserved was not a dictionary, but something deeper: the notions, the values, the understanding of reality necessary to recreate human society on the other side of the Flood in a way aligned with God’s will and wisdom.

Every species was to be preserved in compartments according to its identity. The animals entered male and female, each according to its kind.

The world outside had become morally corrupted. “ותשחת הארץ” — the earth had become corrupted — and “ותמלא הארץ חמס” — the earth was filled with lawlessness.

Noach, however, was an “איש צדיק,” a righteous man. He had preserved in his heart, mind and actions a moral universe in which distinctions still mattered. Where one person’s property was not another’s to take, where wrongdoing couldn’t simply be justified because someone else had done it first.

The living creatures necessary to repopulate the earth, together with the conceptual and moral foundations necessary to rebuild civilization.

Every Home Is a Teiva

Every person’s home, in a sense, is also a sort of Teiva.

Every family carries within it a particular understanding of the world. Of what constitutes love, marriage, loyalty, generosity, honesty, and respect.

And every family has to do some work of preserving those meanings. The values they live by, the boundaries they establish, the behaviors they don’t tolerate, and even the language they choose to use.

I grew up with family friends of my parents who refused to watch any movie in which there was marital infidelity. They knew that cheating was part of the world. They simply didn’t want that part of the world to infiltrate their home. What we watch and listen to changes us.

Similarly, a friend of mine has his own personal custom that whenever he hears about somebody he knows getting divorced, he does something nice for his wife that day. He’s concerned that the prevalence of the word “divorce” on his lips might gradually compromise his own notion of marriage and its sacred stability.

Both are ways of preserving the world of meaning that a home contains. Of making sure that the words through which we understand our most important relationships don't gradually lose the substance they were meant to carry.

One family chooses what not to let in. The other responds to something encountered outside by reaffirming what matters inside. Both are ways of preserving the world of meaning that a home contains.

Entering and Leaving the Teiva

We can’t live our entire lives inside the Teiva.

We have to go out, interact with other people, encounter different perspectives, and engage with a world that doesn’t necessarily conform to our own notions of things.

But we also have to return to the Teiva.

The Baal Shem Tov seizes on the dual meaning of “Teiva” in his interpretation of Hashem’s command to Noach:

Bereishit 7:1:

בוא אל התיבה.

Come into the ark.

Enter the word.

We ordinarily think of words as things that come out of us. We formulate an idea in our minds and then express it in words. Spit them out like an AI chatbot.

But the Baal Shem Tov is inviting us to reverse that relationship. Instead of simply producing words, we can enter them. We can contemplate them, immerse ourselves in them, and allow the meanings they contain to shape our consciousness.

Think of how many times we’ve said “Baruch” without stopping to consider what a blessing is. How many times we’ve said “Echad” without contemplating what it means for Hashem to be One. Or how often we’ve said “Modim” without experiencing gratitude.

We may have the definitions clear, but how often do we actually enter them?

In a world so full of words as ours, we must enter deeply into the words of Torah and Tefillah to contemplate their meaning, and experience what they contain.

We have to go out into the world, but we also have to keep coming back into the Teiva, so that the words through which we understand our world don’t become empty vessels.

The Language of Life

And in a sense, these two dimensions of the Teiva are precisely the two primary goals of this Language of Life series.

The first is to crystallize the definitions of Hebrew words, which in turn crystallizes our understanding of the dimensions of life that those words refer to.

But the second dimension is to actually experience learning and teaching Torah in this way. And that’s what we’re trying to accomplish here. To discover the meaning contained within the words of Lashon HaKodesh, and to enter those words deeply enough that their meaning becomes part of the way we experience life.

We began with the modern flood of language. Messages, articles, opinions, conversations, posts, notifications. An endless stream of words, many of them consumed almost without thought. And perhaps the greatest danger isn’t merely that their meanings change, but that we’re moving too quickly to experience those meanings at all.

We can spend an entire day surrounded by words of Torah and barely allow any of them to penetrate us.

Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.

We need the Teiva to preserve the meanings through which we understand our world. But we also need to enter those meanings, to allow them to shape the way we think, feel and live.

So in a world flooded with words, perhaps the most important thing we can sometimes do is simply to enter one.

בוא אל התיבה.

Enter the word.

Last week, we learned that the word “Torah” means guidance, the instruction we need for life.

Torah is the all-encompassing word for God’s guidance to humanity, most notably through the Torah given to the Jewish people. But there is another word used specifically for the five books of Moses, which Jews around the globe completed just this last weekend on Simchat Torah, and began again as soon as we finished.

That word is Chumash-חומש.

Chumash, very clearly, has something to do with the word chamesh-חמש, meaning “five,” (as in: echad, shnayim, shalosh, arba, chamesh).

The question is: Why is the number of volumes in the core text of the Written Torah so important that it seems to define it?

Asked differently: Why is the Chumash divided into volumes at all?

After all, in its entirety, it possesses about half the number of words (<80,000) as the average Harry Potter book (~160,000).

Since the Torah is a book of instruction, it naturally also instructs us on how best to give instruction.

One of the most important principles of teaching is to teach first things first and second things second. Spewing out information is not helpful, because learning is not just about content. It is as much about structure as it is about content. Context as much as the text itself.

• The Torah starts with the most all-encompassing perspective, on the scale of the universe.

• It zooms into the human condition in the story of Adam and Chava.

• With Noach, it zooms into the specific struggle of being an individual swimming against the current of human society.

• “Jewishness,” in this context, is a sub-concept nested under being human, because all Jews are first human. Guidance about Jewishness itself begins with Avraham.1

• Since Avraham chose to be “Jewish,” the next concept is the challenges and assets of being born Jewish. This is taught through the life of his son Yitzhak next...

Every sub-concept branches out of the concept that precedes it conceptually like a tree or fractal.

What emerges from this structure is something extraordinarily helpful. If you want to understand the meaning of a concept, go to its first appearance in the Torah.2

The first appearance is the 1.0 version of the concept. Later appearances are the 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 iterations.

Let’s put this idea to work: Where does the Torah talk about creation?

Naturally, one would answer: the first chapter of the book of Bereishit, which describes the creation of the universe.

This is true, but you can also look at the whole book of Bereishit as describing the creation of what will become the Jewish people that will be tasked with the creative mission of bringing humanity to its moral maturity.3

On the other hand, if we go back to those seven days at the beginning of the book and want to study the “DNA structure” of the creative process, we need to look closely at the first thing created.

The first thing whose creation the Torah describes is light.4

We may have expected a more magical, even Godly, poof! — God snapped His fingers, made light, and moved on to the next thing, but no. This first creation unfolds through a step-by-step process. While God certainly could have made it instantly, He chose to slow down His process so that it serves as Torah, instruction for us.

First, God says, “There will be light.” Interesting in itself because it could have just skipped to the light coming into existence. It’s as if the Torah is showing us God entering the prompt into the AI, to use a modern metaphor.

Then, there is light.

The first two stages of any creative process are conception and manifestation.

Conception is the formation of the idea in the mind, the intent to create.5 For humans, this is perhaps the most mysterious stage. This stage strikes like lightning, almost always when we least expect it — in the shower, on a run, or just messing around on a guitar.

And then, stage two: manifestation, when one allows what would have remained “just an idea” to run all the way from his mind through to his fingertips until it becomes real and manifest.

“Let there be light.” There is Light.

But the Torah doesn’t stop there, even though one might think that this is the creative process: you have ideas, and you make them happen. But we’re only 40% there.

Next, the Torah surprisingly describes that “God saw the light, and it was good.”

We may not appreciate this as a stage in the creative process because an artist doesn’t seem to be creating at all when she is looking at what she has created.

But think of a painter stepping back from her painting. She tries to look at it with fresh eyes, to take it all in. This is a critical stage in the creative process. While creating, the creator is so enmeshed in her creation that she can’t yet see if it is good.

For us learning the Chumash, this raises a question: Why would God have to do that? Isn’t it certainly good if God made it?

Which brings us to the fourth stage that is the continuation of the sentence that started with God “seeing the light”:

“…and God separated between light and darkness.”

The first question is: If it ain’t broke, why fix it? If you just said it was good, why are you messing with it?

Secondly, what does it mean to separate light and darkness? Isn’t one just the lack of the other?

Rashi, the great commentator on the Chumash, asks this question and answers by invoking a midrashic teaching from the Talmud.6

Rabbi Elazar in the Talmud taught that God saw that the light of creation, which revealed the unity and secrets of all things, would be misused in the future by bad people. And so He concealed it for the righteous.

While this raises questions of its own, it helps answer some of the ones we’ve already accumulated.

The light was good. And because it was good, if it fell into the wrong hands — people with their own agendas for it — it would become very bad.

The truth is that truth itself can become a weapon to spread falsehood in the hands of those willing to use it toward that end.

The light was good — Divinely good — but the users who would come to use it were not yet good, and so the light had to be concealed for the greater good.

This is the stage called user modification.

After assessment, the creator has to tweak her creation. Although creativity begins as a personal, spiritual act in and of itself, ultimately one wants it to reach another and be meaningful for them. This adjustment is therefore a vital step of editing in the creative process.

A creator might make a new app and, after creating a prototype, say: “This is amazing. There’s so much functionality. Look how much you can do with it.”

But creators tend to initially overcreate — to create more than can be received.

The critical fourth stage is to simplify the product for the one who will use and enjoy it.

Finally, the Torah describes a fifth stage:

“And God called the light ‘day.’”

Light is wonderful, but without a name, the user who has not yet put it to use doesn’t know what he’s meant to do with it.

A product doesn’t speak for itself without branding. Creators know their products because they created them. But how do they get someone who doesn’t yet know their product to appreciate them enough to use them?

Branding.

A brand has to convey what has been created in a way that is graspable. This is the fifth and final stage of the creative process.

By now, you might have a sense of where we’re going. There is a remarkable Midrash in Bereishit Rabbah that notes that light is mentioned five times in the opening verses of the Torah, corresponding to the five books of the Chumash. And these five references to light, I would suggest, reveal five stages in the creative process of the Jewish nation.7

The book of Bereishit is the conception of the Jewish nation.

There is no nation even at the end of Bereishit. Initially, the idea of a whole nation striving to live according to God’s guidance is just a glimmer of an idea, which one can perceive only through the foils of Adam and Noach and everyone in between, all the way to Avraham. And with Avraham, we see the beginnings of a Jewish nation, but really it’s just a Jewish family at best. And it doesn’t even take shape as a family until Yaakov. Internal conflicts and tensions prevent that family from growing into a healthy nation until the following book.

The book of Shemot is the manifestation of the vision of Bereishit.

The Jewish nation emerges out of Egypt and formally receives the Torah, whose values it possessed only instinctually through tradition, but not yet manifest in a real way.8

In Vayikra, it’s as if the Torah gives us a vision of this nation in its most elevated form. The Torah shines brightest in its pristine service of God in the Temple and in all the nuances of holy living — as individuals, as a community, and as a nation — but can we all live up to that grand vision at all times?

In the fourth book, Bamidbar, this grand vision crashes into reality.

The light is too bright, too refined. The nation is not ready to enter the Land promised to them and become that light unto the nations.

It has to go through four decades in the desert. Almost that entire generation has to die out.

It's in this book that we even see certain laws generated in response to the demands and challenges of the nation — by those who challenge the authority that seemed so clearly defined in the third book.9

Lastly, Devarim, the fifth book, literally means “Words” in Hebrew. In English, it is called Deuteronomy, which literally means “repeated law.” It is largely composed of Moshe’s final speeches to the Jewish nation before they enter the Land.

Moshe was tasked with putting into words everything the nation had experienced, and everything that came before it. They could not go into Israel without knowing the story that would give context to that experience. Moshe took all of it and gave it language.

This is the fifth stage: branding. Not branding in the shallow sense of putting a catchy name on something, but in the deeper sense of giving an idea a form that can be grasped, remembered, and passed on.

And so the Chumash is not five books simply because a very long Torah needed to be divided into manageable volumes. It’s not very long at all. The five are themselves part of the teaching.

Bereishit is conception.
Shemot is manifestation.
Vayikra is assessment.
Bamidbar is modification.
Devarim is articulation.

And perhaps this explains something deeper about why the Torah begins with creation.

God could have said, “Let there be light,” and there could have been light. Done. Instead, the Torah slows the process down. There is an idea. The idea becomes real. God looks at and assesses what He has made. He modifies it for those who will receive it. And finally, He gives it a name.

Five stages.

Then, the Torah goes on to chronicle how this creative process continues to unfold. An idea of a people emerges. That people becomes real. We see the vision of what it could be. The vision has to adapt to those who actually have to live it. And finally, Moshe gives that experience words so that it can outlive the generation that experienced it.

We call the whole thing Chumash-חומש. The Five Volume Guide to Creation.

Nothing worth creating arrives fully formed. Not a work of art. Not an idea. Not a human being. Not a nation.

Creation is not the moment when something appears. Creation is the process by which an idea becomes something the world can receive.

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Meaning Within

Meaning Within is a place for deep learning Torah.

By Rabbi Jack Cohen

Every religion in the world has its practices and a belief system through which those practices are understood to be meaningful. One of the primary avenues for encountering those beliefs is the sacred books of each spiritual tradition.

I don’t pretend to be an expert in anyone else’s religion. It’s hard enough to keep up with my own. But I do believe that the name people give to their sacred books tells us something important about how they understand the meaning and purpose of study.

The name of something is, in a sense, its brand: a word, phrase or image that succinctly tells us what it’s all about.

• Christianity’s book is composed of “Gospels,” a word that comes from the Olde English of gōd-spell, a direct translation of the Greek euangelion (like the Modern English “evangelical”), which means “good news.” Christianity sees the study of the Bible (which, incidentally, just means “the books,” like “bibliography) as bringing good tidings for a future redeemed by God.1

• The Qur’an of Islam, by contrast, is called al-Qurʾān, “the Recitation” (similar to the Hebrew word for reading and proclaiming aloud, “kriah-קריאה”). The reading and reciting of the words of the Koran are most prominent in the way it is presented to its followers.2

• Hinduism has many sacred texts, but the most ancient and authoritative are the Vedas. In Sanskrit, the word veda means “[Sacred] Knowledge.” The Vedas themselves belong to a category called Śruti, which means “that which is heard/perceived” by seers. The other catergory of sacred texts is Smṛti, which means “that which is remembered,” of which the well-known Bhagavad Gītā is a part, which itself means “the Song of the Lord.”

• Buddhism doesn’t have a single primary authoritative text, but rather a vast collection of scriptures compiled over millennia. They all revolve around what is called Dharma, which refers to the body of principles that “hold” or “support” the universe (derived from the Sanskrit root dhṛ, meaning "to hold").

Now we are ready to appreciate what makes the Torah unique. While it incorporates elements central to these other sacred texts, the term “Torah” highlights a completely different dimension of study.

The Torah certainly contains good tidings for the future. The bottom-line message of all the prophets was to herald a better world. Our tradition is that Eliyahu HaNavi (Elijah the Prophet) will be the one who mevaser lanu besorot tovot, yeshuot venechamot — heralds for us good tidings, salvations, and consolations. Indeed, all the prophets had the habit of finishing their prophecies with optimistic messages to contextualize the severity of their warnings about what would happen if we didn’t get our act together. All this is true, but spreading the gospel of the future redemption is not the main thrust of Torah.

The Torah is often called in the Talmud mikra–מקרא, from the same Semitic root as Qur’an. And there is, in Jewish consciousness, as in Islam, a notion that the very act of reciting words Torah has an impact on the soul, even before one understands what he is reading. This said, recitation is only the beginning — the prerequisite for the deeper understanding and action that is sought.3

No doubt, the Torah wants us to attain knowledge. Da’at Torah, an integrated knowledge of Torah, is, in many ways, the ultimate goal of Torah study. But “knowledge” (דעת) is not the word chosen to brand Torah.

Torah uses the word “listen” as one of its calling cards, and certainly instructs us to “remember and not forget.” It is also called a “song” in one of Moshe’s final speeches before he passes away. But these too did not become the Torah’s chosen brand.

The name chosen for God’s teachings was “Torah” (תורה).

It comes from the Hebrew root י-ר-ה, which means to give guidance and practical instruction, as in the word lehorot (להורות), according to the Book of Roots of Rabbi David Kimchi, known as the “Radak” (1160-1235).

Understanding that the essence of Torah is instruction and practical guidance is helpful in a number of ways.

People often ask about the Torah: Why does it describe creation in seven days? Why doesn’t it give more scientific detail? Why no dinosaurs? Why doesn’t it give more historical context?

A good answer is that the Torah never presents itself as a comprehensive book of knowledge or history. Its goal is to guide us in “those matters that would be understood as having an ethical aspect, that touch on straightening the ways of man, in his outward behavior and his inner emotions.”4

This changes how we should learn it. When we study an academic subject, the goal is to know, and quizzes and tests measure how much we’ve learned. The goal of Torah, however, is not information for its own sake but transformation: bringing ourselves, our lives and our environment into closer alignment with what the Torah asks of us.

The word Torah comes from the root י-ר-ה, which has a second meaning that is surprising at first and profound on reflection. As a verb, it doesn't only mean to instruct. It also means to shoot an arrow, or some other projectile, as in yoreh chetz (יורה חץ).

A friend of mine told me about a rabbi he had in yeshiva who, when teaching something especially important, would raise his voice to an absurd volume. The students would stare up at him, wide-eyed and more than a little scared, and he would ask, still at full volume, “Do you know why I’m yelling this lesson?!”

The students had no idea.

“Because I’m not just teaching you!” he’d say. “I’m trying to teach with enough force that the message reaches your children, your grandchildren, and your great-grandchildren, hopefully until the end of time!”

Instruction that truly matters isn’t a passing prompt. It’s guidance for all of life, not tied to a particular moment in history or a generational fad.

