The Voice of Prophecy, Lesson 14

Table of Contents

• Sound and light as messengers of thought
• Sight and hearing as spiritual levels
• The light of glory and the vision of prophecy
• Shir HaKavod, anthropomorphism, and revelation in human terms
• Imagination, representation, and the distinction between ordinary sight and prophetic vision
• Art, kitsch, and the value of representation
• The thing in itself and the mediation of the senses

Summary

General overview

The text explores the expression “they saw the sounds” through a distinction between sound and light as two modes of mediation for perception and thought, internal and external, and connects this to understanding prophecy as seeing depths. It develops the concept of the “light of glory” as the form of prophetic revelation of God’s glory, using sources such as Saadia Gaon and the Kuzari, as well as the liturgical poem “Shir HaKavod,” to show how one speaks about revelation without grasping the divine essence. It then explains the concepts of imagination and metaphor in prophecy: the prophetic image is not derived from an object in the world the way ordinary sight is, but it is also not rootless fantasy; rather, it is a representation that has a divine root. Finally, it uses a kind of Kantian move to argue that human consciousness always grasps appearances and mediations, not “the thing in itself,” illustrating this through colors, sounds, and the possibility that different sensations might receive the same names.

Sound and light as messengers of thought

The text states that sound and light are “two messengers of thought” that always accompany thought from outside and from within, presenting sound as internal and light as external. It defines sound as carrying content, just as a voice carries speech, and compares this to the way understanding carries what wisdom says, while wisdom sits within the things themselves. It explains that hearing can penetrate through barriers and reach what is behind or inside, whereas sight is easily stopped by a nontransparent screen, and therefore hearing becomes a metaphor for inner perception and sight for external and clear perception. It interprets “they saw the sounds” as describing a level at which the screens become refined enough that one can see even what is usually only heard.

Sight and hearing as spiritual levels

The text cites, parenthetically, a statement in Pitchei She’arim that sight and hearing are rooted in the levels of chayah and yechidah as surrounding lights, whereas the other three senses—taste, smell, and touch—are connected to nefesh, ruach, and neshamah. It invests sight and hearing with the role of ways of grasping refined things that do not enter the person himself and do not depend on contact. It explains that when the Jewish people were, for one moment, on the level of prophecy, they “saw the sounds,” whereas one who is not on the level of prophecy only hears them in a vaguer way, while the prophet grasps the depth in a tangible and clear manner.

The light of glory and the vision of prophecy

The text defines the “light of glory” as “the vision of prophecy” and as the way a divine matter appears in the imagination of the sanctified prophetic intellect, which imagines and gives metaphorical form, and not as a perception of the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself. It cites Saadia Gaon to the effect that a prophetic vision from a clear form of light is called “the glory of God,” and the Kuzari to the effect that glory is “a spark of divine light beneficial to His people and His land,” visible through a medium and called glory or Shekhinah. It explains that the glory of God is God’s revelation in the world; therefore the angels ask, “Where is the place of His glory to adore Him?” and are not looking for a place for the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself, presenting the possibility that glory has a place even if God does not have a place. It links the place of glory to “the place of the Holy Land, upon which the eyes of the Lord your God are fixed,” and formulates that the root of essential revelation is found there.

Shir HaKavod, anthropomorphism, and revelation in human terms

The text quotes from the liturgical poem “Shir HaKavod” and emphasizes the tension in lines such as “I will recount Your glory, though I have not seen You,” alongside “and by the hand of Your prophets, in the secret of Your servants, they likened the majesty of the glory of Your splendor,” which places the transmission in the realm of prophetic imagination. It explains that introductory lines such as “They imagined You, but not according to Your true being” are meant to remove anthropomorphism, yet after them come anthropomorphic descriptions such as “they envisioned in You old age and youth,” “the hair of Your head in gray and black,” and “a man of wars, with mighty hands,” because when the glory of God is revealed, it is revealed in the terms of the recipient. It argues that all these descriptions are imaginings and visions, not divinity itself, and describes glory as connected to revelation and tangibility in the sense of “weight,” mass, and taking up space, similar to a human desire “to be something.” It explains that the ordinary person too does not see the glory of God directly, but relies on what the prophets saw and on the images passed down “by the hand of Your prophets, in the secret of Your servants.”

Imagination, representation, and the distinction between ordinary sight and prophetic vision

The text defines “representation as the appearance of an image of light, fantasy” and argues that “it has no name in the Holy Tongue except dimyon, that which resembles and gives metaphorical form,” because there is no other precise term. It distinguishes between an ordinary image in consciousness, which is formed from an actual object in reality, like the image of a door derived from a real door, and a prophetic vision, in which the Holy One, blessed be He, forms for the prophet an image that has no root in any object in the world. It stresses that this is “imaginary” not in the sense of empty illusion, but in the sense that it has no external root as an object, while it does have a divine root and a representative function, and therefore also has “a metaphorical quality.” It argues that the prophet not only hears but is able to turn hearing into an image, and therefore he “sees” sounds. It adds that another difference from the ordinary person is that the prophet hears finer and higher sounds that are inaccessible to someone who is not a prophet.

