Cracking Open the Rock of Language

The Hebrew Bible is a mystery, with every word a clue that raises more questions than it answers. Take the root word כבד (kvd). At its most concrete, this word means “weight.” One of the places it appears is in the chapters about the plagues in the Book of Exodus, which state several times that Pharaoh’s heart is “hardened.” In fact, three different verbs are used to describe what happens to Pharaoh’s heart. What is the significance of each of them? Elsewhere in Exodus, כבד means “honor,” notably in the commandment to honor thy father and mother. How can one word describe what happens to Pharaoh’s heart, preventing him from freeing the Israelite slaves despite the display of God’s power, and also describe the attitude one should have to one’s parents? The word also signifies one way that God is manifested in the world: the “kavod of the LORD” is something like “God’s presence.” See for instance Exodus 40:34: “The cloud covered the tent of meeting and the kavod of the LORD filled the tabernacle.” The mystery of this word gets deeper and deeper.

My fellow detective in this matter was a man named Robert Sacks. He had taught me in college, but I did not truly get to know him until a decade later. In school, I knew him as Mr. Sacks, though when our friendship rekindled I would call him Bob. The world at large knew him as the author of two remarkable translations and commentaries: The Lion and the Ass: Reading Genesis after Babylon and The Book of Job: A New Translation with In-Depth Commentary. These books had a wide influence on many writers and teachers who were interested in a literary-philosophical approach to the ancient text. Bob, in turn, was influenced by his teacher, the political philosopher Leo Strauss. Many admirers of Strauss knew of Robert Sacks as the primary torchbearer of the storied thinker’s work in this area. Perhaps the most influential student of Robert Sacks’s biblical studies is the teacher and public ethicist Leon Kass, whose own magnificent commentary on Genesis, The Beginning of Wisdom, credits Sacks liberally throughout the footnotes, and brought many of his insights to a much wider audience.

Photographs courtesy of the author.

Like Kass, I first encountered Mr. Sacks at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, where he was my favorite teacher.

I suppose the most noticeable thing about him should have been his cerebral palsy. His speech was sometimes hard to understand, and he always looked like he was about to tip over when he walked over the rocky paths of the mountainous Santa Fe campus. But once I began learning with him, I hardly gave his disability a second thought.

Our primary subject was Homer’s Iliad, large sections of which we read in Greek. Mr. Sacks struck me as both learned and wise. He impressed me with what he knew about poetry, philosophy, and the human condition. But more than anything, he seemed to have a gift for asking questions that blew up my comfortable assumptions, questions that came marvelously out of the blue. I would later learn that this high art of question formation was one that he both lived in practice and wrestled with in theory.

In those days I knew hardly anything about Mr. Sacks’s own research and writing. Along with my classmates, I simply shared his delight at every discovery and his every swoon when a student expressed curiosity in a particularly creative way. Years later I heard a marvelous definition of teaching, offered by another mainstay of St. John’s, Eva Brann: “Teaching itself is indeed above all the controlled public display of delight. A teacher is a lover-in-chief prepared not only to be observed in the activity of love but to beckon students into it.” This describes Mr. Sacks perfectly. Between all of us fresh-faced twenty-year-olds, Mr. Sacks, and Homer, love was in the air.

Young people are wonderful lovers but poor judges of what is important in life. I mostly lost contact with Mr. Sacks after that class. I did visit him once shortly after my graduation, when he invited me and my girlfriend, Heidi (later my wife), for the Passover Seder. That was a tremendous experience. The ritual guide, the Haggadah, prompted deep discussion on time and the balance of the natural and the conventional in the way we mark it.

As friends outside the classroom, I was now to call him Bob. But after that Seder, there was a long gap before I saw Bob again. My path led me to a job with an organization devoted to Jewish education, bringing the great ideas from Jewish texts into productive conversation with the great ideas from other Western sources – from the “Great Books.” That is when I began to think about reconnecting with Bob. But, alas, I was too shy to write or call for a couple years.

What changed things was a visit to a bookstore where I saw the title Beginning Biblical Hebrew: Intentionality and Grammar by Robert Sacks on display. I had no idea that this book existed. But reading it reminded me of its exceptional author’s fascination with language, and how he had inspired my own.

Though it sounds like a simple book for learning Hebrew, it is in fact a work of constructive philosophy. For its author, words – and the bits and pieces of words that most people simply call “affixes” or “inflectional markings” – are really sedimented thoughts that invite recovery (he liked to call them “ghosts”). What was once a lively and creative invention that served a communicative need becomes so routinely used that it hardens into a dead formality. To see that there was once a vibrant thought where there is now just a grammatical marking is to see that thing between order and chaos that allows one to really have a question.

