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.
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
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.
‘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.
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.
Shabbat shalom
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