That is what it means for Torah to be an arrow. The teacher, whether a professional educator, a parent, or anyone sharing guidance with people they care about, has to aim carefully and fire with enough force to reach a target far in the distance, farther than the teacher could ever go.

The greatest teacher of Torah of all time was Moshe. Even though in many ways he functioned as a king, he never took that title, nor did he seem to want it. Instead, he became known for all time simply as Moshe Rabbeinu — Moshe, our teacher.

The Torah itself is called Torat Moshe, the Torah, the instruction, of Moshe.

Our tradition teaches that as soon as a child begins to speak, one of the first verses we should teach them is:

Devarim 33:4:

תּוֹרָה צִוָּה־לָנוּ מֹשֶׁה מוֹרָשָׁה קְהִלַּת יַעֲקֹב׃

Torah tzivah lanu Moshe, morashah kehilat Yaakov.

The Torah was commanded to us by Moshe, an inheritance of the congregation of Jacob.

The Talmud points out that this idea is actually alluded to in the numerical value of the word Torah itself. תורה equals 611, just two shy of that famous number of mitzvot, 613. Why? The first two of the Ten Commandments are spoken in the first person, directly to us:

1. “I am Hashem your God, Who took you out of Egypt, from the house of slavery.”

2. “You shall have no other gods before Me…”

Starting with the third, God is referred to in the third person:

3. “Do not take the name of Hashem your God in vain, for Hashem will not hold guiltless one who takes His name in vain.”

4. “Remember the Shabbat to sanctify it… because in six days Hashem made the heavens and the earth… and He rested on the seventh day…”

The Talmud explains that the first two were heard directly from God. Mystical sources understand them as embedded in the Jewish consciousness since the national prophetic experience at Sinai. The first is that God has a personal relationship with us through history: the God who took our ancestors out of Egypt is Hashem Elokecha, your God, and that relationship didn’t end with them but continues with us. The second is that giving ultimate power to any other deity or entity violates that relationship.

Everything else came to us through Moshe, a human being, flesh and blood. Through the choices he made in his life, Moshe became an ish Elokim, a man of God, and he has remained one in our consciousness ever since. But he was still an ish, a man. And that man had an enormous impact by dedicating his life to instruction that was accessible and practical, giving each person what they needed.

The essence of instruction is clarity and immediacy for the listener. If someone has never kept Shabbat, I can teach them all its laws. That has real value, because it sets up the target and shows them what it looks like. But that alone isn’t instruction, because the person will inevitably feel incapable of reaching it.

Good instruction, good Torah, helps a person see how to begin moving down the path. It also doesn’t sell them short by implying that a few steps will be enough. It shows them where they are, where they’re capable of going, and how to start getting from one to the other.

Good instruction is like firing an arrow. You have to aim properly. You have to be calm and steady. And you have to put enough tension in the bow for the arrow to reach its target.

As it says in Tehillim:

Tehillim 127:4:

כְּחִצִּים בְּיַד־גִּבּוֹר כֵּן בְּנֵי הַנְּעוּרִים׃

Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are sons born to a man in his youth.

Rashi’s Commentary ibid:

כֵּן בְּנֵי הַנְּעוּרִים. הַתַּלְמִידִים שֶׁאָדָם מַעֲמִיד מִנְּעוּרָיו:

“So are the sons of one’s youth” [means to say,] the disciples that a man sets up in his youth.

We guide our children. We try to aim as best we can. But we also let go and let them fly on their own, trusting our best efforts to hit the target.

This is what we’re dancing about on Simchat Torah. If we’re dancing with the Torah, and dancing in a circle together, we’re on target, and will keep going.

Chag Sameach,

Jack Cohen

Sukkot has made a comeback in the 21st century. What was once considered an obscure holiday to most American Jews is now oddly familiar and cool.

Fun fact: the premier online Jewish library, Sefaria.org was co-founded by Joshua Foer thanks to a Sukkah-building competition, which got him Googling how to make a kosher Sukkah, and wondering how he could make Torah texts accessible to more people (listen to his story here at around 44:00 minutes).

This said, although the word “sukkah” now conjures up the iconic Jewish hut in the minds of many, there are other tracks of meaning running through the word “sukkah” that can change the way we experience it — but only if we can read it and understand it in its original Hebrew.

Protection:

To start, the simplest read of the word sukkah-סוכה comes from the word sochech-סוכך. The verb sochech is identical to the noun schach-סכך, which is the specific word for the organic roof of the sukkah. It means cover, screen off, and shield.1

The sukkah is a shelter, albeit a sort of flimsy shelter compared to the sturdier, permanent homes all of us are blessed to possess.

Imagine that you’re lost in the wilderness, and it’s either scorching hot or cold and starting to rain. How happy you would be to find some branches that can serve as a makeshift shelter? How your eyes would widen as you would spot them there almost waiting for you to find them, and how grateful you would be for something so basic and rudimentary, but so essential for life!

Spiritual Infrared Vision:

The next level of meaning of the word sukkah is its connection to a seemingly unrelated word socheh-סוֹכֶה. Socheh is “to see,” but different from the more common word for seeing, roeh-רואה. Socheh is “to peer” or “gaze” — to look through, and perceive beyond what meets the eye.2

Rabbeinu Bechaye (Spain, 1255–1340), in his profound work Kad HaKemach, draws the connection between the word “sukkah-סוכה” and the name with which Sarah, Abraham’s wife, our foremother, was called in her youth because of her astounding way of seeing past superficial appearances to essence of things. She was called Iska-יִסְכָּה because of her ability to be socha — to look deeper than everyone else.

When we reside in the comforts of our home, we barely see our house or possessions. Our house is so important to us, so foundational for everything, that we take it entirely for granted. But think how amazing is it that in the crisis of being lost in the wilderness, subject to the elements, our vision becomes hyper-attuned to this most basic need for shelter. And when we finally set it up, the walls and the roof, we don’t just see a bunch of sticks. We wouldn’t just see a meager shack and feel bad for ourselves. We would see through it and appreciate God’s love for us, that He allowed us to find exactly what we needed, when we needed it.

It’s exactly in this way that the holiday of Sukkot is meant to transform our vision to the point that it should change the way we perceive the blessings around us all year.

Seeing God:

Finally, the word sukkah-סוכה can be viewed with a sort of infrared vision as a samech-ס and a hei-ה surrounding a kaf-כ and a vav-ו. Samech-Hei-סה is actually the way in Hebrew you would spell out the number 65, and Kaf-Vav-כו is the way you would spell out the number 26.

As you may know, in Hebrew, it’s not that letters have numerical equivalents. In Hebrew, Hebrew letters are numbers. Classically, in Torah books, even today, page numbers have traditionally been numbered with Hebrew letters.

What is the meaning of these two particular numbers, 65 and 26?

Well, 65-סה, is the number that represents one of God’s names, the name Elohim-אלקים, which refers to God’s control and dominion of nature. It refers to the way we often relate to life, which is that we live in a world of cause and effect, consequences, laws of nature that are unbending, and getting what you deserve.

By contrast, the number 26, perhaps more famously, refers to God’s essential Name, yud and hei and vav and hei (י-ה-ו-ה) which connotes God’s essential disposition towards us, which is one of love, patience, and a desire to help us grow, despite the challenges we face in a world that’s otherwise inflexible.

If we can make an effort to suspend our disbelief and entertain the possibility that the Hebrew language is different from other languages, then perhaps we would be open to the possibility that the word sukkah is revealing a deep secret about what the experience of spending a week in a sukkah should do for us.

By leaving our homes and being a little bit closer to nature, we also come a little bit closer to Hashem, His essential love and desire for us. By being and feeling more at the whims of the elements, of potentially being rained upon at any moment — when we don’t get rained on, or when our flimsy sukkah keeps back a drizzle or softens the beating sun, we feel blessed with the good fortune in a way we don’t often feel when we’re in the comfort of our homes.

Lastly, if we put these two numbers back together, 65+26, we get another number, 91, which again, if spelled with Hebrew letters, is tze-צא, the word which means “leave.”

Talmud Sukkah 2a:

וְרָבָא אָמַר…״בַּסּוּכּוֹת תֵּשְׁבוּ שִׁבְעַת יָמִים״. אָמְרָה תּוֹרָה: כׇּל שִׁבְעַת הַיָּמִים צֵא מִדִּירַת קֶבַע וְשֵׁב בְּדִירַת עֲרַאי.

Rave [taught that when the Torah says] “Dwell in sukkot for seven days,” it was telling us “For seven days, leave (צא) the permanent dwelling and move into a temporary dwelling.”

To change the way we see ourselves, the world around us, and the way Hashem is involved in absolutely everything, let’s leave the comfort of our homes for a week, and enter into the world of the sukkah.

Chag Sameach.

Jack

Get ready for Meaning Within, a new way to learn — launching soon.

Meaning Within

Meaning Within is a place for deep learning Torah.

By Rabbi Jack Cohen

There are certain words, which are used constantly in Judaism, that are seldom used in the English language. For example, the word “mercy” is not a word I remember using all that much before I started paying more attention to Judaism as an adult.

This is, of course, aside from the childhood game, aptly called “Mercy,” which involves interlocking fingers with an opponent, and competing over who could most quickly inflict pain on the other until he squealed “mercy!” begging for the other to stop. Based on this usage, “mercy” refers to feeling bad enough for someone to cease and desist from whatever pain or difficulty you might be causing him.

The Hebrew word for mercy, rachamim-רחמים, is used throughout Torah literature, very often this time of year, a time for asking for God’s mercy:

Intro to 13 Attributes of Mercy:

…אֵל מֶלֶךְ יוֹשֵׁב עַל כִּסֵּא רַחֲמִים

God, King Who sits on the Throne of mercy*…*

13 Attributes of Mercy:

…יְ-הֹ-וָ-ה יְ-הֹ-וָ-ה אֵל רַחוּם וְחַנּוּן

Hashem | Hashem, Merciful and Gracious God…

But what is mercy, really?

Is there more to it than just “feeling bad?”

Is that what we’re asking God for — to feel bad for us?

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Hebrew, as we’ve seen throughout the Language of Life Series, is a system whose Divine architecture reveals its Divine meaning. A closer look at the Hebrew word for mercy provides as vivid a metaphor as one could ask for.

The word rachamim-רחמים has as its root rechem-רחם, a mother’s womb.

True mercy is not about “feeling bad” for another per se, but rather feeling love and an inextricable connection, as one does for her own child. It is the feeling of one’s own desires enmeshed with those of the other because his existence is an an extension of her own. Maybe the English word “compassion” is a better translation:

Yishaya 49:15:

הֲתִשְׁכַּח אִשָּׁה עוּלָהּ מֵרַחֵם בֶּן־בִּטְנָהּ גַּם־אֵלֶּה תִשְׁכַּחְנָה וְאָנֹכִי לֹא אֶשְׁכָּחֵךְ׃

Can a woman forget her infant? Could she [ever] not have compassion on the child of her womb? Even if these may forget, I will not forget you [says Hashem to Israel].

The metaphor of the womb runs deeper, though.

The purpose of a womb is to grow a human being in it. It’s not to keep it there indefinitely. The baby needs to be prepared for its own “day of judgment,” otherwise known as birth, on which it must face a much bigger, colder reality that is far less amenable to it’s development than the warm, cozy space it presently finds itself in.

Rachamim, then, is not about evading reality or evading life’s consequences, but preparing us for them, with the understanding that if we face reality too soon, too fast, we won’t make it — rendering the whole process absurd. Whereas the modality of judgement demands justice hayom-היום, today, the modality of mercy says that judgment will be more fairly served tomorrow, machar-מחר (interestingly the same letters as rechem-רחם). Mercy, then, does not contradict the insistence of justice, it just asks that it be deferred to a later date when the person facing judgment will be more ready for it.

Rachamim, then, is not about evading reality or evading consequences, but preparing us for them…

In the same way: punishing a child before he has had a chance to learn a lesson, or firing an employee before he’s had a chance to learn from a mistake — while the parent or employer may believe that he is serving justice — is itself unfair. Fairness and justice actually demand mercy. They demand a process that gives the person enough time to stand in judgment on their own two feet.1

This understanding of mercy can help us better understand and appreciate what’s happening this time of year:

A question that often comes up is: Why does Rosh Hashanah come ten days before Yom Kippur? If Rosh Hashanah is the day of Judgment, and Yom Kippur is the day dedicated to teshuvah, repentance, through which we receive forgiveness and atonement, the paradigm seems inverted.

We are used to being tested at the end of a period of preparation, not the other way around. In school, studying precedes the test. At work, the employee “ups his game” before his annual review. But when it comes to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, it’s odd that we are first tested, and only then have a chance to prepare.

What is this pattern, and what does it teach us about mercy?

The pattern is actually found laced into the very fabric of reality as it’s described at the beginning of the Torah.

Love and mercy are associated with God’s essential proper name, spelled י-ה-ו-ה. Hashem’s most essential agenda is our personal flourishing. This is in contrast to His second-most-often-used-name, Elohim—א-להים, which is associated with judgment, rules, and consequences, and seems to place obstacles in the way of our flourishing.2 But, of course, the two names represent the two interacting modalities we mentioned above. He loves us (י-ה-ו-ה), and therefore He holds us to a standard that challenges us (א-להים). The challenges of life are calibrated to bring out our potential.

The creation of the universe is initially narrated using exclusively God’s name Elohim because the laws of nature are in and of themselves unbending. Gravity, if you haven’t noticed, has no mercy for those who test it.

This is why there is no mention in the first chapter of the Torah of God’s essential name, י-ה-ו-ה. It appears only after the seven days of creation are completed and the Torah begins to tell the story of creation anew, with human beings at the center of the story. And there, it appears in conjunction with and prior to the name Elohim:

Bereishit 2:4:

אֵלֶּה תוֹלְדוֹת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְהָאָרֶץ בְּהִבָּרְאָם בְּיוֹם עֲשׂוֹת יְ-הֹ-וָ-ה אֱ-לֹהִים אֶרֶץ וְשָׁמָיִם׃

These are the generations of the heaven and of the earth when they were created, in the day that Hashem Elohim made the earth and the heavens.

The sages explain this shift memorably and concisely:

Rashi on Bereishit 1:1, based on Midrash Rabbah 12:15:

Initially, it occurred to God to create the world with strict justice, but He saw that the world could not exist [under such ruthless consequences], so He put the attribute of mercy first and partnered it with the attribute of justice.

Why did God want pure justice in the first place? Didn’t He know that it wouldn’t work on its own?

God’s “initial thought” reflects His ideal desire. Challenges and consequences to our actions are good. They bring out our best. An athlete who wants to become world-class needs a coach who is relentless. A professional who wants to achieve excellence needs the high standards and accountability of a great manager. God ideally wants us to be pushed to our full potentials.

But without room to make mistakes, learn from them, pivot, and try again, there is no point in even trying.

That is where mercy, rachamim, comes in. The purpose of rachamim is not to cancel the strict standards of justice, but rather to stretch, delay, and diminish its consequences long enough for us to grow through them.3

If we were to live in a world without consequences, our lives would be of no consequence. God, in His care for us and His commitment to our growth and development, wants us to face judgment. Rachamim doesn’t contradict this. It merely creates the space and time for us to develop to the point that we’ll be ready for it.4

A womb.

And yet, at the edge of every womb is the moment of birth. It’s where the rubber hits the road. The moment of truth.

Rosh Hashanah, as the machzor says, is the day of harat olam-הרת עולם, the conception of the world.

We’re not supposed to be ready for Rosh Hashanah.

People ask each other every year, “Are you ready for Rosh Hashanah?” The honest answer is “no.” No one’s ever ready for Rosh Hashanah. Rosh Hashanah is the shock to the system of knowing that judgment — birth — is coming. Without that shock, we don’t even start to get ready.

The period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is that period of mercy in which we have to get moving, get going, and get our acts together. And the day that we’re supposed to fully absorb just how profound God’s mercy and love for us is, is Yom Kippur.

Mercy is not, as I had thought, just begging for the consequences I’d earned to be lifted. It’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card. True mercy, rachamim is the chance for me to get ready — a chance for me to actually get myself out of the hole I’ve dug myself into.

Note the otherwise incomprehensible line from Psalms:

Tehillim 130:4:

כִּי־עִמְּךָ הַסְּלִיחָה לְמַעַן תִּוָּרֵא׃

With You, God, is forgiveness, so that we can revere You.

It sounds like nonsense. Because God forgives us, that’s why we revere and fear Him? How does that make sense? If someone is forgiving, looks the other way, and doesn’t actually act on your mistakes, that should make you fear him less.

But with our newfound understanding of mercy, it makes sense.

What gives a person true reverence is not the feeling that punishment is coming, that no deed goes unpunished, and that there’s nothing we can do about it. That produces resignation. Maybe fear of punishment, but not reverence.

Reverence comes from being given the space to grow precisely because something real is eventually going to be demanded of you. The challenges each of us face are calibrated for us. That’s truly scary because success is frighteningly within reach.

The mercy of begging the other to stop twisting our wrists isn’t it. True mercy is asking for the space we need to succeed in the challenges that will make us into the people we know we are capable of becoming.

Rachamim-רחמים is the space, the womb, the rechem-רחם that we ask to stay in, for just a bit more time — until tomorrow, machar-מחר — to be ready.

Gmar chatima tova,

Jack

The Hebrew word hayom-היום, “today,” appears more in the book of Devarim (Deuteronomy) than it does in the entire rest of the Torah combined. Its repetition marks it as one of the motifs that runs through Moshe’s final speeches, delivered in the last month or so of his life, which comprise virtually the entirety of his final book.

We have a quite arresting oral tradition of how to read this word “today.”

Every time it says “today,” it is referring to today, as in today, today.

Meaning: we should make every effort to experience the instructive words of Torah we are reading as if they were being communicated to us in a live feed, in the present moment.1

While this is certainly an intriguing way to read the word “today,” why did our sages take the liberty to take it out of its plain meaning?

