"He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle," is how President John Kennedy described Winston Churchill, the greatest rhetorician of modern times, perhaps of all time.
What can be written in the English language that will surpass Churchill's speeches?
Even Kennedy's description is shamelessly copied from a quote by his friend, the journalist Edward Moreau.
English speakers can feel, and rightly so, lucky.
They reached the pinnacle of writing even before the Bulldog, in the 16th century with Shakespeare.
But the Hebrew speakers are ancient and ancient.
And the deepest, richest and most beautiful text written in the Hebrew language is also (probably, if you will) the first lines written in that language.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
// And the land was chaos and chaos and darkness on the face of an abyss;
And the spirit of God floats on the surface of the water.
// And God said let there be light and let there be light.
// And God saw the light because it was good // And God made a difference between the light and the darkness.
And God called daylight, and to darkness he called night // And there was evening and there was morning, one day.
This good light
In Greek philosophical thinking, that of Plato and Aristotle, the common term is nature.
an all encompassing term.
Nature is the physics of the world, but also the nature and source of human behavior.
There is natural truth, natural right and human nature.
And God is also subject to the nature of things, to the great law that lubricates the gears.
In the entire Bible, as the philosopher Leo Strauss diagnosed, there is no equivalent term for nature. Unless, like us (the Sons of Yochai and the Ham), you find nature in the opening verses of the Torah.
Nature is chaos.
He is dark.
Writing a Torah book // Archive photo: Dodo Greenspan,
Thousands of years before Hobbes, Judaism tells us about the chaos that exists not only in man, but in the cosmos itself.
When Chinese culture describes creation, it describes yin and yang, chaos and order, created together.
In Judaism, darkness is the natural state.
The light must be created separately to correct the darkness.
In every chapter of creation, God expresses satisfaction with the process, with the successful end of another day of creation.
God expresses his opinion only about the light itself: "And he saw... the light, for it is good."
Because chaos and darkness are the hardware, the divine light is the software.
And if the light is good, then the darkness is at least "not good".
Roll thousands of years in history and Jean-Jacques Rousseau will rise and come, who will glorify the chaos of the natural state and the noble savage, polluted by the oppressive social order.
His relativistic successors, the postmoderns, will firmly argue that there is no single truth, that there is no truth at all.
For them the Bible goes out of its way to make it clear: opposite the natural darkness there is divine light. It is not the difference between light and darkness that is "good", but the light itself.
In the sophistic, pre-Socratic Greek view, which drives the Enlightenment thinkers crazy, truth is human.
Morality is humane, utilitarian, derived from a social contract.
Morality as a means of survival in the face of chaos.
I would almost dare to say - a promo for Darwin.
Edmund Barak, the father of conservatism, understood that in a world where good is a human convention, good may change from generation to generation, and therefore Barak sanctifies order and tradition.
Sefer Torah // Photo: Oren Ben Hakon,
However, according to the Jewish creation story, order itself is not enough.
The definition of good is not human because of relativity.
Because the human order changes from place to place and from time to time.
Man cannot determine what light and goodness are, he was created for the world where they exist.
And he has freedom of choice.
He will be able to fix and destroy.
But it will happen in a world where there is divine light and natural darkness, and no matter what he does and what he wants, 2+2 will never be 5.
And light is also time.
Christianity looks back and sanctifies the world before original sin.
History for her is meant to return to heaven.
This is redemption.
The Hegelians, including Marx, saw the direction reversed, forward, towards the horizon, in a dialectical process until the end of history and a human utopia.
But with us Jews, even in the days of Messiah, a poor person will not disappear from the land.
History is cyclical, not linear, so good can be achieved in every period and every day.
In the Gemara it is said that the Messiah will not come at the end of time but today - if you listen to his voice.
Matter is neither nothing
Yuval Noach Harari, who wrote a book called Hatzna and his poor "Abridged History of Humanity", claims that everything is meat.
Everything is matter.
It's all science.
Everything moral in a person is nothing more than a few neurons that have been connected by Fox like metal parts that fall from the sky and become an airplane.
Man is allowed on the animal - no.
Thought, speech, language, are nothing more than reflexes of survival and economic function.
The reflection of the condition of the material man.
Marx preceded him by 200 years.
Prof. Yuval Noah Harari, photo: Eric Sultan
The Torah answered thousands of years ago.
Matter alone, the sky and the earth, the water and the darkness, are not and nothing.
They are hardware.
Life will develop only with the help of speech.
God says "And let there be light", and then there is a world that is ready for development and morality that does not depend on the whims of man and history.
Harari will say that speech is a by-product of matter, while the Torah says in the opening - speech is the image of God in man.
It is the talk, and not the action alone, that brings the good, the creation, the thought.
The language itself, the rich and powerful writing of the creation episode, is many times more important than a thousand plows in the agricultural revolution.
The opening paragraph of the Torah is the most important and beautiful paragraph in human history.
It is no less than the identity card of the Torah.
Already in the first paragraph, the Torah tells how it all began, why God's presence is needed in the world, and what is going to happen next.
In between, it refers to the conflicts between order and justice, between God, nature and convention, and the moral connection between nature and man.
On the way, the Torah says: I am not just a reading book, in it you have to think letter by letter and letter by letter - and outlines the way of learning in the Jewish people.
Turn it over and turn it over, all over it.
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