Art, kitsch, and the value of representation

The text presents an analysis of painting and kitsch and attributes an idea to an article by Thomas Kulka, according to which kitsch fails not because of technique, but because the experience comes from the situation being depicted and not from the representation itself. It formulates the point that good art arouses experience because of the painting and the added value of the representation, not just because of what the painting depicts, and that even a realistic painting creates interpretation through selection, angle, and addition—things that are not seen in an ordinary look at reality. It uses this to clarify the meaning of the prophetic image as a picture that does not depend on an external object, but stands as a phenomenon of consciousness with the function of metaphor.

The thing in itself and the mediation of the senses

The text presents a Kantian distinction between “the thing in itself” and the thing as it appears in consciousness, and argues that attributes such as color and sound are not found in the world but are produced in the subject. It illustrates that sound is an experience in consciousness, whereas in the world there are acoustic waves, and that if hearing were connected to the visual center, people would “see sounds” like an oscilloscope. It raises the possibility that different people may inwardly experience colors differently even if they use the same words, and suggests that metaphors such as “a black day” might serve as a kind of test, if one assumes an innate connection between colors and emotions. It concludes that the question “what does the thing really look like” is meaningless, because color exists only as perceived, but also argues that there is a root in reality for the differences in appearance, because it cannot be that two identical objects produce contradictory appearances in the same way. The discussion closes with the claim that this is not a limitation but a definition of knowledge through instruments.