Take, for example, what Moshe famously said in the Shema:

Devarim 6:6:

וְהָיוּ הַדְּבָרִים הָאֵלֶּה אֲשֶׁר אָנֹכִי מְצַוְּךָ הַיּוֹם עַל־לְבָבֶךָ׃

These words that I command you today should be upon your hearts.

The word “today” is unnecessary. Everything that has ever been said on any given day was said “today” — on that particular day. So what is added by saying, “I am telling you today?” Whenever we speak, we speak that day!

The answer is because Moshe wanted the words he was sharing to be heard — even in the far off future — with same relevance, urgency and vitality with which they first emerged from his mouth. Moshe, who is understood through the mystical lens as embodying the energy of eternity (netzach-נצח), was acutely aware that if people didn’t learn to see God’s wisdom with fresh eyes, His words would quickly decay into antiquated relics of the past gathering dust behind a glass case.

I think of the Torah scrolls, sidurim, menorahs, mezuzahs displayed as artifacts in old synagogues in Europe and North Africa that I’ve visited, which make it seem like Judaism is a religion of a people long extinct.2 In these museums, the Judaism you and I know to be an electrifying way to live our lives is reduced to mere shells of the past.

Here is one classic rabbinic teaching in this vein:

Sifrei 33:

“These words I command you today.” Don’t regard these words as an outdated imperial decree, which no one care about. Rather, [think about them] as a fresh decree, which everyone races to read.

This idea is actually contained in the deceptively simple Hebrew word for “today,” hayom-היום.

The prefix ha-ה means “the,” and yom-יום means “day.”

Today is THE day! Every other day is just a day.

We are fast approaching big days, “awesome days” (yamim noraim-ימים נוראים), and no doubt they are. But perhaps they are meant to awaken in us awe for any given day we have the merit to be alive and make decisions in. There is no day in the history of the universe that is more today than today. Today is always the day.

Here is a well known teaching from Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810), who would often try to awaken his students to what he saw as a key consciousness to living a good life:

Likutei Moharan 272:

This is an important rule in the service of God:

One should focus only on today. Whether with regard to his livelihood and personal needs, he should not think from one day to the next, as is brought in the holy books.

And with regard to his serving God, he should not consider anything beyond this day and this moment. For when a person wants to enter the service of God, it can seem to him like a heavy burden. He feels that he cannot possibly bear such a heavy load. However, when a person considers that he has only this day to deal with, he will find it no burden at all.

In addition, a person should not procrastinate from one day to the next, saying, “I’ll start tomorrow. Tomorrow I’ll pray more attentively and with the right enthusiasm,” and likewise with any other action in the service [of his Creator]. A person’s world consists only of the present day and the present moment. Tomorrow is a different world entirely.

This perspective on the present moment features in the Torah reading of the first day of Rosh Hashana.

It records the prayer of Abraham’s first son Yishmael, the progenitor of the Arab world, when he was only fifteen years old, and faced what seemed like an imminent death in the parched desert. The verse says that “God heeded the cry of the boy where he was.” Again, isn’t a person always “wherever he is?”

Rashi on Bereishit 21:17:

A person is judged only according to their current deeds [“where he is”], not according to what they will do in the future [“where he will be”].

The fact that Yishmael’s descendants would torment Jews was irrelevant to the way God would receive his prayers on the day he uttered them.3

Rosh Hashanah runs the risk of being dragged in two directions away from the present moment.

On this Day of Judgment, it is easy to be pulled backwards into the past to ruminate on our could-ofs, would-ofs, and should-ofs. Teshuva, often translated as “repentance,” can easily get ensnared in the past, saddling us with remorse that keeps us stuck instead of moving forward.4

Similarly, our minds can zoom into the future, planning, preparing and attempting to fix our mistakes so that we have a better year. While solution-focused forward-thinking is certainly healthier and more productive than being stuck in the past, this is also not the purpose of Rosh Hashana. Aside from the practical constraint of there not being much time in days full of prayer in synagogue and festive meals at home, Rosh Hashana is simply not about rushing to fix the problems.5 It is about being present. It is about embodying the present day with our best selves, and to allow this to mark the standard we aspire to live up to in the year to come.

A friend of mine, a truly special person, was diagnosed with brain cancer. A therapist asked him to describe what the ideal day of his life would look like — a random Tuesday, knowing his Tuesdays were numbered. He described it. This person pushed him to work out every detail about how his day would go. How he would speak to people? How he would relate to his wife? How he would spend time with his child? What bad habits would he avoid? How would he relish every moment?

This conversation changed his life. I try to let it change mine.

Machzor of Rosh Hashanah Musaf:

היום הרת עולם

Today is the day of the conception of the world.

Shanah Tova!

Jack

The essential Jewish mantra is not a prayer, but a meditation.1

Once in the morning. Once in the evening. Once before we go to sleep. Once before we pass on to the next world. Whenever we feel in danger.

We recite the words, with eyes closed:

שמע ישראל ה׳ א-להינו ה׳ אחד

Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad.

Listen, Israel: Hashem is our God. Hashem is One.

In past XL posts, we’ve studied the meaning of these consequential six words. Today, I just want to focus on the first one: שמע — shema.

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Ostensibly, it means “hear” or “listen.”

But as we’ve said repeatedly in our Language of Life series, translating between any two languages—and certainly translating God’s language into a human language — is like flattening a flower between the pages of a book, to borrow an analogy from Abraham Joshua Heschel. You preserve something of it, but so much is lost in the process.

In English, the verb “to hear” means to audibly perceive sounds. “To listen” implies added focus and intention to truly hear those sounds — and perhaps even carries a connotation of obeying — as in, “you listen to me, young man.”

In principle, if you hear something once, it should be enough. So why must we repeat it several times every day?

Why is part of the mantra itself the injunction to “listen?”

And why is it that after 120 years, on our deathbeds, the last thing we ask of ourselves is to listen?

I want to share three additional tracks of meaning in the Hebrew word Shema beyond what we normally hear in the words “hear” and “listen.”

1. The first track is to discern — to hone in on the sound within the noise.

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, in his beautiful contemporary work Jewish Meditation, explains an ancient mystical understanding of how the individual letters of the word שמע harmonize to produce its meaning.

Sefer Yetzirah, attributed to our ancestor and national founder Abraham, and generally understood to be the oldest extant work of Kabbalah, teaches that the letter ש (shin) makes a “shhhhh” noise like the chaotic sound of radio static.

It is not a coincidence that shin is also the defining sound of the Hebrew word for fire, אש (eish). Fire is the thermal version of radio static: air molecules vibrating violently, with no rhyme or reason.

Its diametric opposite is the second letter, מ (mem), which sounds unmistakably like the Hebrew word for water, מים (mayim). Similarly, the sound produced by an extended memmmm is a smooth, constant hummmm.2

One can immediately sense the contrast between these two sounds by seeing their waveforms next to each other. In fact, the first even looks somewhat like fire, while the second looks like waves on water.

Rabbi Kaplan explains that listening isn’t just hearing the sounds, or even making an effort to hear the sounds — both of which are certainly part of listening, but just the beginning.

שמיעה (shmiya), true listening, requires mentally sifting through the static and noise to discern the frequency that one is trying to tune his mind to.

Someone once explained to me that although there is a nonverbal benefit to taking someone aside to have a one-on-one conversation in a quieter place, neurologically, when people speak in a louder, busier space, both brains have to fire more intensely and listen more intently. Once both parties get past the distractions, they lock into an even more deeply connected, attentive state than they would otherwise.

The third and final letter of the word shema-שמע is ע (ayin-עין), which means “eye,” but more precisely connotes looking deeply. For example, in-depth Torah study is called עיון (iyun), and a wellspring that draws water from the depths is called a מעיין (ma’ayan) or עין (ein, think Ein Gedi). After one has tuned into the channel he was looking for, he must go deep to truly listen, which leads us to the second additional track of meaning:

2. Understanding.

It’s clear from the Oral Tradition recorded in the Talmud that Torah sages have always understood that the word Shema means not just to hear sounds, and not even just to discern them through the noise, but to understand the message being communicated.

Talmud Bavli, Berachot 13a:

חֲכָמִים אוֹמְרִים: בְּכָל לָשׁוֹן…אָמַר קְרָא: ״שְׁמַע״ — בְּכָל לָשׁוֹן שֶׁאַתָּה שׁוֹמֵעַ

the Rabbis say: Shema may be recited in any language you understand…The verse states: “Hear, Israel” therefore, one may recite Shema in any language that you can hear and understand.

If you think about it, this isn’t just a quirk of Hebrew semantics. It’s an extension of what listening actually is.

If a person is traveling in a foreign country and sits in a café, he may be hearing dozens of conversations around him. He may even focus his attention on one of them and successfully make out the sounds. But if he can’t hear the meaning within those sounds, he isn’t really hearing in any meaningful sense at all. It’s all background noise.3

When the little bones and tiny hairs in our inner ear vibrate, we perceive vibrations in the air. But only when we understand the meaning encoded in those vibrations are we listening with our minds.

Human beings speak not merely to get another person’s attention and be heard, but to be understood.

It’s for this reason that the sages of the Talmud rule that one can fulfill the mitzvah of reciting the Shema in any language he understands — with the caveat that he actually understands it. Moreover, when reciting it in Hebrew, certainly that first line which explicitly urges us to listen, the one reciting it must understand the meaning of the words in order to fulfill his obligation.

True listening demands understanding.

And one can always understand more deeply than he understood last time.

It’s for this reason that the second paragraph of the Shema tells us:

וְהָיָה אִם שָׁמֹעַ תִּשְׁמְעוּ אֶל מִצְוֹתַי לְאַהֲבָה אֶת ה׳ אֱ-לֹהיכֶם וּלְעָבְדוֹ בְּכָל לְבַבְכֶם וּבְכָל נַפְשְׁכֶם

“…im shamoa tishme’u…l’ahava et Hashem…”

If you listen and keep listening…to love Hashem.

It’s quite clear that what is being asked for is not mere obedience and mechanical observance. Just the opposite. Here the point is to fulfill the mitzvot out of love, and to come to love even more deeply through their fulfillment.

How?

Through ever-deepening understanding.

Hence the unusual double phrasing: אִם שָׁמֹעַ תִּשְׁמעו — im shamoa tishme’u.

The Talmud plays on precisely this repetition:

אִם שָׁמוֹעַ — תִּשְׁמַע. וְאִם לָאו — לֹא תִּשְׁמַע. דָּבָר אַחֵר: אִם שָׁמוֹעַ — בְּיָשָׁן, תִּשְׁמַע — בְּחָדָש

“If you listen”—then “you will listen.” And if not, you will not listen.

Another interpretation: if you listen to the old [if you return to and review what you have already learned] then you will be able to listen to the new.

The paradox is beautiful. We tend to think that once we have heard something, we are finished with it. I heard that already. Old news. I know that.

The Talmud suggests the reverse.

If you really heard it, really tuned into its meaning, you’ll hear even more the next time.

And this leads to the third, and deepest, track of meaning in the word Shema:

3. To accept upon oneself that which he has heard and understood.

One can certainly get married, for instance, and say the words:

הרי את מקודשת לי בטבעת זו כדת משה וישראל

“Behold, you are sacred to me through this ring according to the law of Moshe and Israel.”

And yet, in saying those words, not fully accept upon himself the entire gamut of responsibility that marriage entails—physically, emotionally, financially.

Perhaps this is why it has become popular to renew one’s vows some time after the original marriage ceremony.

Why would people feel the need to renew his vows? They’ve already proclaimed them. Was there something wrong with them the first time?

No.

But when they uttered those words, they were young and somewhat dumb. Even thought they likely understood what they were saying, how deeply did they accept it upon themselves?

This is why we repeat the Shema multiple times a day, and at spiritual junctures in which we have to take stock of our lives in their entirety.

There’s a lot of noise in the world, and the exercise of honing in on that which is most important is not a trivial recitation of some ancient words for good luck.

Additionally, to whatever degree we understood last night what life is about — the One that runs through everything — we can certainly try to understand it better this morning, and even better tonight.

And lastly, whatever it is that we understood, the true test of our understanding is not in our minds. It should become apparent in the way we live our lives.

If we truly understood what we’re looking for, how could that understanding not define us through and through?

This is what it means to listen.

And perhaps this helps us hear more clearly, and more deeply, words in this week’s parsha that we might otherwise have glossed over:

Devarim 28:1:

…וְהָיָה אִם־שָׁמוֹעַ תִּשְׁמַע בְּקוֹל ה׳ אֱלֹקיךָ לִשְׁמֹר לַעֲשׂוֹת אֶת־כׇּל־מִצְוֺתָיו אֲשֶׁר אָנֹכִי מְצַוְּךָ הַיּוֹם…

“And it will be, if you listen and keep listening to the voice of Hashem your God, to observe and do all of His commandments that I command you today…”

And then:

28:2:

וּבָאוּ עָלֶיךָ כָּל־הַבְּרָכוֹת הָאֵלֶּה וְהִשִּׂיגֻךָ כִּי תִשְׁמַע בְּקוֹל ה׳ אֱלֹקיךָ

“All these blessings will come upon you and overtake you, if you listen to the voice of Hashem your God.”

If you listen.

If you sift through the noise.

If you understand.

If you accept what you have understood deeply enough that it begins to shape the way you live.

And then tomorrow morning, we close our eyes and do it all over again.

The Shema is particularly the refrain we return to this time of year, but so is the sounding of the shofar.

Perhaps the mitzvah of hearing the shofar — לשמוע קול שופר — is practice listening to the simplest of sounds, so we can listen to all of the messages in our lives waiting to be heard.

When I was in college, I majored in physics and philosophy.

I wasn’t particularly good at physics, but I really enjoyed being able to mathematically predict where billiard balls would go, what particles would emerge from a high-speed collision, and how much time slows down on a rocket flight — I stuck it out.

People often tell me that philosophy and physics “seem so different,” but actually, science is just the most successful branch of Western philosophy.1

Science knows many orders more about the world today than it did even a century ago, and unfathomably more than it did millennia ago. In contrast, Western philosophy knows far less than it thought it knew when it began, guns blazing, confident that it could discover the fundamental truths of the universe using “pure reason” alone.

What philosophers discovered instead is how limited reason is for knowing anything about objective reality.2 Through reason, we can know for certain only what we could observe and measure, but not how we should live our lives. This is the intellectual backdrop to the fairly common notion Westerners hold today that ideas are divided between scientific truth and religious fictions.3

It’s fairly widespread to hold a similar dichotomy within Judaism itself. Some parts of Judaism are considered “rational,” while others are labeled “irrational/mystical/unknowable.” The epitome of unknowability is the namesake of this week’s parasha, the chok-חוק, a legal decree that has no apparent explanation.

Bamidbar 19:2:

זֹאת חֻקַּת הַתּוֹרָה אֲשֶׁר־צִוָּה ה׳ לֵאמֹר דַּבֵּר  אֶל־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וְיִקְחוּ אֵלֶיךָ פָרָה אֲדֻמָּה תְּמִימָה אֲשֶׁר אֵין־בָּהּ מוּם אֲשֶׁר לֹא־עָלָה עָלֶיהָ עֹל

This is the [quintessential] chok-decree of the Torah, which Hashem has commanded you to say to the people. Speak to the Israelites and have them take for you [Moshe], a totally red-haired, unblemished cow, upon which no yoke was ever laid…

The text continues to enumerate the mystifying details of the purifying process that uses the ashes of an incinerated red cow diluted in water.

The 613 mitzvot are often categorized as mishpatim, eidot and chukim, as the “wise son” asks at the Seder table:

Devarim 6:20:

?מָה הָעֵדֹת וְהַחֻקִּים וְהַמִּשְׁפָּטִים אֲשֶׁר צִוָּה ה׳ אֱלֹקינוּ אֶתְכֶם…

What are the testimonies (eidot), rules (mishpatim) and decrees (chukim) that Hashem our God commanded you?

Typically,

• mishpatim refer to laws that are entirely rational (e.g. don’t steal or murder),

• chukim, as we mentioned above, entirely irrational (e.g. don’t mix milk and meat), and

• eidot give testimony through their practice of a historical event or some idea that should be commemorated (e.g. Passover and Shabbat).

The standard understanding is that these three buckets are completely independent silos.

It turns out that this strict division between rational and irrational is not an accurate depiction of Jewish law — or science, for that matter.4

King Solomon was known to be “wiser than any person,” and yet regarding the parah adumah (the red cow) he writes:

Kohelet 7:23:

אָמַרְתִּי אֶחְכָּמָה וְהִיא רְחוֹקָה מִמֶּנִּי…

…I said [to myself] I will become wise, but it is distant from me.

Bamidbar Rabbah 19:3:

Solomon said: Regarding all these [areas of wisdom] I was able to comprehend, but the portion of the red heifer I probed, asked, and deliberated; “I said: I will become wise, but it is distant from me.”

The parah adumah, the red cow is not described as irrational, but rather “rekhoka” — far from him.

Given that the red cow is the quintessential chok, we can infer that all other mitzvot exist on a continuum in which some are “closer” to our lived experience and therefore more immediately comprehensible, and some less intuitively comprehensible, and therefore intellectually “farther.”

Mishpatim are certainly easier to grasp than chukim. Anyone can easily understand that a society that essentially looks the other way when theft occurs — unravels (think: San Francisco and Los Angeles).5

One click further from our intuitions: the prohibited activities on Shabbat are not the activities one would think to refrain from to have a “day of rest,” but once one keeps Shabbat for a few weeks in a row, he starts to understand their wisdom, and why merely “not going to office” is not enough.