In March 2013, shortly after discovering this book, I finally wrote to Bob. I told him about my new passion for Jewish texts and education and he offered to meet weekly over Skype for a chavruta – a one-on-one study session – on whatever I wanted to explore. In the eleven years that followed, this chavruta taught me more about love, death, and wisdom than I could have imagined.

The main subject of our study was the Hebrew Bible. What Bob and I did can probably best be described as “puttering around in the Tanakh.” Sometimes we were focused enough to read a whole book from start to finish. Usually, we spent a month or two on one section and then jumped to another. Our practice was to read aloud in Hebrew and then try to think about an adequate translation – not so much into English as into the language of thought. Sometimes our focus was on the narrative before us, but often we followed the inviting pathway through a given word into the deeper realms of ideas that can’t be fully captured by a word.

During these eleven years, my life changed in many ways. There were times of joy – raising three beautiful children, seeing my work bear fruit – and times of depression and anxiety. Through it all, Bob would meet with me, and we would putter around in the Tanakh.

At this time, I was teaching a course at Carleton College on Plato and Shakespeare, as well as the Hebrew Bible. I would sometimes ask Bob to work with me on one of these other sources – to read some Meno together, or some Midsummer Night’s Dream. He always graciously obliged the detour from our usual Bible study. The students of Carleton are the beneficiaries of so many lovely insights that I transmitted from this wonderful teacher.

A few times, I was able to go visit him in person. One evening in particular stands out as representative of who he was. Heidi and I had spent hours in Bob’s one-room adobe house, talking about his life and memories, before taking him to dinner at his favorite Indian restaurant. At this point, Bob’s mobility was still good, but he could not feed himself. I was helping him with that when a woman who had been dining alone in the restaurant came up to our table. She said to Bob, “I am sorry to interrupt, but I have to tell you that you are the most beautiful person I have ever seen.” Bob did not miss a beat. He looked up at her and said, “You know, I was just about to come over to you and tell you the same thing.” She blushed and was clearly charmed out of her socks.

Earlier this year, when I sensed the end was near, we spent more time together than ever.

In this final stretch, we moved through text much faster. He did not have his accustomed energy for pausing and peering through the words into the vistas of thought they revealed. We had to sail a different sort of journey. At this new pace, we made it through the first ten of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets – soulful offerings of a great Christian poet to God, reflecting on death and the meaning of life in the face of death. Donne’s verse is both deeply moving and consistently Christian in its assumptions:

I dare not move my dimme eyes any way,
Despaire behind, and death before doth cast
Such terrour, and my feeble flesh doth waste
By sinne in it, which it t’wards hell doth weigh.

I longed for a more Jewish voice. Heidi suggested Psalm 71.

When we read verse 9 of Psalm 71, “Do not cast me off in old age; when my strength fails, do not forsake me,” I noted that the expression for “when my strength fails” is more literally, “in the fullness of my strength” (ככלות כחי). I asked him what to make of that. He said I should consider that, at birth, one is given an allotment of strength for his whole life and at the end one reaches “the fullness of it.” I cannot convey the power of hearing this from him at that moment. I can only say this: the flame of my love for Robert Sacks grew bright and hot.

The very last Zoom meeting we had was only a few hours before he died. His power of speech was so diminished that his aide had to put his ear to his mouth and then try to tell me what he had said. I asked Bob if I could read to him a speech from the Tempest, his favorite Shakespeare play. I read:

You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismay’d: be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

There was a question here that Bob would have delighted in at an easier time: When did the English language start to permit the use of “round” as a verb? (Or is it the other way around – was it a verb first?) Was this speech of Prospero perhaps the first moment that “rounded” was used in this way? Was it a shortening of “surrounded” – which would sound natural in our contemporary English? This all seems to bear greatly on what it means to say, “Our little life is rounded with a sleep.” Is our life a wandering herd of cattle that must be “rounded up”? Is it a number with a remainder that needs to be “rounded off”? Is it a jagged rock that needs to be worn down by the waves over centuries and rounded into something smooth?

Thanks to years of learning with Bob, I’ve learned how to crack open the rock of language to find hidden and important questions. Knowing that these are the right questions – and knowing how to live with the fact that they will never be finally answered – is where human wisdom is to be found (an insight ultimately derived from our shared hero, Socrates).

Incidentally, several of these thoughts about Prospero’s speech were prompted by things that Will, Bob’s aide, said while he was assisting our conversation. (Thank you, Will.) So, fittingly, Bob really went out doing what he did best – beckoning his two last students into the activity of love. And now it falls to us to beckon others.