Words

         Our souls reach out to each other, desperate for connection, hungry to reveal and to receive.  Our eyes meet.  A stranger's friendly smile makes my face shine.  A drummer's hands set a hundred feet dancing.  A melody rises up out of one heart and finds ten thousand others welcoming it home.  Making love is perhaps the most powerful, and therefore most dangerous, way of revealing and of receiving.

            But the characteristically human mode of connection between our souls is the word.  Jewish religion exalts words, plays with words, worships a God who creates and destroys with words, and names humanity: M’daber, "The One Who Speaks." 

With words we give ourselves to each other.  We tell each other our secrets: our fears, our hopes, our thoughts.  If we are able to speak the truth, we can share our inner lives with each other, and in this way overcome our loneliness.

            The Hasidic sages noticed that the Hebrew word for Noah's ark, teiva, also happens to mean "word."  In this linguistic accident, they found a beautiful image for the fate of our words.  Our words are "arks," sealed vessels, which carry the human soul across the flood of oblivion, without sail or rudder, until they land on a mountaintop--a receptive human mind.  Then follows an eruption of understanding or emotion. We may explode uncontrollably with laughter.  Or our eyes may well up with tears.  These involuntary responses reveal the power of words to carry our souls across space, to each other.