Finally, furthest from our intuitions, not wearing garments woven with wool and linen (shatnez) or refraining from cooking/eating milk and meat together sound completely foreign, and one would struggle to come up with a rational explanation. In his radical essay on vegetarianism, Rabbi Abraham Yitzchak Kook speculates how they will become self-evident in the future, when we better understand the differences and similarities between humans and animals.6 It’s not that they are illogical laws, but rather that they are counterintuitive because they have a deeper logic.7

Ironically, modern science reveals that the natural world works the same way. The logic of the universe isn’t flat. At high gravity, high speeds, and small scales, the logic warps. My college professor of Modern Physics warned us not to “try to picture anything” — because the pictures in our minds are built from experience at human scales, and human scales are just one thin layer of reality. As physics pushed into these new domains, a deeper logic emerged beneath the familiar one.

Those who haven’t studied science will say quantum mechanics and relativity are “really deep” — and they’re right, but they don’t know the half of it. Those who have studied them know just how far the rabbit hole actually goes.

Both the universe and the Torah were created with God’s infinite wisdom. One might expect them to be incomprehensible — products of a depth so far beyond us that our minds couldn’t gain purchase. But the opposite turns out to be true. Everything has a logic. The surface is genuinely accessible to human reason, and that’s not a compromise or a simplification — it’s a gift. But the rabbit hole of God’s wisdom has no bottom. The deeper we go, the more clearly we can see how much deeper it gets.

I’m sorry I haven’t written in a while. Stay tuned, for my new venture, Meaning Within. I’ll explain how it will work in the coming weeks.

I recently heard a podcast with mega-coach and serial entrepreneur Tony Robbins in which he identified the three decisions he sees people make every moment of their lives:

1. What do you focus on?

2. What does it mean?

3. What are you going do about it?

We often think about “life decisions” as major forks in the road like career or marriage choices, and weighty ethical dilemmas, but from this perspective, any moment of any day of your life is likely full of choices to make.

• What of the many things you could focus on will you focus on?

• How will you choose to interpret what you’ve chosen to look at?

• How will you choose to alter your behavior as a result of your interpretation?

Since the most important difference between the artificial intelligence (AI) of machines and the real intelligence (RI) of humans is the agency humans possess and the identity that is forged through those choices, these three domains of choice can be seen as emblematic of our humanity.

I want to suggest that they correspond to the three Hebrew words:

• khokhma-חכמה

• bina-בינה, and

• da’at-דעת,

the three central words for intelligence.1

Before we continue, an important disclaimer:

The purpose of this post and my last one is not to prophesy an imminent AI armageddon, nor to discourage its use. My intent is to use the Divinely precise language of Hebrew to identify the uniquely human dimensions of intelligence, which are more important than ever for us to recognize and cultivate. The goal is that we preserve and deepen our RI so that we can use AI to amplify our positive impact on the world without losing ourselves in the process.2

OK, here we go:

1. What Do You Focus On? (khokhma-חכמה)

This was our topic last post. The world is big and complicated. At any given time, all people have multiple things going on and must choose what they focus on. Life is constantly demanding from us that we distinguish between what’s important and what’s more important.3 If we don’t learn to do this, we will instinctively chase the closest, shiniest object.

Especially in the looming “Age of Abundance,” our modern world has made this work more difficult and more vital. Due to our overwhelming access to information, goods and services, combined with algorithms ingeniously trained to irresistibly put them in front of us at all times, we now bear even more responsibility in discerning what we should be pursuing and when’s the right time to pursue it.

This ability of know what we need and appreciate when we find it is called in Hebrew khokhma-חכמה. The Zohar teaches us that this is alluded to in the letters that make up khokhma-חכמה which can be reordered to spell koakh mah-כח מה, the “power of ‘what?’” Modern technology gives its users access to the entire universe, but it is the user who must now more then ever, choose what he’s looking for, and care enough to look in the first place. AI does not solve the wisdom problem for us. It amplifies it.

What else makes human intelligence real intelligence?

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2. What Does it Mean? (Bina-בינה)

The appreciation of knowledge is what fuels people to seek out and absorb ideas from the world around them, but what’s meant to happen after they have done so?

“I found the information I was looking for…what am I supposed to do with it?”

My father has mentioned to me on multiple occasions that he has hired graduates from the fanciest of Ivy League universities, who produce beautiful slide decks with complex mathematical analyses to back them up, but too often, when he asks them “what does it all mean?,” they don’t know what he’s asking them for.

The problem is that for most people, school was entirely about the acquisition of knowledge. We listened to teachers talk. We took notes. We crammed, took tests, cranked out papers, rinsed, and repeated for two decades or so.

Technological changes over the last 30 years have for the most part obliterated this model. Students tend to feel, now more than ever, that they can just listen to recordings at 2x speed, watch a YouTube or Khan Academy video, or just ChatGPT to get the content they need.

Let’s say that they’re right.4 They can get to the information they need. What would be the next step? What is one meant to do with a new piece of information he’s learned? In Hebrew, the word for this next step is bina-בינה. Bina is what deepens, broadens, and enriches understanding with insight.5 Bina is the process of meaning-making.

Richard Feynman, one of the greatest physicists and teachers of the 20th century, explained that most intelligent people are satisfied with merely “knowing things.” What makes truly brilliant people brilliant is not that they’re necessarily smarter, but that they consistently ask themselves and their teachers, “OK fine, but what does this mean???”

Whereas wisdom (khokhma) is the absorption of ideas, understanding (bina) develops only through the digestion of those ideas. I can watch a video on how to fix my car’s engine, but that does not mean I will understand how it works, or why I would be fixing a particular problem in a certain way and not any other. To get to bina, I must question every step along the way. There is no shortcut to understanding how an engine works without breaking it apart into its pieces, and putting it back together. This is why the word “bina-בינה” shares the same root letters as “boneh-בונה,” which means “build.” Bina can only emerge from a person deconstructing and reconstructing things and ideas.

It’s for this reason that making mistakes along the way are required to arrive at insight. Your mistakes are your tuition in the school of insight.6

While AI mimics this process of trial and error when it’s being trained, it never arrives at meaning — only at a semantic structure that is meaningful to humans who unpack it. The model’s mistakes along the way are also meaningless because there is no self behind the model to suffer through those mistakes, which renders the model’s achievements meaningless as well. This was recently noted by OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman in his comments about AI art.

It is this process of working through an idea, embodying it, experiencing it, contemplating why it is the way it is, asking why isn’t it any other way, misunderstanding it on the way to understanding it, figuring out how it applies in other areas — that produces the quintessentially human bina that is the source of meaning in our lives.

3. What are You Going to Do About it? (Da’at-דעת)

The hallmark of maturity according to Jewish law is not khokhma or bina, but a third thing called da’at. Da’at is your connection to the heart of the matter, your sense of why it matters, and what you are going to do about it. A person can be brilliant in his curiosity and focus, and profoundly insightful in his understanding of its meaning, but if he does not know how he should act as a result — or knows, but doesn’t actually do so — he is essentially a child.7

The final stage of real intelligence is the integration of knowledge into your perspective, experience, behavior and identity. This downwards vector from the brain into the body is what is known as da’at.

This integration of what we know in our heads into our muscle memory is symbolized by the straps of the head tefillin that form a “ד“ for “דעת“ near the brain stem and flow down from there to our belly buttons and loins, representing the merging of our wisdom with our most basic and primal faculties.

“Real intelligence” must ultimately be judged by our actions, not our published academic papers or lip service. The more educated we are, the more our actions should reflect what we’ve learned.

Da’at is where we most clearly can see that artificial intelligence is eminently useful but inescapably artificial. Models have no skin in the game. They don’t have to live up to anything they say. They don’t feel bad when they’ve hallucinated. They don’t have to defend why they gave you a different answer to your prompt than they did to me with the same prompt. They don’t have any true opinion because they don’t bear any responsibility. They can’t bear responsibility because they don’t truly exist as an entity, and therefore have no identity. They are merely models of human reasoning.

We, however, possess all of these. We have a whole lot of skin in the game. We are taken to task when we don’t live up to what we say we will. As we should. We are called out for saying one thing to one person and another thing to someone else. We are expected to form opinions, and take actions based on those opinions. For this, we bear responsibility, and through this we forge our identities.

AI can really help us, but it cannot and will not replace us. Perhaps most importantly, AI will help us come to know who we are and what we are capable of — if we are wise enough to see it.

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I first realized that we had a major problem on our hands in the fall of 2012. I had just returned to the US to serve as a rabbi for college students after six years of studying Talmud and Jewish philosophy in Jerusalem, and I was experiencing some culture shock — in the culture I was raised in.

The community I had spent that prior chapter of my life has an attitude towards technology that ranged from “suspicious” to “antagonistic.” Part of this aversion was cultural. Technology is seen by most of the Ultra Orthodox Jewish community in Israel as opening the doors wide to influences that are considered dangerously seductive, particularly to young people.

The other part, however, is principled. Torah study sits at the sacred center of the Orthodox world. Taking a shortcut in learning could be compared to offering a sacrifice from stolen goods.

If you didn’t invest effort to acquire it, how can it be considered yours to offer?

Learning is meant to be hard.1 And hard it was.

There were practically no shortcuts available to us in my yeshiva2.

The fonts of the Talmud come in three sizes: tiny, tinier, and tiniest. Its pages are filled with footnotes and sidenotes, commentaries, and commentaries on commentaries. My flip phone was obviously not equipped with Google Translate, and certainly not with ChatGPT. I had nothing except a thick, physical dictionary to help me break down the dense Aramaic vocabulary devoid of vowels or punctuation.

There were no CliffNotes to the Talmud (thank you, Cliff for getting me through high school and college). And if you’re wondering: what about the ubiquitous Artscroll translation of the Talmud? At that time, it was considered contraband in those hallowed halls.

It doesn’t help that the legal cases that the Talmud deals with are, at first glance, abstruse and archaic. And most challenging for me, the Talmud’s logic is endlessly layered, ever-branching into diverging opinions, and opinions on those opinions. To be honest, after 20 years, I still find Talmud as dizzying as it is dazzling.

Nothing about the external packaging of the Talmud is alluring. I’ve come to absolutely love it, but back then, the only thing pulling me to study it was the millennia-old assurance that there was life-changing meaning to be found in its study.

Any delicious whiff of Divine meaning I had gleaned from the more accessible, contemporary English books on Judaism was sourced in the Talmud and Zohar, and the rich Hebrew library that surrounds them. I felt that I owed it to myself to push through my deep-seated aversion to Talmud that I had developed in my early teenage years. I would never forgive myself for not trying as an adult to break through to the pleasure of learning Talmud.

At some point, it became clear to me that I would only find meaning and relevance in the Talmud through my own concentration, effort, and contemplation. My teachers, supportive as they were, couldn’t concentrate or contemplate on my behalf. The best they could do was answer my questions, correct my mistaken assumptions, and guide me through the infinitely ornate maze of Jewish texts.

After two decades of cramming my way through some of the top public and private schools in the country, I had arrived at the oldest, continuous educational tradition in the world without any way to hack it. My success or failure as a Talmud learner would depend wholly on my own effort.

Back to the fall of 2012 and realizing that the old fashioned, black-and-white Jews of Jerusalem might be onto something:

It was my first full-time job, and I was being onboarded by Rabbi Shmuel Lynn at the University of Pennsylvania. I watched carefully as he led the opening session of his “Maimonides Fellowship,” a 10-part “Intro to Judaism” course that he would recruit for through a combination of charm and a modest stipend that students would “earn” upon completion. After warming up the crowd with some jokes and pop culture references, Rabbi Lynn asked the group to turn to the person next to them and together come up with a definition of "wisdom.”

A third of them instinctively pulled out their phones and Googled “wisdom.”

Wide-eyed, I realized that I was witnessing the beginning of the end of wisdom as we knew it. Even wisdom had been reduced to mere information.

Increasingly, it is dawning on people that while the first two industrial revolutions that spanned from the 18th century through the early 20th century began the process of replacing the human body, the technological revolutions of the 20th and 21st centuries, sometimes known as the third and fourth industrial revolutions, have begun replacing the human mind.

The 20th century computing revolution introduced sophisticated calculation, machine automation, and the ever-expanding internet. The 21st century has most notably introduced the world to AI, propelling us at warp speed towards a drastically different future.

It seems like every other post, article and conversation these days is about AI. Some futurists caution — while others romanticize — a post-labor economy in which all or most of us will be out of a job. “It will be okay,” they say, since our needs will be provided for by autonomous robots that do everything that was once upon a time called “work.” And whatever cash or bitcoin we will need will be provided by a mythically benevolent government-like entity that will dole out what is known as UBI (universal basic income) happily ever after. But all of this begs the devastating questions of what will we do with our time? And who will we be without our professional identities?

These third and fourth waves of industrial revolutions have washed over us so quickly, and have so successfully distracted us that most of us have yet to appreciate the proportions of what is happening to us faster than we can keep track.

When those Ivy Leaguers reached for the phones after being prompted to think about wisdom, they were embodying what it meant to be raised in the “Information Age.” Memorization and “knowing stuff” were “no longer a thing” — or so we had been told. The promise of emerging technologies was that we could outsource our memory to the cloud so that we could do the “real thinking.” How wrong that hypothesis was.3

What we are living through now should be appreciated for what it is — a massive step towards not thinking at all. Whereas the Information Age was about outsourcing information retrieval and calculation, the Age of AI is about outsourcing thinking, processing, judgement, and decision-making.4

We are being led to believe that real, human intelligence can be completely substituted with artificial intelligence.

As an educator, I want to challenge that foregone conclusion.

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As we’ve seen already in the Language of Life Series, the richest concepts in Jewish consciousness have a full palette of distinct words in Hebrew to reflect distinct experiences in the world. Sharpening each word against the other can give a person a much more clearer view of life. We’ve seen this most notably in our exploration of joy and speech. There are a multitude of words for both because there are a multitude of kinds of happiness and communication. Each word points to a different one.

Our exploration of what constitutes real intelligence should bring us to the definitions of three essential words in Hebrew for the work of the mind. We’ll see how each of them is brought into high contrast through AI, which does not possess any of them:5

• khokhma-חכמה

• bina-בינה

• da’at-דעת

Let’s start with khokhma.

Khokhma-חכמה

In the “Age of Abundance,” the issue is no longer finding what we need. It is about knowing what we need.

When I was in elementary school, we spent a considerable amount of time learning the Dewey Decimal System for categorizing and finding books in a library. If you knew what book you were looking for, you would have to hunt it down in a physical library, which may or may not have it, by flipping through musty index cards in a yellowed wooden cabinet system. I’m not sure how people looked for books before 1876, when Melvil Dewey made his system public. There were far fewer books and periodicals in print, but they were even more difficult to locate.

Today, there is a veritable deluge of knowledge.6 About ⅔ of humanity could search virtually the entirety of human knowledge with a device they carry in their pockets (when it’s not in their hands). But having access to information is only a precondition to becoming wise. To become wise, a person must know what they want to know, and want to know it in the first place.

The Zohar sees in the word khokhma-חכמה an acronym for koakh mah-כח מה, the “power of asking ‘what?’” Google and ChatGPT can deliver what we ask for, but only if we ask for it — only if we care to ask “what?” Technology will only make humanity smarter if we continue to educate humans to value and seek out knowledge.

And once we do prompt it with our question, and subsequently get sprayed with the firehose of knowledge that is the internet, we must be wise enough to distinguish between “what is important and what is more important.”7 Receiving a bulleted, bolded, and thoroughly emoji’d list in response to my ChatGPT prompt challenges and highlights what wisdom is. It is ultimately I and only I who must sift through its response, and decide how I digest it.

Khokhma-חכמה is usually translated as “wisdom,” but it’s far more precise to translate it as our receptivity to wisdom. Wisdom is less about the content of the wisdom itself, and more about a person’s curiosity and openness — his willingness and ability to absorb it. Unwise people parroting otherwise wise aphorisms are not considered wise precisely because of the way they mishandle wisdom. Wise people think before they speak, unwise people tend to just speak.

Wise people handle wisdom with care because they value wisdom like their life depends on it because it does. This is why the hallmark of a wise person is that he or she “learns from all people,” always thirsty for wisdom, wherever it is found. Wisdom lies in the ascribing value to wisdom, and it is precisely this notion of weight and value that must be trained by humans with real intelligence. This is why artificial intelligence will only ever work with information, but will never replace human wisdom.

The deluge of information we are living through is preparing us for a future beyond our imaginations. In the meantime, whether it is a blessing or a curse depends on our desire and ability to process it.

Stay tuned for an exploration of the two other areas of real intelligence, bina and da’at.

One of the great mysteries of life — biologically, psychologically, and spiritually — is the immense amount of time we spend sleeping and dreaming.

The average person, over the course of their lifetimes, will spend over two decades worth of time sleeping, and nearly 7 years dreaming.1

I invite you to ponder these staggering numbers for a moment.

Why is it necessary for us to dream at all?

Why can’t it be that while our bodies are physically recuperating at night, our minds are completely blank?

If we look at the Torah, the question gets compounded, because dreams occupy an outsized chunk of the narrative — certainly in the book of Bereishit-Genesis.

Why is so much precious ink spilled on the unreal mindscapes of the subconscious?

The cast of characters and the contexts of their dreams are also noteworthy:

• Avimelech, the would-be sexual predator, king of the Philistines.

• A penniless Yaakov, unexpectedly, as he sleeps on rocks while on the run from his brother Esav.

• Lavan, Yaakov’s conniving father-in-law, on his way to do something terrible to his son-in-law.

• Yosef, whose dreams of grandeur backfire, leading ten of his brothers to lower him into a pit with intent to forever extinguish him and his dreams.

• The Head Butler and Baker of Pharaoh’s court in a royal dungeon for less than petty crimes.

• And then there are the dreams of Pharaoh that shook his whole kingdom, and changed the course of world history.

What’s going on with all these dreams, and how might they help us understand our own dreams — or lack thereof?

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The tool we’ve been trying to arm our readers with in the Language of Life series is:

If you have a questions in Life or in Torah, start by looking closely at the Hebrew words themselves.

The word for “dream” in Hebrew is khalom-חַלוֹם.

How might this help us?

