EE & R, 7_2: Speech After Silence: From the Word to Words

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Gabriel came and taught him [Yosef] the seventy languages.1

If you believe they were languages, you believe lunacies.2

Since spoken words are the symbols of mental experience,3 a comprehensive lexicon would contain the same number of words as mental experiences. These vary from person to person, according to their inner states. People of differing temperament will use the same word differently. The base cases align, but the edges diverge. Take, for example, the word “water.” Everyone would apply that word to pure H₂O – that is the base case. But would they apply it to brackish water? Steam? Tears? Here divergence in temperament causes divergence in application. An anthropocentric vocabulary might exclude water that is unfit for human consumption; a broader one would include water that exists without serving any human purpose. A person’s vocabulary is itself rooted in his character type – what he values, what he considers most real – hence the proverbial seventy languages, matching seventy human types,4 the exact same word used in seventy different ways by seventy different types of people.5

This same scheme of variation maps onto the seventy nations comprising the family of mankind.6 To each nation its unique cast of mind, shaped by its particular land and history; and to each such kind of mind, its use of words – its own “language.”

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The actual languages, as such, are of no concern to the Torah’s project. What does mastery of tongues contribute to the attainment of knowledge? But to know the varied mind-types, the many different paths that humans take to truth, of which the actual languages are but the surface expression – this is a hidden wisdom of the highest order.

This wisdom is the only form of knowledge available to the tsaddik in exile, such as Yosef in Pharaoh’s court and Mordechai in the Persian empire. To be in exile is to be denied knowledge of Hashem, experience of His manifest ways. The word of Hashem is hidden from the exile. He knows not the Word but a cacophony of corrupted words that obscure it, each system of thought vying to usurp the system he has been torn from – knowledge of Hashem. For this reason, living in exile is likened to idolatry: “Whoever dwells outside the Land is as if he worships idols.”7 A foreign language is the symbol of the lie of foreign gods, and to speak a lie is to lie. But to know the path whereby a truth was falsified – that is to know a truth, and it is the only path available for the exile back to the source.

This is the kind of knowledge one distanced from Hashem’s Word can know. The unsophisticated speaker of the foreign language takes it as the full representation of reality – as his God. He is an idolater. The tsaddik knows the contours of the corruption of truth that generated the filtered word, the path through which the Word of Hashem was transmuted into this echo. He is “as if” an idolater, outwardly inhabiting the imperfect order of a foreign god while inwardly oriented toward Hashem.

To speak a language is to inhabit the kingdom it represents; to understand how the Word was refracted into it is to see through that kingdom to the Kingdom. And the one who has mastered the refractory logic of any one language will master them all, for the question is always the same: What kind of human type produced this refraction, and what does that tell us about the Word they were refracting? The tsaddik in exile knows that exile is false, each exile in its own way, and in knowing how it is false, knows something of the truth it conceals, as one who knows the product and the operation of a mathematical equation can reconstruct its factors.

In this way the tsaddik stands above the particular exile in which he finds himself, standing for the Word that transcends any worldly order, knowing not one language but all of them. The Greek who knows Greek knows one cast of mind – his own, mistaking his semantic field for reality itself, his fragment for the whole. Because he has no vantage point above it, he cannot see outside it. But the one who knows that Greek is but a derivation from a language lost knows that there are many ways to corrupt the truth, and that Greek is merely one of them. Free from the constraints of any single corruption, he can move between them all. He is the master of seventy languages.

This is the Word as it is heard in exile – echoed, distorted, instantiated but partially, and to one who knows how to listen, audible precisely through those very distortions, as a bent shadow reveals the shape of what cast it.

If the seventy languages are the symbols of seventy paths of distortion, the Holy Tongue is the symbol of the order of Hashem, which transcends all earthly orders. Its designation as “holy” is given differing reasons, the one by Maimonides and the other by Nachmanides, and the two explanations track onto the differing paths of knowing Hashem or recognizing the impossibility of knowing Him that we have traced extensively earlier in this work. According to Maimonides, it is so called for lacking certain words:

…in this holy language no word at all has been laid down in order to designate either the male or female organ of copulation, nor are there words designating the act itself that brings about generation, the sperm, the urine, or the excrements.8

According to Nachmanides, it is not what is unexpressed by this language that grants it holiness, but what is:

I hold that this is the same reason why our Rabbis call the language of the Torah “the Holy Tongue,” because the words of the Torah, and the prophecies, and all words of holiness were all expressed in that language. It is the language in which the Holy, blessed be He, spoke with His prophets… In that tongue He created His world, and named heavens and earth and all that is in them…9

The language of Hashem, taken in His unknowability, is the language that points beyond the familiar, that refuses to be exhausted by any human experience of its referent. To speak this language in its essential form, the speaker must reach beyond himself to an unknowable word. In this paradigm,10 to utter the word “מים“ (mayim – water) in the Holy Tongue is to consider that there is a godly perspective on water, unfathomable to us. For those mental experiences that can go no further than the body – where the speaker is trapped within his own flesh and cannot transcend it – this language has no words.

The language of Hashem, taken in His knowability, is the form of His Word communicated to the prophets, the definition His revelation takes through creation and history. In this paradigm, to utter the word “מים“ in the Holy Tongue is to consider water from God’s perspective.

These are the two faces of the Holy Tongue. The seventy languages are the distortions that remain when the singular Word is forgotten.11

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