Using Poetry To Evoke God
Rabbi Margaret
Back in the short moment when I was a philosophy major in college I think I whacked my way through a little bit of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophus. (Knowing me I probably read the back cover and winged it from there…) For a guy who wrote about language he was sure hard to read! But what I think he might have said is that language is an agreement between people: you see this thing and call it a table. I see the same thing and also call it a table. So when I hear you say “table” that picture is what arises in my mind too. I may think of my mother’s dining table when you say “table. You may think of your mother’s dining table when I say “table.” But we both have a general sense of what is meant by the word, enough that we can have a conversation about setting this table that’s in front of us.
This agreement holds up when you and I both know what the other person means when they say a word. It’s easy when we speak of things that we know the other person perceives similarly, whether nouns like table and chair, verbs like stroking , placing, touching, adjectives like blue or soft. It is harder to talk about things that I can’t see in front of me and know that you are seeing in the same way. Like God.
There are ways you can talk about God and kind of be understood. You can use words that we understand from human experience and just say they pertain to God too: God loves, God hates God chooses, God commands, God breathes. You can use metaphors, like God is the Tree of Life or God is King of the world. You can just make propositions about God and hope they kind of make sense to the person you’re saying them to because we understand each word, even though we may not fully get the whole concept, like: “God created the world in six days.”
You can tell a story that implies something about God: Angels came to Sarai and said, when we come back in a year you will be pregnant. She laughed because she was 90 years old. But in a year they came back, and she was pregnant. That tells us in a narrative way something about how God works in the world.
You can use poetry to evoke God:
Shachar avakeshcha tzuri umisgabi
Morning I will seek You, my fortress, rock each day…
But whether we are saying rock or tree or love or pregnant at ninety, we are making a leap from those words that we understand to a reality which is l’ayla min kol birchata v’shirata — beyond all blessings and prayers. When we say these words to another person we trust that they, like we, will be able to make a leap from the concrete to the numinous.
This is both a strength and a limitation of religion — that it has to use the language of this world — and of the particular culture and landscape where it is practiced — to create a container which will hold the ineffable. And so different religious traditions offer stories, poems, prayers, scriptures which all seem distinct and contradictory — even if at the center of each is the indescribable Mystery that none can completely articulate or contain.
Our parsha today makes an extraordinary claim about God, speaking in — kivyachol, as if such a thing could be — in the voice of God:
וְשָׁ֣כַנְתִּ֔י בְּת֖וֹךְ בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל
I will dwell among the children of Yisrael
(Ex. 29:46a)
I think we mostly understand most of these words: “I” — first person singular pronoun, “will dwell” future tense intransitive verb, to live someplace, sleep there, keep your stuff there — “among” — in the mix with — “b’nai Yisrael” —that’s a bit of an idiom, but a familiar one. It doesn’t literally mean children, like tykes — it means the people Israel, the Jewish people.
But what the hey? What can it possibly mean for God to live someplace? Much less with the children of Israel, among them? I suspect that this reality was as much beyond the understanding conveyed in language for our ancient forbears — b’nai Yisrael — as it is for us today. It doesn’t mean it isn’t real — it just means that it can’t be articulated plainly. It needs a container.
One could look at the mishkan — the traveling tent whose structural details we are receiving in Tetzaveh and indeed most of the second half of the book of Exodus — as an understandable, tangible, describable container — a kind of a physical metaphor — for the indescribable, intangible reality of the Mystery, the Divine, HASHEM doing something that we can only metaphorically describe as dwelling.
Tetzaveh is full of material details that we and our ancestors can easily (or occasionally not so easily) understand. In particular it focuses on an outfit for the High Priest consisting of a robe, a tunic, a box-like knit (I had to work on that one a bit), a turban, a sash, a breastplate with stones whose names must have been familiar to the ancients even if they are not so to us, turquoise, purple, scarlet, embroidered pomegranates. It also prescribes offerings of young bulls, rams, unleavened bread smeared with oil, placed in a basket and so on. Our parsha is a continuation of the instructions for building the mishkan itself — measurements, materials, again colors and textures.
It was all so sensual — so tactile and visual, probably fragrant as well. Its beauty and its grandeur communicated something that led people to the edge of what they could understand and then beyond.
The mishkan was a container for the Ineffable Divine, a construction built of materials that the people could understand, could craft and then could look at, enter, walk towards the center. In that center, in the Holy Place, at the altar, before the ark, in front of the menorah, in the Holy of Holies, people may have been able — at least sometimes — to move from the material experience to something beyond the material plane. While the instructions for building the mishkan, outfitting the High Priest and offering the sacrifices are verbal, the construction itself was not. But it was still a comprehensible container for something beyond description. We could think of the mishkan as a kind of language — a kind of metaphor, a kind of poetry. But we might notice as we enjoy the poetry of the Kohen Gadol’s outfit that something is missing here: words. the Kohen Gadol presides inside the mishkan made of multicolored tapestries, wearing this glorious outfit, offering up animals. And there is no script, no formula to be said, no blessing. The language of the mishkan and its rituals is visual and sensual.
This visual, tactile way of articulating a container for the Divine is practiced in many of the world’s religions.
Once the Temple was destroyed and the ancient Jewish people dispersed around the world, the vivid physical container that held and contained the ineffable Mystery was no longer available. In its place was built a beautiful, elaborate container of words. Words are our mishkan — the comprehensible structure that we build to hold the incomprehensible.
Many religious traditions still create a container for the Divine with sensual and material language. Years ago I saw the Life Magazine book of World Religions — Life had all these great photographers and a huge budget, and they went all over the world recording rituals and places of worship. I remember being dazzled by the color of Hindu temples, Sufi dancers, mosques, stupas, saints’ processions and so on. And then I turned a page and saw Jewish men in a yeshiva — with their striped tallitot and payes, their shtenders and open volumes of sacred text — almost completely black and white.
The prayer service echoes the structure of the mishkan, the order of the sacrifices. The practice of study, whether of the materials and dimensions of the great tent or the compounding of the incense, replaced the physical structure. Today we recite daily services rather than offering bulls and breads. These practices too transport us to the center of what we can easily understand and then allow us — at least sometimes — to step over that precipice into the Mystery.
It’s beautiful in its own way — all those words. But sometimes when reading about the mishkan I can’t escape a feeling that something is lost. Color, texture, shape — these so beautifully convey the Divine. They feel much more accessible than our present Jewish container of prayer and study.
And this makes me think about one kind of container for the Divine which is both ancient and new, verbal and sensual, located in particular places and completely transportable. And that is music. Music can come out of our own hands and mouths — and at the same time it can transport us to places beyond where we materially stand. Music is a mishkan — a human construction that creates a place where the Divine can dwell among us.
My beloved Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Piazetzner rebbe of blessed memory, wrote: ‘
One who simply describes God’s greatness and His praise is like a person who reports that somewhere, far away, there is a great light. But to actually sing God’s praise is like bringing a candle back from the faraway light to this world.
And so it is essential and not incidental that we sing our services, even our scriptures. Through song we build a mishkan, a container for the Divine
וְשָׁ֣כַנְתִּ֔י בְּת֖וֹךְ בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל
I will dwell among the children of Yisrael
(Ex. 29:46a)
When we build a dwelling place of melody, it creates a place where God can dwell. When we sing we enter that place. And perhaps held in place bby that container we are able to step beyond the notes and the words into the mysterious, inarticulable and completely real Center, where God dwells among us.