Let’s make some connections. Every Hebrew word has a root, a shoresh-שרש, usually made up of three letters.

The words that branch out from that root help us triangulate its meaning. As we better understand the root, our understanding of its individual branches deepen.2 In our case, these connections may initially raise more questions than answers, but ultimately, they’ll help us get closer to the deeper meaning of dreams.

The root chet-lamed-mem (ח-ל-ם) is most immediately recognized as the root of the verb lakhlom-לחלום, which means “to dream,” but is also connected to the word lehakhlim-להחלים, which means “to recover medically,” which naturally begs the question:

What’s the connection between dreams and recuperation?

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch explains, in his richly linguistic commentary on the Torah, the root ח-ל-ם to mean the reconnection of estranged parts.3

When someone is recovering, their body is reintegrating itself. If a person suffers an injury that isn’t treated, and the limb doesn’t receive enough blood or drain out toxins, he or she could end up requiring amputation, the ultimate disconnection. If the injury is treated on time, however, the body can begin to reconnect the limb into its holistic system. The same is true if a person gets sick. The body first wages war against the disease, and then begins to restore and reintegrate itself. Hakhlama-החלמה, healing, is the reintegration of all of ones parts into the whole, which is the hallmark of health.

Dreaming, then, can be thought of as a sort of spiritual recovery that our psyches must undergo regularly, just as our bodies must every night. Over the course of any given day, and certainly over the course of our lives, all of us become somewhat estranged from our hopes, dreams and aspirations. When we allow ourselves to dream, we are able to reconnect with those aspects of ourselves before they float away from us completely.

This helps us understand a startling statement in the Talmud:

Talmud Berakhot 14a:

…וְאָמַר רַבִּי יוֹנָה אָמַר רַבִּי זֵירָא: כָּל הַלָּן שִׁבְעַת יָמִים בְּלֹא חֲלוֹם נִקְרָא ״רַע״

Rabbi Yonah said in the name of Rabbi Zeira: “Anyone who sleeps soundly for seven days without a dream is called “evil” (רע).

Why would this be? Wouldn’t bad dreams specifically be a problem? What’s wrong with not dreaming at all?

If you meditate on what evil is in its essence, you will eventually arrive at some notion of disassociation and estrangement — the alienation and cruelty from which all bad things stem.4 It’s for this reason that the only day in the 7 Days of Creation that is not called “tov-טוב (good)” is Day 2 — the day of division, when the waters were separated, and nothing new was created. It was Day 2 that introduced the notion of opposites, which never the twain shall meet.

By looking for other words that share the etymology of ra, we find another illustration of evil as disconnection:

The teruah sound of the shofar is meant to conjure for us the staccato, shattered sound of a person uncontrollably sobbing. The word "Teruah-תרועה” comes from the same root as “ra-רע (evil).”5 We cry in a shattered way when our lives feel like broken, disconnected pieces with no hope of ever coming back together.

Now, we can understand why someone who stops dreaming is called “ra.” He’s become so estranged from his higher consciousness that even when his judgmental lower consciousness is unconscious (i.e. he’s sleeping) he still cannot hear his soul’s intuitions.

When people stop dreaming, they’ve closed out all possibilities about who they can become or what the world could be. The lack of dreams is a symptom of a spiritual disconnection that must be healed. As people begin to heal and reintegrate their practical, rational selves with their intuitive, expansive, open selves, they can begin to dream again.

You probably know that Hebrew is built out of consonants. There are 22 consonants that get strung together in the Torah without explicit vowels to indicate how to pronounce them.

The implied vowels have names and symbolic forms called “nekudot-נקודות,” literally, “dots.”

There is a vowel whose name is essentially the same as the word for dream: “kholam-חולם.” It looks just like the letter vav, the sixth letter in the aleph-bet, with a dot hovering above it.

In his Kabbalistic work Sefer Hanikud, Rabbi Yosef Gikatilla (1248-1305) opens his exploration of the meaning of the Hebrew vowels by discussing the kholam, which he describes as the highest and most spiritual of all the vowels — the one that represents the connection to the infinite and impossible-to-capture. The dot on top represents that which is so close but so far, and the vav visually represents the integration down to the ground. The letter vav grammatically means connection by functioning as the conjunction “and,” and the word “vav” actually means a “hook” or “connector.” So, the kholam symbolizes connecting with that which is otherwise disconnected from a person a.k.a dreaming.

Dreams introduce us to ideas, visions, desires, possibilities that we can’t fully understand or visualize in practical terms. Not only would we not be able to comprehend them if we were awake and conscious — we would outright reject them as absurd. This is precisely why we must dream. If we have any hope of the status quo changing, we must allow ourselves to dream of that which we would otherwise see as impossible.

When we sleep, we are more loosely tethered to the world around us. This looseness allows us to consider possibilities that don’t yet make sense — and to be okay with them. This thin connection to those possibilities allows us to begin building bridges to a future that is incomprehensibly far from us now.

The Book of Bereishit is full of dreams is because in that lawless, Godless, ancient world, there was no rational reason why things shouldn’t have just descended deeper and deeper into violent, pagan tribalism. No intelligent person would have accepted the future, which we now know as reality, and certainly no one could have imagined the utopian future that yet awaits us.

The king of the Philistines, the king of Egypt, Jacob’s father-in-law were all men who were closed to the status quo changing precisely because of the power they wielded. God had to circumvent their egos by coming to them in dreams.

So too, Yaakov running into the unknown away from his brother — only a dream could have shown him that everything would be okay.

Yosef’s dreams reflected his desire to lead, but he could never have understood how they would play out. In the short term, they backfired. He shared his dreams with his brothers and they hated him even more. Instead of bowing their heads before him, they threw him into a pit. But decades later, in the unlikely setting of an Egyptian royal palace, those dreams came to be.

The whole saga of Yosef itself was like a dream. His leadership, though brief, introduced an idea into the Jewish psyche: that leadership is possible — that unity is possible. That idea was the seed that would eventually grow into the concept of Jewish kingship.

Devarim 33:5:

וַיְהִי בִישֻׁרוּן מֶלֶךְ בְּהִתְאַסֵּף רָאשֵׁי עָם יַחַד שִׁבְטֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל׃

He was king in Yeshurun, when the leaders of the people and the tribes of Yisra᾽el were gathered as one.

Israel’s current national anthem centers around hope — ha’tikvah-התקווה, literally “the hope.” Hope is a vague sort of optimism. Some have critiqued the anthem for representing too low of a bar for the future we as Jews should aspire towards. We should want more for the ourselves and the world than “to be a free nation in our land — להיות עם חפשי בארצינו.”

It’s interesting to note that one of the other candidates for Israel’s national anthem was a line from Tehillim-Psalms — attributed to King David — recited by many before Birkat Hamazon (Grace After Meals) on Shabbat and holidays:

Tehillim (Psalms) 126:

שִׁיר הַמַּעֲלוֹת בְּשׁוּב ה׳ אֶת־שִׁיבַת צִיּוֹן הָיִינוּ כְּחֹלְמִים׃

A Song of Ascents:

When Hashem restores the captivity of Zion, we will have been like dreamers.

As the Jews return to Israel, we will see ourselves as dreamers. On one level, we’ll realize we were asleep in our exile. But on another level, we’ll realize that our subconscious — or better, our superconscious — kept us connected. Not just to a glimmer of hope. But to a vision. To a dream.

Our dreams are always partially-self-fulfilling prophecies.

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3

Perhaps going out on a limb, he proceeds to claim that the root .ח.ל.מ is also related to the word khalamish-חלמיש, which he understands to be what we call “granite,” and the precious stone achlama-אחלמה.

It turns out that that’s what granite is: minerals pressed together under immense pressure.

Apply even more pressure, and you get diamond, yahalom-יהלום, which would also be connected to our linguistic tree above using the concept of interchangeable letters (אותיות מתחלפות), which posits that letters from the same source location can be interchanged while preserving semantic connection.

Hebrew letters are organized according two the five locations from which their sounds emerge in the body of the speaker:

1. Lips – בומ”ף

2. Teeth – זסשר”ץ

3. Pallate – גיכ”ק

4. Tongue – דטלנ”ת

5. Throat – אחה”ע

By now, we should be pretty familiar with the notion that the Hebrew language is a highly economical language. While English has, according to some linguists, around a million lexemes (core words), Biblical Hebrew has only around 10,000.

The reason Hebrew can afford to be so lean on lexemes is that many words can branch out in meaning from a single, shared 3-letter root (shoresh-שרש). If you’re interested in learning Hebrew, this is great news, because the learning curve is bent in your favor. Once you start recognizing roots, you can start figuring out words in context relatively quickly. It’s this linguistic elegance that is partially responsible for the remarkably high literacy rates in Jews in the ancient world.

“the learning curve of Hebrew is bent in your favor!”

While many people are familiar with the 3-letter root system, most don’t realize that the system goes much deeper. 3-letter roots are generally organized according to their 2-letter roots.1

Let’s take, for example, the holiday of Chanukah (חנוכה), which has in its name the root khet–nun–kaf (ח־נ־כ), which, as we explored a few weeks ago, literally means “dedication,” but it also shares a root with the word khinuch (חינוך) — “education.”

The first thing to note here is that education is meant to function like a dedication ceremony — or like the rededication of the Temple that the Maccabees led after their hard won battle against the Seleucid Greeks.

Education is not merely the transfer of information, but is meant to be a celebratory push along the growth trajectory in which a student is meant to travel on over the course of their lives. The Hebrew word “חנוכה” teaches us that dedication is what drives education, and that Jewish education was at the heart of the Macabbees’ rededication of the Temple.

“The word ‘חנוכה’ teaches us that dedication is what drives education.”

But what’s at the heart of this dedication? What exactly are we trying to cultivate in our education?

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If you look at the word חנוכה, you’ll find that there’s a 2-letter root within that 3-letter root — the root of the root — in this case, the word khein (חן).

Khein (חן) is an elusive word that appears throughout Tanakh. It captured the curiosity of the Greeks themselves in their attempts to translate the Torah, known as the Septuagint. The sages of the Talmud understood Ptolemy II’s intention in commissioning the translation as an attempt to subsume and suppress the teachings of the Torah, reducing it to just another book in their library.2

In the Septuagint, the word khein — as in “Noach found khein in the eyes of God — נֹחַ מָצָא חֵן בְּעֵינֵי ה׳”, or “Yosef found khein in the eyes of [his master] — וַיִּמְצָא יוֹסֵף חֵן בְּעֵינָיו” — is translated as “charis,” which means “grace” or “favor,” related to the English word “charisma.”

This, however, begs the question: what’s charisma?

As a word, “charisma” is simultaneously shiny and opaque. Most people have a strong sense of what it is because they’ve seen people who possess it, but it’s hard for them to put their fingers on what it is. It’s a je ne sais quoi, an “I-don’t-know-what-it-is” (IYKYK in modern parlance). Charisma, it seems, is a “secret sauce” that makes people likable, but what exactly we like about them remains obscured.

The Hebrew, on the other hand, does two things. Firstly, by calling it khein (חן), it recognizes the mystery of our attraction to certain people. It does this by associating the word khein (חן) with the word chinam (חינם), which means “free.” You like them, but you don’t know what they’ve done to earn your approval, which you’ve essentially given to them for free.

A closer look at the word khein (חן) reveals why.

The opening piece of the Chassidic master Rebbe Nachman of Breslov’s magnum opus, Likutei Moharan centers around khein, and resolves this paradox.

He explains that this 2-letter word can be broken down even further into its letters. The letter chet (ח) represents khochmah (חכמה) — Divine wisdom. If you look at the way chet is written in a Torah scroll, you’ll see an arrow pointing upwards (the chatoteret). It points toward a grasp of something above its head — which is the essence of wisdom. Wisdom, in Jewish consciousness, is not information or intelligence, but rather the reception of a life force, a perspective and vision that flows down from above, as it says in Kohelet: “wisdom gives life to those who possess it — הַחׇכְמָה תְּחַיֶּה בְעָלֶיהָ“ and “wisdom makes a person’s face shine — חָכְמַת אָדָם תָּאִיר פָּנָיו.” It’s for this reason that many have said that the pinnacle of wisdom — the crown on the head of the wise — is to know how much he does not know — how much is above his head.

The nun (ן), continues Rebbe Nachman, represents the precise opposite end of the spectrum of life from wisdom. It represents the concept known in Kabbalistic texts as malchut (מלכות) — kingship — the ability to practically apply wisdom in the world.3 It’s for this reason that the “final nun” (ן) is written as a line that starts up top and continues down into the “ground.” It is also the letter of constant practice and resilience, which are the hallmarks of bringing ideas into reality. A person who lied once shiker-שקר, but a liar who lies habitually is a shakran-שקרן.

If you put these two ideas together, you start to get a picture of what khein is — and what it is about people who captivate us even before they’ve achieved anything per se. Those who try to stretch themselves to grasp ideas that they don’t readily understand, and to practically apply those ideas to the best of their abilities, inspires in those around them, attraction and admiration. The khein is there even before they’ve achieved anything.

The greatest illustration of khein is kids. Kids — when their curiosities haven’t been blunted by brain rot — are constantly stretching themselves to understand things “above their pay grade” and experiment with those new ideas in their world. When we put aside the mess they might make in the process, we feel khein towards them.

It’s this natural desire to stretch in both directions that education is meant to cultivate. We all possessed this khein as kids, but when we stopped cultivating it, we started losing it.

“We all possessed this khein as kids, but when we stopped cultivating it, we started losing it.”

Ask kids in 1st grade, “who thinks of themselves as an artist?” Tons of hands will shoot up.

“Who here is a little scientist?” Again, many kids who enjoy science will identify as scientists.

Ask kids in 8th grade the same questions. Far fewer hands.

Tragically, we tend to lose our khein as we stop growing, and stop stretching ourselves.

The Jewish notion of education is not about transferring information. Nor is it about expanding proficiencies, per se. It’s about cultivating this khein. It’s about preserving and developing this quality that children have naturally — of curiosity, of boldness, of willingness to experiment and to apply this wisdom in the world, each person in his own way.

This is the same thing we find so compelling about the Maccabees. A small army — which wasn’t really an army at all — but a family of kohanim, priests, who primarily identified themselves in their service in the Beit HaMikdash (Temple). But when the time came, and they realized that it was do or die — they pushed themselves. They understood that they had to stretch out of their comfort zones, and face a military force much greater than they — and would fight however long it took to defeat them.

And they did.

And when they finally did, and they arrived at the Beit HaMikdash, they pushed themselves again. They knew that somewhere there must be pure oil — even though there was no rational reason to believe that there should be. They committed themselves to searching until they would find it.

And they did.

The message in the miracle of the oil is that it also stretched beyond its normal limits — and burned for eight days. It’s precisely this khein-חן that has carried the holiday of Chanukah-חנוכה for millennia in the hearts and minds of millions of Jews.

May we find the khein in ourselves and in the people around us — the khein we all possessed from childhood — and reawaken it as adults, to stretch ourselves to grasp ideas we may have considered above our heads, and be bold enough to make them realities. May we find khein in Hashem’s eyes. And may we see the world stretch around us — with khein.

For more XL on Chanukah, read this 👇

Have you ever had the experience of repeating a word to the point that it starts to sound almost unrecognizably foreign?

This apparently universal phenomenon actually has a name. It’s called “semantic satiation.”1 The jury is out as to why exactly this happens, but the effect is clear. A word normally full of meaning can decay through repetition into mere noise.

Saying “thank you,” “thanks,” and “thank you so much,” as well as texting “ty,” “thx,” and “tysm” are ubiquitous in our generally polite society, and yet, as these words fly out of our mouths and off our thumbs, they seldom emerge from a profound inner sense of gratitude.

One of the core teachings of Jewish character development (mussar) is that the simplest, most seemingly obvious concepts are the ones we tend to understand the least — precisely because we assume we know everything there is to know about them. Ironically, the most meaningful concepts — like gratitude — are at the greatest risk of becoming meaningless.

Here’s where learning Hebrew as a second language can help. Hebrew self-identifies as a laser-cut language of Divine origin whose words encode the inner meaning of life itself. Precisely because it’s not our native language, we can better use it to gain perspective on concepts we likely feel are simple and straightforward, and in so doing reclaim our thank you’s.

The word for “thank you” in Hebrew is todah (תודה). The common “thank you very much” is todah rabbah (תודה רבה).

The first thanksgiving ceremony in American history was two years prior to the more famous meal of the Pilgrims upon landing on Plymouth Rock. On December 4, 1619, Captain John Woodlief arrived with 36 English settlers on the shores of America, not far from Jamestown, Virginia. It is recorded that the first thing he did upon arriving is kneel, pray, and subsequently declare:

“We ordain that this day of our ship’s arrival at the place assigned for [a] plantation in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God.”

It wasn’t Woodlief though who coined the word “thanksgiving.” That juicy English word can be traced to the first complete (Christian) English translation of the Bible, where it appears a handful of times in the Psalms attributed to King David.

Tehillim 100:

מִזְמוֹר לְתוֹדָה הָרִיעוּ לַה׳ כׇּל־הָאָרֶץ: עִבְדוּ אֶת־ה׳ בְּשִׂמְחָה בֹּאוּ לְפָנָיו בִּרְנָנָה…בֹּאוּ שְׁעָרָיו  בְּתוֹדָה חֲצֵרֹתָיו בִּתְהִלָּה הוֹדוּ־לוֹ בָּרְכוּ שְׁמוֹ׃

A song of thanksgiving: Make a joyful noise unto Hashem, all ye lands. Serve Hashem with gladness: come before His Presence with celebration…Enter through His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise. Give thanks to Him, and bless His name.

Although the American celebrations of Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have all passed, Jews can be thankful that thanksgiving for us is never more than 6 days away. Shabbat is a very much a weekly holiday of thanksgiving. We carve out the time to push aside distractions to gather around a table to an elaborate feast with family, friends, and community in gratitude to God for everything we have in our lives.

