EE & R, 7_4: Speech After Silence: Shard and Fossil

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Knowledge of Hashem, once the substance of Israel’s life, survived only as remains. With its bearer scattered among other nations holding knowledge of other gods, it was left with no tongue of its own. What does one do with the remains of a shattered knowledge?

Mordechai collected the shards; Ezra guarded the remains.

Mordechai discerned the hidden Word in every distortion of it. The fragments of knowledge accessible in exile were made to point to their departed source without ever naming it, half-speech tracing the truth that once belonged to the Holy Tongue. Like the bird flitting from nest to nest, so the people wandering from land to land, and like the bird’s empty chirping, so too their speech. Prisoner of a knowledge not its own, the speech of Hashem-knowing collapsed into sound without sentence and thus drew into itself the corrupted words of the nations among whom it was captured.

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The exiles are at risk of having no voice at all, like the nations around them, mixed and made mute:

I removed the boundaries of peoples… My hand found the wealth of the peoples like a nest, and as one gathers abandoned eggs, I gathered all the earth, and none moved a wing, or opened a mouth, or chirped. (Isaiah 10:13-14)

To find the Word despite its absence, Israel would have to learn the language of the birds, broken meaning that points toward what it cannot say. Mordechai/Pesachiah, the officer in charge of the bird-offerings, developed this new path to prayer: “They are Israel, who are like fledglings chirping to her with many chirpings of prayer” (Tikkunei Zohar 45b); “There is none there who receives the prayers of Israel. How many birds chirp in prayers to their mother” (ibid 21a).1

The man who made of foreign language a vessel for the Word of Hashem did not recoil, in one case sanctioned by Heaven, from making of foreign seed a vessel for its place of dwelling. Mordechai raised Esther to the throne of Persia – and from that marriage, the Sages tell us, came the son who would permit the Temple’s rebuilding to proceed: Daryavesh.

Ezra took the opposite approach. When faced with the death of knowledge, this tsaddik preserved the body after the soul had departed. He fixed the Holy Tongue into a liturgy the stammering exiles could still recite whole, though none of them could compose a single word of it himself; and he sealed the seed of Israel the same way, setting apart foreign wives whose children could no longer speak the language of Judah at all.

What appears to be a dispute is really two halves of one response. Knowledge of Hashem was not merely a truth, but a truth held in a specific form, carried by a particular tongue and a particular seed. When it shattered, both had to be reckoned with: the inner truth by Mordechai, the outer form by Ezra. Mordechai took the essence of knowledge and let it go where it had to go – into corrupted tongues, into half-speech, into the words of nations who knew other gods. He was tracking what remained legible of the Word in the shapes it had broken into, and legibility requires only that the distortion still bear the mark of what it distorted. But a mark can only be read against what made it. Mordechai’s map of departures is a map back only so long as someone still remembered what was departed from.

Ezra preserved that memory. The encounter itself had ended, but there remained the precise shape it had left behind: the fixed liturgy, the unmixed seed, the record, pressed into words and blood, of what unbroken knowledge had once looked like. He guarded a fossil, not a living thing. But a fossil still holds the shape of what made it, long after the life inside is gone, and without that shape, Mordechai’s seventy corruptions are corruptions of nothing. They become seventy ways of speaking, no nearer the Word than any other, with nothing left for any of them to have departed from.

Each man’s work is the condition of the other’s. Ezra alone leaves Israel with a sealed and empty vessel, faithfully preserved and pointing to nothing anyone can still reach. Mordechai alone leaves Israel with an infinity of fragments and no memory of the whole from which they fell. Together, they hold what was lost: the shape of it, and the scattered proof that it once had a content.

Under the world-spanning Persian empire, the house of David transformed into a “house of prayer for all the nations” (Isaiah 56:7). Even after returning from exile to its land, Israel did not achieve political independence under the dynasty comprised of its noblest seed. A kingdom no longer Israel’s alone required a knowledge of Hashem no longer Israel’s alone, a prayer expressible in many languages – only through the many languages. The house of this knowledge rose on Esther’s marriage to the throne of Persia.2

This was Mordechai’s universalistic answer. Ezra’s project of preserving the particular had one guardianship left: the royal seed of David. That story is next.

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