Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [50]
Another version of this idea that God's revelation is without or beyond specific content is found in a Hasidic source quoted in the name of Rabbi Mendel of Rymanow.21 Perhaps it can be seen as the final step in this progressive narrowing of revelation's funnel. Only the first letter of the commandments, the aleph of anokhi, “I am,” was spoken by the divine voice alone, Rabbi Mendel claims. All the rest was revealed through Moses. Aleph signifies the number 1, referring to the unity of all in Y-H-W-H. That sufficed for the message. The bet, or number 2, of bereshit, the birth of duality in Creation (since “creature” appears to be other than its “Creator”), is now replaced by the all-embracing aleph. All the rest is humanly transmitted commentary.
But the perceptive reader will note (with Gershom Scholem)22 that the letter aleph, if unmarked by a vowel point, is utterly silent, nothing more than an intake of breath. Is this all God has to say? Or does the divine voice in fact only make room, through an act of tsimtsum, self-limitation, to allow the human voice to speak and articulate the teaching in the human tongue? Here we are taken through the eye of the Kabbalist's needle, back into the realm of divine silence, or to the font of a divine speech that cannot be fully translated into our all-too-human languages, where its essence and purity would surely be lost. Thinking in words and letters, we have gone back to the mysterious name Y-H-W-H, the most abstract and yet energy-filled of all words, the root of all language. This name is nothing but a breath, yet it will animate all of speech. On the Kabbalistic chart we have here “ascended,” or, as I prefer, turned deeply inward, proceeding from chamber to chamber. We have made the journey from malkhut, or Oral Torah, as wide as the seven seas, taking in all the world and its wisdom, back to her mate tif'eret, Written Torah, containing just so many words and letters, each of which has to be written and pronounced perfectly. (The textus receptus is a kind of verbal embodiment of God's presence in our midst, an icon in language. Hence the insistence on perfection in its form.)23 But now we continue along on the journey, slipping through hokhmah, the primal point of divine self-disclosure. Hokhmah is symbolized by the letter yod, the smallest of all letters and the graphic beginning point in writing them all, the shape of the needle's eye. As we pass through it, we stand in aleph, the realm of ‘atiqa,24 the Ancient of Days, the God of primal unity before Creation, before differentiation, before sound, and we strive to listen to its silence.
Language and silence are here engaged at the high point of their eternal dance with one another. Poets have always used language to bring their readers to the edge of silence. The interplay between the two is the great poet's stock-in-trade. Shetok;kakh ‘aleh be-mahashavah: “Be silent; only thus may you ascend to the divine mind,” said Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, intentionally misreading a famous Talmudic quotation.25 Leave words behind as you enter the divine palace, a place of silence. As long as you still have with you language and the questions it inevitably brings, you will not be able to break through to God's silent, awesome realm. But then another voice enters. “No,” cries the prophet, “Take words with you as you return to God” (Hos. 14:3). You cannot leave language utterly behind. Uplift and transform language; use it in a different way. Create the sort of language that will always feel like it is brimming with divine silence. Be a prophet, or, at very least, a poet, one who knows how to infuse words with silence. This is the voice that dominates in Jewish culture (differing from Eastern traditions here), one that ultimately depends upon the possibility of sacred language.
“All of Torah contained within the letter aleph