“Although the American celebrations of Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday have all passed, Jews can be thankful that thanksgiving for us is never more 6 days away. Shabbat is a very much a weekly holiday of thanksgiving.“

Going back to Psalms, we find quite explicitly that the “Song of Shabbat” is the expression of gratitude itself:

Tehillim 92:1-2:

מִזְמוֹר שִׁיר לְיוֹם הַשַּׁבָּת׃ טוֹב לְהֹדוֹת לַה׳ וּלְזַמֵּר לְשִׁמְךָ עֶלְיוֹן׃

A meditative tune, a song for the Sabbath day: it is good to give thanks to Hashem, and to sing meditative praise to Your highest name.

Moreover, Jews are called “Jews” (יהודים) and Judaism “Judaism” (יהדות) with this same root הוד — after the tribe of Judah (יהודה). This is because those who were left after the ransacking and exiling of Israelites by the Assyrian Empire were primarily from the tribe of Judah, living in an area that was known as Judea (יהודה) — and is still known by many today as Judea.

The original name “Judah” — Yehudah-יהודה — comes directly from the word hodaa-thanksgiving (הודאה). The reason is that his mother Leah experienced, when she had her fourth child, this moment of, “wow, this is beyond my wildest dreams.” She had thought that since there were four foremothers of the tribes of Israel, each one would merit to have three children (4 x 3 = 12), from whom would emerge three tribes. When she had her fourth, she realized that her expectations were off, nothing is really owed to her, and she felt an overwhelmed by a feeling of gratitude that inspired her son’s name.

Bereishit 30:35:

…וַתֹּאמֶר הַפַּעַם אוֹדֶה אֶת־יְ-הֹ-וָ-ה עַל־כֵּן קָרְאָה שְׁמוֹ יְהוּדָה…

…she said, Now will I thank Hashem: therefore she called his name Yehuda…

More than this: the name Yehudah (יהודה) includes God’s name (י-ה-ו-ה) — because in that thanksgiving is a recognition of God Himself.

We can ask though: why did she only feel gratitude to this extent with her fourth child? And, going back to our original question: what will it take for us get past the superficial “tysm” way of saying thank you to which we’ve become so accustomed?

In Hebrew, the full meaning of “lehodot-להודות” is more than just to “say ‘thank you’” — it is to admit and recognize the role of another. “Admission” is a word we intuitively associate with guilt — not gratitude. But think about what we’re doing when we say thank you — not in a performative, polite way, but when we really say it with our heart and soul. My sincere expression of gratitude is an admission that I couldn’t have done it without you. By recognizing what you did for me, I must recognize my own limits and vulnerability. For Leah, it was only her fourth child that broke her schema of what was “coming her way” and elicited her thanksgiving. She also modeled for her son Yehudah what it meant to verbalize her error, which he famously did many years later when he publicly accepted fault for the episode with his daughter in law Tamar.

In order to truly be grateful, I must admit that I am not an island. I’m releasing a part of my ego that would like to think I’m a self-made man, and I’m handing credit over to someone else. This is what makes true gratitude difficult even if mechanical “thank you” isn’t.

“A sincere expression of gratitude is an admission that I couldn’t have done it without you.”

Again, when we say “thanks” — or “thank you so much” to the barista at Starbucks — we may not be feeling this. But notice how much easier it is to say thank you for something small, like a cup of coffee, than it is for something massive — like thanking your parents for raising you, or your spouse for being your partner in absolutely everything. How can we do justice to what we owe them? We can’t. We wouldn’t know where to start or where to end. So we too often avoid it entirely, whereas our normal, sweet, cute, performative, check-the-box “thanks” and “thx” can continue business as usual.

This brings us to the other major meaning of the etymological root hod-הוד. It’s sometimes translated as “splendor” or “glory.” I will admit that I don’t really know what these translations are getting at other than fancy ways of saying beauty — but I can illustrate it like this:

When someone stands up to receive an Oscar or an Emmy or a Grammy, the standard, accepted thing to do is not to credit oneself, but to immediately express gratitude to all the people who helped bring him or her to that place.

But take a look at it’s opposite: imagine how ugly it would be if someone went up to receive one of those awards and gave a speech about how vindicated they feel, because they — and they alone — deserve it for all their talent and hard work.

It wouldn’t just be wrong or dishonest or unethical. It would be — on top of all those things — ugly.

If you understand this, you can appreciate how beautiful the opposite is. How beautiful it is when people express real gratitude — when they put their egos aside and recognize all those who deserve recognition, and give credit where credit is due. They become transparent prisms through which the light of the universe courses through them, and the beauty and splendor of all of reality becomes more visible.

It will likely surprise no one that the modern Hebrew word “evolutziya-אבולוציה” (meaning “evolution”) is not a word sourced in authentic Biblical Hebrew, but an English word that was imported and adapted into modern Hebrew in the 20th century.

In 1953, the Israeli government established The Academy of the Hebrew Language to research and adjudicate issues of the newly established language of modern Hebrew while preserving its authenticity as it faced the forces of modernity.1 Ironically, they called their institution for the preservation of Hebrew’s authenticity “Ha’Akademia La’Lashon Ha’Ivrit — הָאָקָדֶמְיָה לַלָּשׁוֹן הָעִבְרִית,“ using a word, “akademia” (i.e. “academy”) that is as authentic to Biblical Hebrew as “evolutziya-אבולוציה” .

This, for me, is a cute illustration of how much smaller the Hebrew vocabulary of the Torah is compared to the vocabulary of modern English. How much smaller is Biblical Hebrew? About 100 times smaller.2 Hence, the need to import words into modern Hebrew to flesh it out as a modern language.

Elizer ben Yehuda, the father of modern Hebrew and his successors needed to be resourceful and plagiarize from other languages to come up with words for concepts they couldn’t source in Tanakh or the Mishnah. English would serve handsomely to fill the gaps in Hebrew as it was and is a massive linguistic melting pot, borrowing and blending from other languages as a result from immigration, commerce, and colonialism in the British Commonwealth and the United States.

Biblical Hebrew, on the other hand, self-identifies as Divine in origin. The practical upshot of a language designed by God is that it would possess precisely the number of words it needs to convey the essential kernels of reality — no more, no less.3

Now, back to evolution. Evolution is one of the foundational concepts in modern science. It’s rare to read an article about psychology, sociology, economics, philosophy or medicine that doesn’t at least mention evolution as the underlying explanation for whatever is being discussed. The word was coined in 1864 by English philosopher/scientist Herbert Spencer. The basic workings of the theory were later developed and made famous by Charles Darwin, but was simultaneously worked on by the lesser known Alfred Russel Wallace, and after a century and a half of research all over the world, has become ubiquitous.

As we mentioned above, there is no indigenous Hebrew word for “evolution.”

On the other hand, seeing as the body of evidence for evolutionary processes at work in the development of life on Earth, maybe it should surprise us that there is no word for it. Does the lack of a Biblical Hebrew word for a thing mean that the thing in question doesn’t exist?

If evolution is as real as it seems to be, why isn’t there a word for it?

The Torah is laser-cut in its precision when describing things, verbs or properties that have clear, logical distinctions. One area in which we can see this is the different words for creation itself:

• Bara (ברא) - to create something “out of thin air” that did not exist before — even conceptually (creatio ex nihilo). 

• Yatsar (יצר) - to develop the form (tsura-צורה) and function of that which has already been created.

• Asah (עשה) - to finalize its practical manifestation.

Because many believers, agnostics and atheists alike possess a vision of God that is abstract and distant, the only sort of creative action they would associate with Him is “bara” — the sudden, lightning-from-Heaven, boom!, bam!, wow!, and-there-you-have-it-folks! sort of creation.

However, a close look at the story of creation in the beginning of the Torah reveals that the word “bara” — creation from nothing — appears only in connection to 3 very particular moments in the creative process in which new things, without precedent emerge into reality:

1. The creation of the primal stuff of the cosmos, the energy contained in the singularity of the Big Bang:4

   Bereishit 1:1 (with commentary of Ramban):

   בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱ-לֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָרֶץ׃

   In the beginning, God created (bara) the Heavens and the Earth.

2. The emergence of will and consciousness:5

   Bereishit 1:21 (with commentary of Vilna Gaon):

   וַיִּבְרָא אֱ-לֹהִים אֶת־הַתַּנִּינִם הַגְּדֹלִים וְאֵת כׇּל־נֶפֶשׁ הַחַיָּה  הָרֹמֶשֶׂת אֲשֶׁר שָׁרְצוּ הַמַּיִם לְמִינֵהֶם וְאֵת

   כׇּל־עוֹף כָּנָף לְמִינֵהוּ וַיַּרְא אֱ-לֹהִים כִּי־טוֹב׃

   God created (bara) the great sea creatures and all of the living consciousness that crawls and is spawned in water by species and all flying winged creatures by species, and God saw that it was good.

3. The appearance of human uniqueness, conscience, and the marital unit:6

   Bereishit 1:27 (with commentaries of Rashi and Malbim):

   וַיִּבְרָא אֱ-לֹהִים  אֶת־הָאָדָם בְּצַלְמוֹ בְּצֶלֶם אֱ-לֹהִים בָּרָא אֹתוֹ זָכָר וּנְקֵבָה בָּרָא אֹתָם׃

   God created-from-nothing (bara) humanity, each person in his [unique] image — in the image of God He created (bara) him; male and female He created (bara) them.

Everything in between, is not beriah (creatio ex nihilo) but yetzira or asiya, a giving of shape to that which already existed.

Rashi 1:14:

“…all that emerges from the heaven and earth were created on the first day, but each of them was [simply] put in its place on that day when it was so commanded…”

Ramban 1:1:

“Initially, [God] brought forth from total and absolute nothing an extremely ethereal substance devoid of corporeality but having a power of potency, fit to take on any form and to proceed from potentiality into reality. This was the primary matter created by God. It is called by the Greeks hyly (prime matter) [and by modern scientists energy]. After the hyly, He did not create anything, but He formed and made things with it, and from this hyly He brought everything into existence and clothed the forms and put them into a finished condition.”

Even a cursory look at the Torah’s account of creation shows a process that is generally compatible with an organic process of evolution from:

• simpler inanimate elements (like light)

• to growing, living vegetation to conscious, moving animal life

• to intelligent, communicating, free-choosing human beings.

So why is there no word in Biblical Hebrew for this magnificent process of unfolding of reality from within itself that the Torah is so careful to articulate?

It’s for the same reason that there is no word in Biblical Hebrew for “nature.”7 In modern English, we tend to personify nature. There’s a long standing pagan tradition of doing so, referring to it as “Mother Nature” or “Gaia.” As elegant and powerful of a theory as evolution is, and as much as the Torah may describe the development of the world in a way that is organic and evolutionary — as opposed to synthetic and sudden acts of God — Hebrew does not give a name to evolution so as to not personify it. It is, after all, ironic that intelligent, secular people who adamantly refuse to believe that there is a fundamental will and intelligence underlying the universe habitually personify the universe, nature, evolution, and randomness as autonomous actors.

While evolution certainly has its natural mechanisms, it is Hashem Who is behind it. Neither mutations, nor changes in climate are random. The unfolding of the universe in the Torah is indeed natural, but it is moved along quite clearly by the deliberate commands of the Creator, Who says “let there be light,” “let the earth sprout vegetation,” “let the waters teem with conscious living creatures.”

Only the personified randomness of evolution is negated by the Torah — not the process.

“Only the personified randomness of evolution is negated by the Torah — not the process.”

Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook, Orot 565:

“Evolution itself—rising step by step from the lowest forms to the highest—shows with great clarity that existence follows a far-seeing vision, a purpose set in advance. This only deepens the sense of Divine greatness. It strengthens every foundation of faith, and makes our trust in God and our service of Him even more fitting…There is, therefore, no real difficulty in harmonizing the words of the Torah or the teachings of our tradition with an evolutionary understanding.”

Rav Kook, no doubt unique in his open-mindedness, not only saw no conflict between evolution and the Torah, but saw in the notion of evolution a manifestation of Hashem’s Dynamic Perfection.

Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook, Shmoneh Kvatzim 1:443:

“What do we mean when we speak of Divine perfection?

“We might be tempted to think of it as the same kind of perfection we see in created things — the perfected state that results from a complete and finished existence, beyond which nothing can be added. If that were the case, Divine perfection would mean that nothing more could be added to it.

“But this is impossible. For in the Divine, perfection does not negate the possibility of addition. Rather, there is a perfection that includes the power of infinite growth and addition — a perfection that is not static, but dynamic, ever-ascending, overflowing with new vitality and revelation.”

May continue to see the evolutionary process of the purification of our language that heralds the next evolutionary stage of humanity:

Zechariah 3:9 & 14:9:

כִּי־אָז אֶהְפֹּךְ אֶל־עַמִּים שָׂפָה בְרוּרָה לִקְרֹא כֻלָּם בְּשֵׁם ה׳ לְעׇבְדוֹ שְׁכֶם אֶחָד׃

“For then I will turn to the peoples a pure language that they may all call upon the name of Hashem with one, unified effort.”

.בַּיּוֹם הַהוּא יִהְיֶה ה׳ אֶחָד וּשְׁמוֹ אֶחָד…

…on that day, Hashem will be One, and his Name with be One.”

Education is not about information. It’s about initiation.

If you walk the halls of a high school in 2025, and as you do, peak at kids’ laptops, you’ll see them playing video games, on Snapchat, watching videos on YouTube, or sometimes doing shopping. If they happen to be doing school work, they’re probably using ChatGPT.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that virtually all homework done by teenagers today is done with the help of AI (if not entirely by AI). This may not alarm you because, at this point, you also use AI quite a bit. So do I.

The massive difference is: if you graduated high school when dial up modems took a minute or so to connect to the internet, or prior, you had no choice but to learn how to think for yourself. Of course, plagiarism has existed since time immemorial, but even the plagiarists had to do some thinking about how to plagiarize back in the 90s.

Here’s the issue:

If you don’t learn how to think when you’re a full time student, when will you learn how to think?

If you are a thinking person, and through your own efforts, over many years, you’ve discovered your own voice, and style, and convictions, so then AI is a tool you wield, no different than spellcheck, a thesaurus, an encyclopedia and a word processor. But if you’ve never learned to think for yourself, and never had to put in effort, you are a tool wielded by artificial intelligence and the companies that design it.

I am not a Luddite, and this isn’t another prophecy of doom about technology, but I do believe that this is one of the big hairy societal problems we have today. If we’re not concerned about it, and not thinking about it, we won’t adapt our educational approaches fast enough to avoid its dangerous pitfalls.

If you’re not convinced that this is cause for concern, I recommend that you have a conversation with a teenager. Try to convince them that it’s important for them to learn to write on their own — without AI.

“When will I have to write anything on my own in the future?”

Even if they don’t, they definitely will have to think in the future. I’m willing to bet that they haven’t thought about that.

For decades, we have been told that we have entered a shiny, new “Information Age,” in which the entire universe is literally at our fingertips, and at worst, in our pockets. However, we were not told, or trained, or more importantly, educated to flourish as humans in this new age. And it feels like nothing could have prepared us for AI.

When information can be accessed in fractions of a second, and research papers produced in a matter of minutes, we need a new notion about what education is.

Or perhaps an old one.

“When information can be accessed in fractions of a second, and research papers produced in a matter of minutes, we need a new notion about what education is.

“Or perhaps an old one.”

The Hebrew word for education is Khinukh-חינוך.

As we’ve encountered many times in the Language of Life Series, the problem with 1-to-1 translations is that they end up squeezing round concepts from a one language into the square holes of analogous concepts of another language. Languages were not created in coordination with one another. As a result, words never neatly translate from one language to the other. Something is always lost in translation.

We might assume that the Torah’s concept of khinukh-חינוך means the same thing as what “education” means to most traditionally educated English speakers today. But, of course, it doesn’t.

Most people’s experience of Western education is of memorization and regurgitation. This was the issue that struck a chord with tens of millions of viewers of Sir Ken Robinson’s 2006 TED Talk, one of the most listened-to talks on their platform. This reveals that the problem with modern education is not modernity per se — it’s not ChatGPT and MathGPT — it’s that an underlying view of education was always superficial, just waiting to be exposed as such by AI.1

The word khinukh-חינוך comes from the same word as Chanukah-חנוכה, which literally means “inauguration” since the holiday of Chanukah celebrated the re-inauguration of the alter in the Beit HaMikdash (Temple) after it had been defiled for years by the Syrio-Greeks.

The question is:

What does inauguration have to do with education?

Think about the high level tasks you do at work. The sophisticated processes people pay you for: complex analysis, surgery, therapy, diagnosing problems, negotiating deals.

You didn’t learn how to do any of these things by watching YouTube videos. Nor did you learn how to do them by reading about them in a textbook. Ultimately, your education began when you were given a chance to do it yourself — that terrifying moment that a mentor believed in you and let you climb into the cockpit and fly — even though you weren’t fully (or even partially) qualified yet.

This brave moment of initiation — and a celebratory inauguration — is the essence of education.

It’s a brave moment for students, and it’s a brave moment for their teachers who allow them to try (and fail) for the first time.

When the Torah provides a window into what God saw and loved in Avraham it doesn’t merely speak of his belief in Him as a religious person. It focuses of his belief in people as an educator.

Bereishit 18:19:

…כִּי יְדַעְתִּיו לְמַעַן אֲשֶׁר יְצַוֶּה אֶת־בָּנָיו וְאֶת־בֵּיתוֹ אַחֲרָיו וְשָׁמְרוּ דֶּרֶךְ ה׳ לַעֲשׂוֹת צְדָקָה וּמִשְׁפָּט

For I know and love about him that he instructs his children and his household after him to keep the path of Hashem by doing what is just and right…

Note that Avraham’s teachings are not described as static information or even spiritual secrets, but as “a path” that we learn to walk on.

