6: From Budapest, about Prague

Beloved friends

Jews have always believed in the power of words. They say that God created the world with speech. In some circles, they even say He made the letters that fill the Book before He made things that their wordy amalgamations might point to. The word for “thing” in Hebrew is in fact the word for “word.” The verb to speak, Medaber, means also to thingify. Words turn the formless masses of the Universe into comprehensible units, units that we can apprehend, can grasp with our tactile minds. They separate the indiscriminate force of life, and in separating that which is conjoined, they give life anew. In a world with no difference, no individual lives; to separate is to give life to that which is distinguished.

In Prague, they tell an old story of a wizened Jew who believed more than most in the power of words. Yehuda Leib was a studious man, a learned Rabbi from Poland who had come to Prague to lead its great and numerous Jews. He wrote many books: commentaries on the Mishnah and the holidays, supra-commentaries on Rashi, ethical tractates, and the list goes on. His books were novel and well-argued, the products of a great mind, a light of his generation, so great that he became known as “The Maharal,” from the Hebrew acronym for “Our Teacher, the Rav Leib”; and yet his greatest verbal feat was not in the books. You see, they say it was with words that Yehuda Leib saved the Jews of Prague. Sometime during the five and a half centuries during which the Jews were forced to wear a badge of shame by the Christian authorities, there was a particularly violent period in Prague. The gentiles, driven by fear and lies, took to murdering Jews on the street. 

The Maharal went to his study and prayed. He prayed with words, and the words ascended to Heaven and they came back and told him to fashion a being made of clay. And he went to the banks of the Danube and collected clay, and he fashioned it into a man, twice as large as any man in Prague. And then the Rabbi knelt beside the clay man and in his ear the Rabbi whispered magical words, and on his forehead he wrote the Truth: Emet. And the man lived, and he took to the streets, and the Jews were safe. And the streets ran red with the blood of gentiles.

The words were blunt, and so the Golem (for that was the name of the man of clay) could not see. To him, there was no Andrej, the bookbinder, or Jan, the Baker, or Heschel, the Kosher butcher. There were Jews and Gentiles, and the Gentiles were guilty, and the Gentiles had to die. There is no distinction in this, no nuance, no complexity of experience; there is only Truth and Falsehood, Right and Wrong, Black and White.

A few days ago in Prague, I stumbled across some graffiti that said “Fuck Islam.” These are blunt words. They thingify a group of believers at least as complex as Christians and Jews and Buddhists and Hindus. They erase the more subtle differences alluded to by other words, by adjectives and nouns that point to bodies and lives. 

In Hamburg, at my Nonviolent Communication workshop, we were asked to attend to our experience. What does it really feel like when you feel sad? Angry? Where do you feel it in your body? How do you know you are sad, or angry, or hungry? What are the words you can use to transform these generic broad strokes into precise plays of shading and color? And for those who are listening, how can you listen to the precision of this experience? How can you listen to the entirety of this human being, not through a generic Humanity, but through the way that humanity expresses itself uniquely here and now through this person?

John Ruskin taught drawing because be believed it helped his pupils see and appreciate beauty. In addition to pencils, he sometimes painted with words. How do you describe a sunset so precisely that you capture the nuance of the moment? That you hold still in time that which will never live again? You don’t. You try, and in trying you discover that this cannot be held, that the words we have, whatever language they are in, even if they be surgically precise, are insufficient. The best they can do is point, coarsely, at the moon.

Which might just be enough to show us the way, if we do it right.

with love,

Rafa

PS: The Ruskin reference, along with much of the email from Bergen, owe a heavy debt to Alain de Botton’s “The Art of Travel”, which I highly recommend for those who are embarking on a journey (or who wish they were). Also, the Golem story was especially on my mind thanks to the homonymous exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

Rafael Kern