D’Var Torah
Kol Nidrei 5787
The ability to speak is one of the most powerful things we are capable of – as the ancient translators of the Torah taught us when they translated the Hebrew “Adam” into Aramaic “Bar Memalel” – Human into Speaking Creature.
It is truly remarkable how much Jewish fascination with speech and words – what we will call dibbur – has shaped our religious culture.
Look at us tonight, we’re here again, on the eve of another Yom Kippur, to spend hours together speaking words, yes also singing words, and reading words quietly, listening to this speech or d’var Torah – word of Torah.
On Erev Yom Kippur, we say Kol Nidre – like we just did – a careful, formulaic arrangement of words, in order to relinquish the power of the promises we make with our words. We’re all here because we feel the power of Dibbur – and we probably used words to internally consider to be here and how to be here, what to wear, how to travel from home, and with whom to sit.
In essence, I will claim tonight that Jews spend an extraordinary amount of Yom Kippur speaking because Judaism believes that the words we speak can change the person who speaks them and develop our soul’s capacity for self-awareness and connection.
Yes, Dibbur (speech) is one of the defining characteristics of humanity – according to the Targum Onkelos, Jewish tradition, and our manifest experience of talking with each other.
However, dibbur is not the most valuable or important aspect of being human – according to Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira of Piaseczno, zt”l, one of the great Jewish luminaries of the early 20th century, who wrote:
עיקר חשיבותו וסוגו של האדם הוא מה שהוא בר דעת
The essence of the importance of humankind is that we are capable of consciousness – or da’at.
For Shapira, Da’at (consciousness) is more central and defining than dibbur (speech). But, at the same time dibbur is a profound technology for the cultivation and expression of da’at.
As he writes,
אמנם באמת עיקר הדיבור שבאדם הוא מה שמגלה את ידיעת עצמותו
והכרת את עצמו בלא שכל
Surely, the root of human speech is that a person reveals their self-knowledge and their familiarity with themself, in a way that is beyond rationality.
Shapira is making a striking claim. What makes us human is not merely that we can speak. What makes us human is our capacity for da’at—awareness, knowledge, consciousness. But speech is one of the principal tools through which that consciousness becomes accessible to us. We discover what we think by trying to put it into words. Our human capacity for speech is such a defining trait of humanity because it shapes our consciousness and awareness. Speech enables us not just to communicate, but to think.
In recent decades, modern scientific research has given us many reasons to think that language and cognition are deeply intertwined. As young children begin to speak, there is a clear spike in brain activity observable through brain scans.
So, here we find a noteworthy intersecting insight into inner human experience from modern biological research and ancient religious wisdom: for humans, speech shapes our thoughts and inner lives.
Rabbi KK Shapiro, zt”l, often known as the rebbe of the Warsaw ghetto, from whom I’m drawing inspiration tonight, is increasingly studied in the broad spectrum of the world of Torah for his direct and artful reflections on questions of spirituality, inner human experience, and cultivating a life of Torah through suffering. Shapira is widely admired for his dedication and resilience in supporting his community and all the Jews of Warsaw through the Shoah.
In many of his sermons before and during the war, Rabbi Shapira zt”l praises as Godly the human capacity to cultivate self-knowledge with words, and to learn profoundly from the self-knowledge revealed by others through the words they present to us.
This is how he understands Torah: the linguistic manifestation of self-knowledge, Divine self-knowledge mediated by prophets and sages who cultivated their personal capacity for da’at atzmo – self-knowledge.
Words of Torah offer us a way of developing our self-awareness in conversation with the self-awareness of those who’ve come before us – and with G-d. When Jews study Torah, we enter into a conversation across time between our consciousness, the consciousness of previous generations, and the Divine.
When we pray, we do something similar. On Yom Kippur, we spend hours reciting words written by people who lived centuries before us – many of whom we will never be able to identify. However, through the words of prayer they left us, we can encounter their souls.
The words of prayer arranged for us in the Mahzor were formed by the hearts and souls of yiddishe neshamos before us who lived, loved, prayed, and did works of goodness – which is what mitzvos are.
We open up to these words in order to try to open ourselves up – to become more aware of who we are, to bring awareness to who we’ve been in this past year, who we are here today, and who we would like to be. The words of the Mahzor seek to guide us in using our capacity for speech to clearly articulate the characteristics we want to cultivate:
- Patience, forgiveness, compassion, generosity of spirit and of resources, and intentionality in our use of language.
The Mahzor is a technology for borrowing language from people who came before us in order to discover what is happening inside us now. This is an example of the power of dibbur to shape da’at and da’at to shape our dibbur.
This year, in the unique moment we find ourselves in, the growth of Artificial Intelligence is shaking up how we experience words and language – and the relationship of words to any sort of self-awareness or self-knowledge. We see clearly that words can be formed nearly instantaneously totally untethered from a human heart and soul.
This AI moment is a unique stage in tech that threatens to undermine our trust in the power of language to truly give voice to human experience. What happens to us if we stop knowing whether words reflect someone’s interior life?
Though this moment is a unique one, it is also just the latest development in how digital technology distances us from one another, and even from ourselves, from true self-awareness.
To say something obvious, it is not at all clear to me where this is going; I cannot presume to have any unique insight into how technology will develop in the coming years, how these new tech innovations will or won’t be regulated, and how they will shape our global society.
However, what is transparently clear to me and I feel a responsibility to share with you all tonight is that we are the inheritors of an ancient, innate human technology developed by the hearts and souls of thousands of generations of Jews before us that is capable of helping us to use language to connect deeply with one another and with our souls.
As Rabbi Shapira wrote, and said to his community a century ago in Poland, we may be tempted to disregard speech as merely one tool that we can use to do things, to accomplish our desires. However, in reality, speech is a profound capability rooted in what it means to be human that enables us to become self-aware creatures and to open ourselves up to others. Through words, we can be Mithaber – connecting ourselves to one another and others across the generations – in an ongoing effort to cultivate ethical qualities of character.
Shapira describes how our efforts to connect with each other – and to speak with intentionality and love can ennoble us all in our efforts towards moral and spiritual growth:
“חברים המתחברים יחד
Friends who connect themselves to each other, and from love, each one strives to guide the others in the path of Hashem, they will speak words that are not merely shallow instruments of communication, but words that emerge from the interiority of their souls, and the friends will be united in the profound soul-love of friends.”
While human beings have always developed technologies for communicating and cultivating consciousness, Judaism has developed its own extraordinarily sophisticated technology of language. According to Rabbi Shapira, this technology enables us both to know ourselves and to forge deep bonds of love, friendship, and mutual support towards living lives of service.
So, despite the fact that this year technology has made it clearer than ever that the future is uncertain, or perhaps precisely because the future is uncertain, let us recommit ourselves to using our words in the best ways we can. Let us bring an earnest desire for expression, self-knowledge, and humanity into our prayers tonight. And in this new year, let us strive to use our words to help develop our self-awareness and the awareness of others so that we can work together to create a world of compassion, patience, generosity, and real connection.
Finally, tonight and tomorrow, as we pray together, I invite you to pay attention to the words of the Mahzor, and the words that arise in your heart.
As you say the prayers, notice:
- Which words feel natural and comfortable?
- Which words make you uncomfortable?
- Which words surprise you?
- Which words name something you’ve been unable to articulate?
- Which words do you want to carry into the year?
Tonight, don’t worry about whether you understand every word. Listen for the words that understand you. And together, may we reach for da’at atzmi – for deep, self-knowledge.