“…Avraham’s teachings are not described as static information or even spiritual secrets, but as “a path” that we learn to walk on.”

One example that comes to mind of how Avraham would actually do this is when he had the opportunity to host hungry merchants beaten down by the desert sun, he didn’t just do the mitzvah of taking care of their needs on his own. Nor did he rely on some sort of esoteric osmosis of role-modeling in which the members of his household would somehow learn to be kind from his example while they sat on the couch doomscrolling on Tiktok.

Avraham would get them involved. He trusted them to do the job with him.

Bereishit 18:7-8:

וַיְמַהֵר אַבְרָהָם הָאֹהֱלָה אֶל־שָׂרָה וַיֹּאמֶר מַהֲרִי שְׁלֹשׁ סְאִים קֶמַח סֹלֶת לוּשִׁי וַעֲשִׂי עֻגוֹת׃ וְאֶל־הַבָּקָר רָץ אַבְרָהָם וַיִּקַּח בֶּן־בָּקָר רַךְ וָטוֹב וַיִּתֵּן אֶל־הַנַּעַר וַיְמַהֵר לַעֲשׂוֹת אֹתוֹ׃

Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah, and said, “Quick, three seahs of choice flour! Knead and make cakes!” Then Abraham ran to the herd, took a calf, tender and choice, and gave it to the young man who rushed to prepare it.

Rashi, ad loc:

אל הנער. זֶה יִשְׁמָעֵאל, לְחַנְּכוֹ בְּמִצְוֹת

“to the young man” — this was [his son] Ishmael [whom he asked to take care of preparing the meat] to educate him in the performance of mitzvot.

Expensive social-emotional curriculums that talk about kindness may make us feel like we’ve done our due diligence in educating our kids to be caring, but this is not education (khinuch-חינוך) at all. The actual kindness-education happens when people actually start down the path of kindness by being kind. Even if they don’t get it right the first (which they won’t), the most important thing is happening: they’re starting.

It’s for this reason that only when Avraham gets news of his nephew being taking hostage, and responds right away by mobilizing his students from their studies to go fight that they are called his disciples, khanikhav-חניכיו:

Bereishit 14:14 (see Rashi):

וַיִּשְׁמַע אַבְרָם כִּי נִשְׁבָּה אָחִיו וַיָּרֶק אֶת־חֲנִיכָיו יְלִידֵי בֵיתוֹ שְׁמֹנָה עָשָׂר וּשְׁלֹשׁ מֵאוֹת וַיִּרְדֹּף עַד־דָּן׃

When Avram heard that his brother was taken captive, he mobilized his disciples, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued the [enemy] to Dan.

Only when they’ve been mobilized are they called “his disciples.”

“Only when they’ve been mobilized are they called ‘his disciples.’”

Artificial Intelligence is and will remain a challenge in education, but the real problem lies not in the technology, but in how we think about what education is — and if we’re thinking at all.

If I had to name the psychological phenomenon that is most glaringly absent from the conventional model of the human psyche, I would point to teshuva-תשובה.

Freud spoke a lot about pleasure, self-image, and people-pleasing. Skinner — reward and punishment. Maslow — actualizing one’s potential. Frankl — people’s search for meaning. Kahneman — loss aversion and satisfaction. And Seligman — wellbeing.

But what about teshuva?

To quote the famous first words of the first Chief Rabbi of Israel, Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak HaKohen Kook in his tour de force on teshuva called the Orot HaTeshuva (“Lights of Teshuva”) :

Orot HaTeshuva, Foreword:

Teshuva occupies the largest part of the Torah and life. Upon it are built all of our personal and collective hopes. It is a commandment of God that is, on the one hand, the easiest of all — for even the mere thought of teshuva is already teshuva — and yet, on the other hand, it is the most difficult of all undertakings, for it has not yet been fully realized in the world and in life…

…Much has been written in the Torah, in the Prophets, and in the words of the Sages concerning [teshuva], yet for our generation, these things remain hidden and in need of clarification.

Teshuva is everywhere around us and within us, but still eludes us.

We’ve started thinking about this mysterious but somehow simultaneously familiar concept of teshuva-תשובה in the last XL post, and the one before it.

Firstly, it literally means “return.”

Most simply, it refers to a person who turned away from God, in his behavior and attitude, but later finds the desire and the humility to turn around and come back.

But Rav Kook explains it more:

Orot HaTeshuva 15:10:

The primary role of teshuva…is for the person to return to his true self, to the root of his soul.”

Teshuva isn’t merely about behavior. It’s about identity.

In recent years, this understanding of teshuva as a “return to self” has been widely disseminated, especially in contrast to the Christian-influenced notion of “repentance” that is essentially synonymous with “penitence,” meaning the pain of remorse.

While returning to oneself requires remorse at some point, teshuva, in Jewish consciousness, is not defined as remorse.

In case you missed the footnote in our last post, Maimonides’s proof for this is a verse in Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah) that seems to very clearly place remorse as a step one takes after the personal transformation of teshuva:

Yirmiyahu 31:19:

כִּי־אַחֲרֵי שׁוּבִי נִחַמְתִּי וְאַחֲרֵי הִוָּדְעִי סָפַקְתִּי עַל־יָרֵךְ בֹּשְׁתִּי וְגַם־נִכְלַמְתִּי כִּי נָשָׂאתִי חֶרְפַּת נְעוּרָי׃

For after I returned, I regretted; and after I was made aware, I slapped my thigh [in remorse]. I was ashamed, and even mortified, because I carried the shame of my youth.

After one grows and matures, he has the perspective to look back at his actions and regret them — and should do so to continue to move forward in his growth process. But teshuva is not the regret itself. True regret is rooted in true teshuva.

Teshuva is about moving forward to a new place by going back to one’s original place — a sort of transformation that brings the person back to who they were all along. This sounds paradoxical. How does it work?

Teshuva does not mean “return” because a person is going back to an arbitrary starting point. The notion of returning of teshuva is much deeper. A person is pulled back, by his own soul, his own conscience, to his most natural state, much like the way a spring goes back to its equilibrium or a boomerang comes back to its starting point.

The sages coined another word in post-Biblical Hebrew for the verb “to return”: lachzor-לחזור. Interestingly, they took it from the Biblical word for pig, chazir-חזיר. But this notion of returning is different. ”Lachzor challila” means to go “around and around.” This is a return to the beginning that is not really returning to any true, essential point of origin. It’s just an endless loop.1

We are used to thinking about teshuva as a discrete, linear, almost ritualistic recipe that we do once a year between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. It almost seems odd to be speaking about it now, after the holiday season. But as we begin to see it more clearly, more deeply, and in a more real way — as a return to our truest self — we realize that now is the best time to speak about teshuva. Now is when we can really put the teshuva mindset into practice because teshuva is iterative.

“Now is when we can really put the teshuva mindset into practice because teshuva is iterative.”

Rav Kook, Orot HaKodesh 3:

The call to purify one’s character never ends. One may have already purified it when on an intermediate spiritual level; however, after growing further, new mysteries of life that have never yet been exposed emerge from the depths of chaos for one to refine and clarify.

There are holy people who never cease growing. They go “m’chayil el chayil” (from strength to strength), always engaged in practical repentance, of which purifying and refining one’s character is a vital ingredient.

The very fact that, on some level, human beings want to get better — that people drift from living the way they know deep down they should be living — and then feel pangs of desire to come back to themselves — bespeaks of the inextinguishable flame of the soul within them.

To understand human beings, we must first accept the neshama (soul) as part of the human psyche, and then train ourselves and others to listen to its gentle but resilient voice:

Rav Kook, Orot HaTeshuva 11:2:

One must believe in oneself; one must believe that one’s life and feelings come directly from the essence of one’s soul, are good, and lead one upon a straight path.

Rav Kook, Maamarei Hare’iyah:

The way to truly heal an individual is by uncovering the wellspring of strength and health that is hidden within the self. It is through the revealing of the soul within the soul, the uncovering of the unconscious self that is so hidden and covered up that often people do not even recognize their own essence.

Once we get it — once we grasp the meaning of this return, we don’t just understand teshuva, we believe in it. It is for this reason that the Torah assures us that the national teshuva of the Jewish nation is an inevitability:

Devarim 30:2:

וְשַׁבְתָּ עַד־ה׳ אֱ-לֹהֶיךָ וְשָׁמַעְתָּ בְקֹלוֹ כְּכֹל אֲשֶׁר־אָנֹכִי מְצַוְּךָ הַיּוֹם אַתָּה וּבָנֶיךָ בְּכׇל־לְבָבְךָ וּבְכׇל־נַפְשֶׁךָ׃

You will [eventually] return to ה׳ your God, and you and your children will heed His voice according to all that I command your today with all your heart and soul.

Rambam, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Teshuva 7:5:

Israel will only be redeemed through teshuvah. The Torah has already assured [us] that, ultimately, Israel will repent towards the end of her exile and, immediately, she will be redeemed as [Deuteronomy 30:1-3] states: ”There shall come a time when [you will experience] all these things... and you will return to Hashem, your God...”

May we see and accept that teshuva is not reserved for only 10 days a year, but is the essential driving force of who we are — and and ongoing process — for us as individuals, couples, families, communities, a nation and as a civilization.

What a privilege to be alive to bear witness to moments of redemption — glimmers of the ultimate peace that humanity is destined for and longs to see, hear, smell, taste and feel — whether we can articulate our desire for it or not.

May we all live long healthy lives to bear witness to the ultimate redemption and may it come soon.

As I finished the last of seven laps around my synagogue Monday morning with lulav and etrog in hand, elated from the news that the 20 living hostages had actually been returned intact to Israel, I read this prophetic verse from Isaiah that was referenced in the final lines of the prayer unique to that day:

Isaiah 51:11

וּפְדוּיֵי ה׳ יְשׁוּבוּן וּבָאוּ צִיּוֹן בְּרִנָּה וְשִׂמְחַת עוֹלָם עַל־רֹאשָׁם שָׂשׂוֹן וְשִׂמְחָה יַשִּׂיגוּן נָסוּ יָגוֹן וַאֲנָחָה׃ֿ

The Lord’s redeemed shall return, and come singing to Zion, and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads. They shall attain gladness and joy, while sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

It’s not lost any Jew who is aware of the Jewish calendar that the last living hostages in Gaza were returned to safety two years later, to the day, from the day of their brutal capture and abduction. They were taken from their homes and from their dancing on the holiday of Shmini Atseret/Simchat Torah 5784, and they were brought back to Israeli soil this past Monday, Hoshana Rabbah 5786, which led straight into Shmini Atseret/Simchat Torah 5786 that night at sundown.

In addition, let it not be lost on anyone that the literal meaning of Hoshana Rabbah (הושענא רבה) is none other than “Great Salvation.”

And yet — on that radiant day, I found a dark question lurking in the back of my mind. It’s an uncomfortable question, but one I believe must be asked — because if we don’t, it will no doubt fester in the shadows of our psyches:

• These 20 remaining living hostages are back to safety, but are not back to normal. They have come back with unimaginable wounds from what they’ve endured, which will undoubtedly will leave scars on them and all those around them.

• 251 people were taken hostage on October 7, 2023. Those that were thankfully returned — by the grace of God and the courage and sacrifice of the soldiers of the IDF — will similarly bear their burdens, each in their own way, probably forever.

• 92 of the 251 hostages were murdered while captive in Gaza.

• As of this writing, Hamas has only returned 7 of the 28 deceased hostages whom they committed to returning in the deal signed last week. One of the bodies they returned was confirmed by Israeli forensics to be the body of a Gazan.

• 1,195 people were murdered on October 7th itself.

• 915 IDF soldiers have fallen in this war. The IDF have identified over 6,500 bereaved family members who have lost loved ones in this war, and this is just the closest circle of people mourning those lost in battle.

• 3,830 soldiers have been lightly wounded in battle, 1,557 moderately wounded, and 946 severely wounded. May they all see complete recoveries.

• Earlier this week, another Nova survivor took his life. His pain, he wrote in a note to his friends and family, was too great to bear. May Hashem bring consolation and healing to all of those suffering from what they’ve experienced.

• The country is exhausted from the two years of war — the word “exhausted,” I’m told by those who live in Israel, just barely captures the feeling of tension, strain on marriages and families, tiredness, seemingly endless calls into the reserves, hearing sad news, and enormous economic strain.

• Gaza is in ruins. Tens of thousands of non-combatants have lost their lives. Millions of Palestinians have been left living in misery.

Here’s my question — maybe it’s yours too:

How can we truly celebrate the return of these 20 hostages with so much destruction wrought? It’s not even a return to things as they were on October 6, 2023… The word “return” makes it sound like things went back to where they came from, but they didn’t. Everything is different. We, of course, should be grateful and relieved, but can we celebrate in good conscience?

We, of course, should be grateful and relieved, but can we celebrate in good conscience?

Here’s a utilitarian way to answer this question and put our minds at ease.

We could claim that things are objectively better after the war than they were before the war:

• We are no longer naive to the threat of Hamas and the vulnerabilities in Israel’s border security. The Israeli security apparatus has a much better grasp on how to secure Gaza as well as Judaea and Samaria.

• Hamas’s leadership and fighters have been decimated.

• October 7th provided the critical opportunities to obliterate Hezbollah, which was far more formidable than Hamas. It similarly allowed Israel to take decisive actions against the Houthis, and of course, deal historic blows to Iran’s nuclear program and weaken its regime that was the proverbial “head of the octopus” of global terror.

These points can be made, are made by many, and ought to be made, but they do not satisfy, at least for me, the depths of our question. They feel like emotionally detached rationalizations akin to chalking up the devastation of the Holocaust as a necessary tragedy to allow for the establishment of the State of Israel. They may satisfy some people’s minds, but not their souls.

I want to propose a perspective that isn’t entirely rational, but does resonate with me more deeply.

Throughout Biblical and Rabbinic literature, redemption weaves together two threads that most of us would not have intuitively connected:

• teshuva (“repentance”) and

• the return from captivity.

Here’s a notable example:

Devrarim 30:1-3:

And it shall come to pass, when all these things are come upon you, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before thee, and you will take to heart (וַהֲשֵׁבֹתָ) among all the nations, into which Hashem your God has driven you, and you will return (וְשַׁבְתָּ) to Hashem your God, and will listen to His voice according to all that I command you this day, you and your children, with all thy heart, and with all your soul; that then, Hashem your God will return (וְשָׁב) your captives (שְׁבוּתְךָ), and have compassion upon you, and will return (וְשָׁב) and gather you from all the nations, amongst whom Hashem your God has scattered you. If your outcasts be at the ends parts of heavens, from there Hashem your God will gather you, and from there He will fetch you.

Notice that the Hebrew language makes the connection virtually impossible to ignore. The repeating Hebrew root ש-ב runs through it all: returning to a truth one had previously ignored, our return to Hashem, the return of our captives, and the return to our homeland.

There is more meaning to this than a mere linguistic coincidence. When a person has led his life certain way, with certain habits that have harmed himself and/or others — and eventually wishes to change that path — and even succeeds in doing so — sinister thoughts may stop him from celebrating: the regret of all those years wasted, what he “could have” and “should have” done. How “life could be different if he had only…”

The penitent is very much like a prisoner released from captivity, but still haunted by a past that hinders his future. He wants to go back and live his life, but feels like he can’t.1

It’s been thankfully well-publicized that the common translation of teshuva-תשובה as “repentance” is misleading. The English word “repentance” comes from the word “penitence,” which refers to experiencing pain, shame and remorse over one’s actions. The notion of teshuva-תשובה, however — although certainly includes remorse as part of its process — refers to the person’s return to his natural state of alignment with his ideal self.2 If the pain, shame and remorse stop him from this realignment then they are, by definition, working against the teshuva. This realignment — despite looking like going back to “square one,” must be celebrated because it is not square one. The one who has set himself free from these habits and mindsets is unlike anyone else:

Talmud Berachot 34b:

As Rabbi Abbahu said: In the place where “masters of teshuva” stand, even the fully righteous do not stand…

Having made his mistakes, even when he makes the necessary changes, he is a new person. True, he doesn’t regain his innocence. That isn’t the idea of teshuva. The idea of teshuva is that he now knows more about life, more about himself, and more about his God Who has given him the opportunity to grow through it all. He has more experience, and is a deeper, richer person. This transformation must be celebrated.

It’s not an accident that the Jewish calendar places the holiday of Sukkot, known as “Zman Simchateinu,” the “Time of Our Joy,” four days after the conclusion of Yom Kippur, the culmination of the season of teshuva that began 40 days prior to it on Rosh Chodesh Elul. Imagine for a moment what it would feel like to receive forgiveness and atonement, emerging with a fresh slate from the prison of past mistakes and not have a dedicated time for celebration for the chance to live another year of life unburdened by the past. After breaking our fast, we’d remain saddled with opportunity cost, too fragile and terrified to start anew. This would be sad indeed. We would have ostensibly returned to a “pre-sin state,” but without celebrating that we have matured in the process.

The message of Sukkot, which ends with Hoshana Rabbah, and is capped off with Shmini Atseret/Simchat Torah is to not allow sadness to overwhelm happiness in the teshuva process. Just the opposite —  we are instructed to actively make sure that our happiness overwhelms our sadness. Gratitude, happiness and actual celebration are the very things that lock in our commitments to change.

For this reason, one of the main events in the Holy Temple during Sukkot was a song and dance performed by two groups of elderly men, those who were renowned for the righteousness their whole lives, and those who were renowned for having had youthful lapses in their righteousness, but eventually turned their lives around:

Talmud Sukkah 53a:

The pious and the men of action [would dance before the people who attended the “Simchat Beit HaShoeva” celebration].

The Sages taught that some of them would sing [in their song praising Hashem]: “Happy is our youth, [as we did not sin then,] that did not shame [us in] our old age.” These are the pious and the men of action, [who spent all their lives engaged in Torah and mitzvot].

