Revelation
by Robert Frost
We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone find us really out.
'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.
But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone find us really out.
'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.
But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.
I think we are
done, don’t you, with the question of whether this is, or is not, the letter by
letter, word, by word record of some divine dictation.
Long done.
There’s a lovely
passage comment in the Talmud Yerushalmi that imagines Moses taking dictation
from God on top of Sinai, writing away in black fire on a scroll of white fire,
when, sweating from the heat of the fiery letters he mops his brow on his
sleeve and some of the fiery ink rubs off on his forehead – and that is why the
Torah speaks of Moses having horns of light – carnei or.
The sort of thing
pictured by ... well everyone.
This is Jose de
Rivera’s image
But this tale of
the fiery quill isn’t meant to be taken literally.
It’s a poetic
image.
And revelation is
always going to come down to a matter of poetry
Light words that tease and flout ...
'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The greatest problem I have with the notion that this, all this, represents some letter by letter record of Divine
dictation is not based on Biblical archaeology or Ancient Semitic philology or
Higher or Lower literary Biblical criticism or fossil records or astral physics
or anything like that.
The greatest problem I have with the notion that all this represents some letter by letter record of Divine
dictation is theological. If the will of god, revealed to humanity, ultimately
boils down to a bunch of letters placed in order, then the will of God ceases
to be something infinite, touching the heavens, beyond human ken, and becomes
instead something ultimately two-dimensional and all too simple for a true
encapsulation of what is willed for our existence.
It’s more than the sort of theological problem that should be filed with
the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. People die
because other people think that the will of God is really encapsulated in a
series of letters so that they can claim some kind of monopoly on an
understanding of God’s will. They think they can know what God wants and it’s
at that point that other people start getting excluded from being important in
God’s eyes. Other people end up getting hurt, excluded, killed even.
'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.
‘Tis pity indeed if we make the mistake of thinking that God’s will is
capable of being trapped by printing presses, ink scrawls of pixellated
imagery. Revelation is poetic, not literal speech.
I know the letters, in the order in which they fall, are capable of
revealing the most extraordinary truths about the nature of human existence. I
love the stories; I live my life by these stories, and the commands and all of
it. But that’s not because of the precise letter by letter nature of how these
verses appear in the good book. It’s because of the way the letters open up
something that is beyond the letters themselves. It’s not that the letters are
the product of revelation, they are the symbol pointing to the reality of
revelation; a reality that can never be pinned down, like a lepidopterist’s
butterfly.
This is Abraham Joshua Heschel, ‘ The nature of revelation is something
words cannot spell, which human language will never be able to portray. In
speaking about revelation, the more descriptive the term, the less adequate the
description.’[1]
In other words if you make a point about something being literally revelatory,
you fail to understand what revelation actually is – it’s beyond.
So therefore we are all, seeking after that which is beyond all letters.
And the role of the letters becomes not encapsulating the will of God, but
pointing instead at that which is beyond all letters.
To put it another way, in the words of the very Sidra we read today.
Vchol ha’am roim
et hakalot – ‘All the people saw the thunder’
That’s impossible, of course, or rather it requires a blending, a
bending, of sensory perceptions.
It becomes poetically possible as it is literally impossible.
Is this a little highfalutin, I’m sorry. But this is important. This is
who we are, as a faithful, non-fundamentalist community.
Maimonides[2]
puts it like this.
We believe that the Torah has reached Moses from
God in a manner which is described in Torah figuratively by the term ‘word’,
but nobody has ever known how that took place except Moses to whom that word
reached.
Those words – the words that were heard on Sinai are not the same kinds
of words I’m using today. That revelation is quite unlike anything I can
articulate.
Or another Midrash. There is a tale of the way in which the letters of
the Ten Commandments were carved into the Shnei Luchot – the two tablets Moses
brought down from the mountain.
Rabbis hold that the carving went right through the stones and that it
didn’t matter whether you looked one way on or the other way on at the letters
They still read the same way.
In other words they were nothing like the largely non-symmetircal
letters we now know.
In other words it wasn’t written in the sort of letters we would
consider letters.
One last example, my favourite.
From the C19 Hasidic Rebbe,
Naftali Tzvi Horotvitz of Rophshitz.[3]
What was heard on Sinai? Asks the Rophshitzer, ‘The sound of the first
letter of the first of the Ten Commandments.’ Now that’s terrific. The first
letter of the Ten Commandments is an Aleph. It doesn’t have a sound.
Or rather, maybe, it is the sound of a letter before there is noise, the
sound that encapsulates all possibility of future sound, it’s the aural
equivalent of a microdot in which contains all possible written information.
I’m trying to articulate an ambivalence, in the strict sense of the word
– a simultaneous tug in two different directions – or valences.
On the one hand every revelatory text, every purported experience of
revelation has to be tugged back down to its proper earthly station. By the
time we, humans, are speaking about revelation it’s already gone.
On the other hand every text, every experience that point beyond itself
towards something unknowable has to be cherished. These texts serve as
pointers, a roadmap towards that which is beyond.
And the more these texts become used in this way, the more carefully and
more profoundly their spiritual core is unpacked and used, in turn to point
ever higher, the more important they become. They serve like spiritual ladders
pointing away into the heavens. You climb them not to get to the top, but to be
one who climbs, one who seeks out the heavens.
From the perspective of the heavens revelation works in the opposite
way.
There is, somehow, some need of the Divine to disclose, to reach down,
to share with us puny humans.
But as the information arrives it is whisked away, less we should find
ourselves carrying too great a burden for our fragile human minds.
Those who claim to understand too precisely the will of God are
dangerous, to themselves and others.
Frost again,
But so with all,
from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.
Are you still with me?
I know you don’t believe in the literal letter by letter version of
revelation.
My hope, in giving this sermon is that you are with me in making two
other claims.
I hope you don’t believe that what I’ve been trying to articulate is
less profound, a sort of ortho-lite pseudo-faith. It’s not. It’s stronger and
more holy than fundamentalism. It’s the very nature of what Jews, the most
spiritually refined of Jews in any event, have felt about revelation and the
letter by letter nature of this book.
I hope, equally, that you can feel, even if only on those fleeting
moments, that there is something which is beyond, there is something all these
letters and words point towards; not graspable, not capable of being turned
into a plaything for humans to do their worse, but rather an invitation to turn
towards the heavens and gaze on at the animating power of the Universe and the
will for our existence.
Because a true Jewish sense of revelation exists in the middle of these
two claims.
We make ourselves
a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone find us really out.
'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.
But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone find us really out.
'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.
But so with all, from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar,
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.
Shabbat shalom
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