And some would sing: “Happy is our old age, that atoned for our youth [when we sinned].” These are the “baalei teshuva.”

Both these and those say: “Happy is he who did not sin; and he who sinned should repent and Hashem will forgive him.”

True teshuva is cause for celebration, and celebration is essential to true, long-lasting teshuva.

The families of hostages suffered unfathomably for 738 days. But when they greeted their kids, siblings, spouses — they cried with pent up sadness — but also with tears of joy. They smiled and laughed, hugged and kissed them. Their joy did not contradict their sadness and suffering. This joy reinaugurated their relationships with their loved ones now in their arms. It is this joy that brings with it the belief that they are actually home. They are actually back. With a long lives ahead of them, please God.

Teshuva means to “return,” but it never meant to go back to where we were. There’s an ironclad rule of the universe that things never go back to what they were. We cannot understand spiritually why exactly we have to go through what we went through, but we know in our souls that this process is what makes us who we are, even if we never would have asked to go through it.

Perhaps this is why the message of this journey is sent to us in a wordless code long before we get to the last days of the holiday season.

The sound of the shofar begins as a unified tekiah sound, but then breaks into three wailing shevarim (literally “broken pieces”) sounds, and then shatters into the staccato teruah (literally “shattered”) sound. The code clearly signifies a breakdown in life that at some point seems like it goes from bad to worse. But it doesn’t end there. It returns to a tekiah on the other side. The pieces are put back together. Although the second tekiah sounds like the first tekiah, one who appreciates it coming after the breakdown in between understands in his soul that it is so very different. It shines bright with joy on the background of sadness.

May we merit to hear the tekiah gedolah of a world in which all the pieces come back together.

Isaiah 51:11

וּפְדוּיֵי ה׳ יְשׁוּבוּן וּבָאוּ צִיּוֹן בְּרִנָּה וְשִׂמְחַת עוֹלָם עַל־רֹאשָׁם שָׂשׂוֹן וְשִׂמְחָה יַשִּׂיגוּן נָסוּ יָגוֹן וַאֲנָחָה׃ֿ

The Lord’s redeemed shall return, and come singing to Zion, and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads. They shall attain gladness and joy, while sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

I know we are still knee deep in our Language of Life series, studying the Divine depth and precision of Hebrew language, but I had an epiphany when studying the book of Jonah last Shabbat, and feel compelled to share it with you. I hope you find it meaningful as I did.

On Yom Kippur, the day of forgiveness and atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, the Book of Jonah is read at Mincha, the afternoon service.

Why? Of course, it’s about teshuva (repentance) — but most of Tanakh is about teshuva. It also ends in such a strange, anti-climactic way. It’s not even clear if Jonah himself repented. He seems to have ended right back where he started.

Rabbi Yehoshua ibn Shuaib (Spain, circa 1280-1340) explained that the role of the book is to broaden our vision outward — to the whole world’s repentance — since over the course of Yom Kippur we may have become too narrow in our focus — as if everything is just us Jews and God. This is how Rashi (the classic French medieval Biblical commentator) explained Jonah’s reluctance to enable Nineveh’s repentance: if they succeeded, it would make the Jewish people look bad for their weak teshuva record, and allow Assyria to become God’s instrument to displace the Jews from the Land of Israel. But Jonah was wrong. Moses refused to indict the Jewish people — but not at the expense of other nations’ repentance!

The Malbim (19th c. commentator) adds another layer. He explains that Jonah wasn’t opposed to helping even non-Jews repent — but only if it was real repentance — not some pro forma, “Disney repentance” that would last a week, while making for horrible optics for the Jewish people. No, Sir. He would not be accomplice in this mission.

Here’s my added insight, which I thought was worth interrupting our study of Hebrew for: Jonah was a black-and-white thinker. He is introduced as “Yonah Ben Amitai,” literally, “Son of my truth” — a man of truth — perhaps to a fault. If repentance wasn’t “real,” he wanted no part in it. So convinced was he of his absolute stance that he slept in the bowels of the ship while the waves crashed around them to get him to change his mind and return to his Divine mission. He even introduced himself to the pagan captain of his ship as “a Hebrew and I fear the Lord.” So sure was he that God was merely testing his resolve to not compromise the reputation of the Jewish people for the superficial teshuva of others. Only after three days at death’s door, squished inside the guts of a fish, did he shift — to repent, if you can even call it that. He agreed to go to Ninveh and do what he was told, but ironically, his own repentance is eventually shown to be incomplete.

Nineveh did a spectacular albeit partial repentance. They abandoned the sin theft altogether, returning stolen objects in their position, but not their idolatrous beliefs. Jonah cries out in frustration, “This is exactly what I was talking about!” Apparently, he hadn’t fully accepted God’s will after all.

And so Jonah asks to die. “What would be good is if I died — and don’t live.” There is no thought more black-and-white than this. The only objectively good outcome for Jonah at this point is for him to cease to exist.

God’s response? “Are you upset about a mere marginal improvement?” In other words: Would you have preferred that the 120,000 people of Nineveh remain exactly the same? Would that have been better than their incomplete but still meaningful step forward in spiritual living?

This question connects powerfully back to the very first act of repentance: Cain’s partial repentance after killing his brother Abel.

Right before he committed that first murder, God asked him: “Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you improve yourself, won’t you be uplifted?” (Genesis 4:6–7).

Cain was angry and sad. Angry at himself for failing, and sad over a reality his ego wouldn’t let him change. He was stuck. But God’s solution was clear: just improve — even marginally. Learn from mistakes, and you are by definition moving in the right direction. Cain’s stubbornness stopped him from accepting this advice. And yet, ironically, he is the one who ends up teaching his father Adam — the first human being that he’s not stuck. We can all change. Through Adam, and later the Jewish people, all humanity was taught about teshuva — that partial repentance is still called repentance. When Cain admitted, “My sin is too great to bear,” he modeled the first step towards return. You can’t go anywhere without taking a first step.

The episode of the kikayon plant God provided Jonah for shade drives home the same point: even temporary shade is better than no shade at all. Jonah doesn’t fully internalize this. But the fact that God’s last words to him are left hanging — with Jonah giving no answer — leaves open the possibility that he did accept, at least partially, that absolute good is not the only good. Improvement is also good — and a necessary good towards ultimate, global good.

And this is the message we need — not on Shabbat Shuva or the morning of Yom Kippur, when we aim high — but at the afternoon service of Yom Kippur, as we begin to accept that we haven’t fully repaired ourselves, let alone all of creation. This is precisely what we need to hear: perfect should not be the enemy of the good. Absolute good should not stand in the way of genuine improvement.

I want to share two stories with you about people I know personally.

• A friend of mine, now a man extremely influential Jewish leader, was once a fairly not religious college student studying abroad in Jerusalem. One day, when visiting the Kotel, an Orthodox woman came up to him — he assumed to ask for money. She said to him, “I know that if I tell you to change your life and become fully religious, you’ll ignore me completely. So too, if I tell you to start keeping completely kosher. All I ask is that one time that you are about to eat something not kosher — you don’t.” For reasons unknown to him, he agreed. A month or so later, he found himself at Wendy’s ordering a double bacon cheeseburger. Again, inexplicably he correct his order, and asked the woman serving him to “hold the bacon.” Confounded but intrigued, he sat to eat his hot double cheeseburger. This is how he described the experience to me: “As I bit into that double cheeseburger, I felt waves of kedusha (holiness) wash over me, and so began my process of becoming religious. It was the holiest cheeseburger in history.”

• Another couple, who were likely in their early 70s when I met them, shared with me that they started keeping Shabbat in their 60s. That’s fairly unusual, so I asked them to please tell me the story behind that life change. They said that the rabbi at the synagogue they were attending asked them a couple of years after they started going regularly for Shabbat, how they got to Shul. Slightly uncomfortable, they admitted that they drove. The rabbi, without flinching, recommended that they try driving the following week halfway. Puzzled at his bizarre suggestion, they agreed anyway. The next Shabbat, they drove halfway, parked on the side of the street, walked the rest of the way, prayed and enjoyed kiddush. On their way back, they got to their car, stopped and looked at each other. “Are we really going to get back in the car? We’re already halfway.” That was the last time they drove on Shabbat.

Like these stories there are hundreds of thousands of stories of people growing through small, incremental changes. In the face of big life changes, they would have stayed stuck forever.

The Vilna Gaon (also known as the “Gra,” 18th c.) pointed out that this is the deeper message of the book, which he understood was an allegory for the journey of the soul into one body, not being fully successful and needing to reincarnate to complete its mission. The whole concept of reincarnation (gilgulim) rests on the idea that no one repairs their entire being in one lifetime. Each lifetime accomplishes a partial rectification (tikun) until the complete rectification is achieved. In this way, Jonah’s prophecy is truly for the generations. Like Eliyahu the Prophet, to whom he owed his life for reviving him as a child, Jonah’s life work unfolds not in one moment but across Jewish history — one Yom Kippur afternoon at a time.

Gmar Chatima Tova.

🖨️ Printable Version for RH

You take either some fish head or meat from the head of a lamb, and before you eat it, you pray “נהיה לראש ולא לזנב — we should be a head (rōsh), and not a tail.”1

It makes you wonder if the name for the Jewish New Year “Rosh Hashana,” literally, “the Head of the Year” is intentional or just a trivial quirk of the Hebrew language.

Why isn’t it called “Hatchalat Hashana — התחלת השנה,” which would translate to “the beginning of the year”?

Or, as we do in English, “Shana Chadasha — שנה חדשה,” “the new year”?

The Jewish concept of Rosh Hashana is very different than the secular concept of New Year. On December 31, people around the world watch their clocks with great excitement as they approach 12am, eventually counting down from 10 — 9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1, bursting in catharsis, releasing confetti, chugging champagne, and kissing the closest person to them. The year changes, but unsurprisingly, this ritual doesn’t lead to people changing.

Instead, the cycle continues. After all, from a scientific point of view, there’s absolutely nothing special about 12:00am on January 1st. Astronomically, nothing — literally nothing — happens at that moment. The Earth keeps sliding along its elliptical orbit.

In order for our lives to change in a meaningful way, we have to change our minds. We need a new outlook. A new perspective. A new way of seeing, and a new language to talk about it.

“In order for our lives to change in a meaningful way, we have to change our minds.

This is the change we look to make on Rosh Ha’Shana. We don’t just want our feet to keep moving mindlessly in the direction we’ve been walking all year. We want to start the year with perspective, with our head on our shoulders. With a fresh Rosh-ראש.

This brings us to another Hebrew word that perhaps we haven’t given much thought to: Shana-שנה, “year.” What is its deeper meaning?

On the one hand, the verb lishnot-לשנות means “to repeat,” from the word shnayim-שנים, “two.” On the other hand, the word shoneh-שונה means “different.”

Aren’t “repeat” and “different” opposites?

They are, but they come together in the English word iteration. To iterate is to repeat a cycle but with a conscientious modification every time.

“To iterate is to repeat a cycle but with a conscientious modification every time.”

Herein is the misnomer of “10,000 hours of practice” to become an expert, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, based on research by K. Anders Ericsson. The misconception was founded on the notion that if you repeat an activity for 10,000 hours, you automatically become an expert. This is patently false. The world is full of bad doctors, lawyers, plumbers, and teachers who have practiced their craft for well over 10,000 hours — and did it wrong every single time. It’s for this reason that Ericsson made sure to call it 10,000 hours of “deliberate practice.” It isn’t the repetition alone that makes one improve. It’s the mindful learning with every repetition, that makes the person 1% better than the time before. This is iteration, and the idea of a Rosh Hashana — mindful iteration.

Before we restart the cycle again, another lap around the sun, we need to feel the existential judgment that asks us if we’re running in circles or becoming better.

May we experience the mind expansion of Rosh Hashana that allows us to see higher than the patterns we tend to mindlessly travel along. May the judgment be sweetened in knowing that the changes we have to make are the changes of growth, improvement, and self-actualization.

Shana Tova!

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A few weeks ago, we began to explore what prayer is by carefully studying the Hebrew word for it, mitpalel-מתפלל.

This week, I want to think together about the most essential mental maneuver to be able to pray — what’s known in Hebrew as kavana-כוונה.

Kavana is normally thought of as “concentration,” and is most often translated as “intent.” While these are reasonable English language associations with the Hebrew word kavana, they miss its core meaning, and may not help you actually figure out what it is you’re supposed to do when you decide to concentrate.

“Concentration” conjures up an image of a person physically exerting himself, trying with all his might to get himself to think intensely.

In my experience, this approach to mental focus ironically makes it harder to concentrate. I personally end up getting distracted by the physical strain in my face and body, as well as by the focus on “trying to focus” — instead of what I want to be focusing on.

The word “intent” is better. The problem with it is that it gives to indication as to how to live and pray with more intentionality. After all, we may intend to have a meaningful prayer session, but fail dismally despite our best intentions.

What secrets are encoded in the word kavana-כוונה that can guide us to actually putting it into practice?

Kavana-כוונה is the verb form of kivun-כיוון, which means direction.

To have kavana is to direct, aim and align your mind, heart and body. It’s this alignment that allows our intentions to flow through us — and it’s this flow that is the essence of prayer.

“To have kavana is to direct, aim and align your mind, heart and body.

It’s this alignment that allows our intentions to flow through us — and it’s this flow that is the essence of prayer. ”

The problem is that the mind’s natural state is s c a t t e r e d.

If this isn’t immediately evident to you, try to be quiet for two minutes, and watch your thoughts bounce from one thing to another.

“Am I doing this right?”

               “Has it been two minutes?”

     “My nose itches.”

                        “Oh man I forgot to call Steve back!”

Because our attention is loosely attached to whatever happens to be scrolling through our minds at any given moment, we tend not to realize how random our thinking is. We just follow the bouncing ball of our thoughts.

Manually scrolling through social media just masks our inattention. It does this through an illusion of focus on whatever the algorithm feeds our bottomless appetite for distraction.

While those with diagnosable ADHD certainly experience a significantly larger deficit of attention relative to most people, most people suffer from an objective deficit of sustained attention on what we truly want from life — and suffer we do from the consequent misalignment.1

Spiritual disciplines over the millennia have had to reckon with the problem of our perpetual distraction. It’s a hard fact of the human condition. Any discipline that ignores or avoids this fact is naive and not a discipline at all. And it’s not just because of smartphones and micro-form video content (although these certainly haven’t helped).

The Buddha was teaching people how to calm and direct their minds 2,500 years ago, and Hinduism was already addressing the issue even prior to the Buddha. Both traditions often refer to the dilemma of the “Monkey Mind.”2

Although the discipline of meditation was prominent in Judaism in ancient times, and was revived more recently in pockets of the Mussar tradition, some Chassidic schools, and the Sephardic Kabbalistic system of the Rashash — the meditative tools of Judaism remain essentially invisible to the general population today.3

Let’s look at kavana as a mindfulness practice of alignment more closely and practically:

The Talmud, 1,500 years ago, identified a number of verses in Tanakh, written millennia prior, as speaking to the need to align one’s mind, heart and body — not just before uttering words in prayer, but also before performance of a mitzvah.

It should be noted that even this oft-used English word associated with mitzvot — “performance” — is precisely what the sages of the Talmud wanted us to avoid. Mitzvot and certainly tefila (prayer) are meant to be profound experiences of connection and relationship with God. In order for them to indeed be connection points, not merely “performances,” we have to first align the many layers of who we are towards the goal of connection.

This is precisely the function of saying a beracha before a mitzvah, and the goal of the entire lead-up to the amida in prayer — inner and outer alignment.4

Here’s a visual of what alignment might look like:

Our first flicker of awareness should be trained towards gratitude towards the One Who has given us another day of life.

As mundane as it sounds, we have to make sure we use the bathroom so that our bodies are clean, healthy and undistracted. We wash our hands to be physically clean, but also to shed the sleepy unconsciousness from them.

We get dressed in a way that doesn’t produce a mismatch between how we look and the momentous meeting with God we are hoping to have.

Since our emotions do not autonomously blossom when we open up a siddur (prayerbook), we have to warm them up to align with the encounter with our Creator. After some discussion, the Talmud concludes that the appropriate emotional state for prayer is a joyful reverence (or a reverent joy). By considering how precious the opportunity is to have quality, mindful time of connection, we are meant to feel great about having achieved a state of true trepidation.

This emotional state is reached through a conscious state of awareness that we are “before God.” Meaning, although we cannot visualize God, we can visualize ourselves before Him. We can consider that our actions, words, and even thoughts are all seen by Him. This “being seen” is what all of our souls desire, and naturally brings joy.

We then focus on aligning the words we say with this consciousness. To mean what we say we need to: a) understand at least their simple meaning, and then b) actually mean them sincerely.

The desire that is meant to course through this alignment is the sincere desire to connect with our Creator. If this sounds foreign, think about it as simply the desire to connect — the desire to be aligned with your purpose — the desire for meaningful moments. All humans desire this. We just need to calm our minds enough to allow this desire to shine through.

This alignment isn’t necessarily a specific step-by-step process. Different people on different days may have to focus more on one element than another, but the idea is that a powerful spiritually experience of connection depends on this alignment — on our kavana.

The alternative is the default, mindless state of misalignment.

Without intentional alignment, we are all scattered. We barely know where we are, and have given no thought as to where we want to be. We might be dressed like we just rolled out of bed, and haven’t even stopped to take care of our bodily needs. Our emotional state is blowing in the wind. We open the siddur and mumble words out of habit, often not even noticing that they don’t register meaningfully in our minds.

Without doing the work of alignment, we obviously have no awareness of being in God’s presence, and our conscious craving is for breakfast and/or sleep — not to connect with our Creator.

Alignment is a choice.

Perhaps the most important choice we can make everyday.

It’s all in the word kavana-כוונה. Another example of how the “language of life” can guide us.

Next time, we’ll take a look at the word for prayerbook, siddur-סידור.

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