The image being discussed here—what does it mean, “they saw the voices”? Is it an image? If so, then you see, and that’s all. But this image is an inner voice that in fact is not seen at all, only heard. The purpose of this article is basically somehow to explain these things. As in previous times, the audience here changes, and the book has also told us about earlier things, and we’ve already commented before on what will come later. So fine—if anyone feels something is missing, then ask. Sound and light are the two angels of thought that always accompany it, from outside and from inside, as with every prophetic vision. We saw at the end of the previous essay that understanding is an aspect of sound. Sound is basically the thing that carries, the way in which something is conveyed. When I say something, the sound carries what I say. Understanding carries what wisdom says. Wisdom sits within the things themselves—wisdom itself—and understanding is what reveals things outward. That’s what we learned at the end of the previous essay, and that was in the lesson on repentance. Here he goes back to deal with sound and light themselves, and he says that sound and light are really two mediators, two ways of mediating things. You can grasp things through light and through sound. Of course, we’re talking here about sound and light conveying sensation through the senses, but he uses them as two ways of grasping thoughts or ideas. And therefore he says that sound and light are the two angels of thought that always accompany it from outside and from inside. Sound is from within and light is from outside—that is apparently what he means. We said that sound is basically—the difference between hearing and seeing is that in hearing, we hear things from within or from behind something. In sight, you can’t—in sight, you can’t do that. If there’s a screen in front of me, I can’t see. But hearing is very hard to block. To block hearing—that’s not entirely accurate, because there are transparent barriers, glass, that sound passes through just as it passes through a wall; there’s no difference. But the wall stops vision much more. As for vision, there are better and worse screens, but with vision, the simplest thing is enough—anything not transparent. Put anything between me and the thing, and it blocks vision. That isn’t true of hearing. To stop hearing takes a very strong effort. If I want not to hear you, what would you have to put between us? Try to think—you almost won’t succeed, you practically can’t do it. So for me not to see you, what’s the problem? Take a sheet of paper and I won’t see you. Clearly that’s characteristic. Fine, but I’m saying: the usual description is that vision is the external thing, the thing that is very easy to hide because it is what is revealed to me, whereas hearing is very hard to stop because the sense of hearing—this is precisely its nature—that we can hear things that are behind, things that are inside. Therefore these are the metaphors he uses to describe grasping something from the outside and grasping it from the inside. Thought from within and thought from without, which he describes here by means of sound and light. “And all the people saw the voices.” Yes. With transparent screens, when the screens are refined, you can also see the voices, reach the higher state. Here this is a parenthetical remark: the note says there is an earlier source for this, that seeing and hearing are the level of chayah and yechidah, the surrounding lights. And the other three senses—taste, smell, and touch—are nefesh, ruach, and neshamah. What? Nefesh is ruach—I can look it up, I don’t remember exactly. Seeing and hearing are two ways of grasping more refined things, two ways that basically do not enter into the person himself. You can grasp things that are outside the person. You also don’t need contact in order to grasp by means of sight or hearing. Maybe smell too, but again—this is the light of glory in the realm of imagination. The light of glory, the prophetic vision. Light of glory. The light of glory, the prophetic vision, in the place of the Holy Land, “upon which the eyes of the Lord your God are,” means the divine matter in the imagination of the sanctified prophetic intellect that imagines and allegorizes. Here he explains what is called the light of glory. When we speak with regard to the Holy One, blessed be He—“the glory of the Lord,” “the appearance of the glory of the Lord,” “full is the glory of the Lord,” and so on—what is this glory of God? There is a light called the light of glory. Below he brings this from various books. For example, from Saadia Gaon he writes: a prophetic vision of a clear form from light is called the glory of God. The clear form from light, the image of prophecy, is called the glory of God. Or he brings the Kuzari: yes, glory is a spark of divine light beneficial among His people and His land. It is seen in an intermediate form, what is called glory or Shekhinah. Glory—if you think about it, at least in biblical usage, but I think it is also connected to the concept of honor that we use in everyday life—means revelation. The glory of God is the revelation of God, the way in which He is revealed. In the Kedushah we say that the angels ask one another: “Where is the place of His glory, to revere Him?” Opposite them they praise and say: “Blessed is the glory of the Lord from His place.” Why are they looking for the glory of God? The Holy One, blessed be He—clearly He has no place. There is no point in asking where His place is; the Holy One has no place, and the angels know that too. But the glory of God may have a place. Therefore: “Where is the place of His glory, to revere Him?” I will pray toward that place where the glory of God is found. The glory of God is the revelation of the Holy One, blessed be He. When the Holy One, blessed be He, is revealed in this world, then fine—like any revelation that exists in this world—He may have a place. One must search for where that place is, but the angels do not find it. “Where is the place of His glory, to revere Him?” They do not find it. And that means that they are there, praising and saying, “Blessed is the glory of the Lord from His place.” But when they say it, they say, “Blessed is the glory of the Lord from His place.” So perhaps after all the glory of God has some kind of place. That is, it is not clear what the conclusion of this description is—whether it has a place or does not have a place. I assume it has a place, only not a place that should be grasped, that can be seen; or perhaps it is found everywhere. The questions are open. We won’t get into the interpretations of the Kedushah here. I just wanted to show that when people seek the place of the Holy One, blessed be He, they are not seeking His place but the place of His glory. His glory is the light by which He is revealed. With Moses our teacher this is most prominent: “when My glory passes before you,” right? When Moses our teacher wants to see the Holy One, blessed be He, and “you shall see My back, but My face shall not be seen”—when the Holy One, blessed be He, is revealed, it is His glory that is revealed. We look at the glory of the Holy One, blessed be He. Glory really is connected to the revealing side, that is, where the Holy One, blessed be He, is revealed, where there is someone to receive the revelation and give Him honor. From this description in the Kedushah it seems that this exists independently of the receiver. The light of the glory of God would exist even if there were no people here. We spoke about this once: “Blessed be the name of His glorious kingdom.” Glory—one of the revelations of the Holy One, blessed be He, is that He is king. But we discussed the line “Master of the universe, who reigned before any creature was created.” He was king even before any creature was created. Apparently glory is something that exists in itself. It is not like human honor, say, which we usually understand in a certain sense as self-respect. A person with self-respect can have it even in solitude. But a person who needs the respect of his fellows—that is a social kind of thing. Your self-respect is something defined from within itself, not something defined by the environment. In other words, revelation is something that exists even if not everyone sees it; if someone were to contemplate it, that is what he would grasp. But revelation is not necessarily—that is, it is not necessarily. It exists. Yes, exactly. The same thing that you reveal—and that is the possibility. The same thing that you reveal: when you reveal something, it will be His glory, not God Himself. So it is true that it exists before you existed, but on the other hand it is also true that it exists for what will come afterward. Afterward there will be created beings who will see it or receive it, and that is obvious, otherwise there is no point in creating. And in principle, logically, the thing stands even before the perceiver. There is a poem called Shir HaKavod, right? “I shall sweeten songs and weave hymns, for my soul longs for You. Whenever I speak of Your glory, my heart yearns for Your belovedness.” So this is speaking of all sorts of glorious matters—of His glory, in the sense of honor, yes? “I will honor Your name and songs of affection.” This whole poem deals with glory, right? “I will recount Your glory though I have not seen You.” This sounds like a contradiction. What’s the problem? How can one recount the glory of someone one has not seen? Clearly one cannot, because to recount someone’s glory is to recount how he is revealed. Glory is revelation, but still it says: “I will recount Your glory though I have not seen You.” In a moment we’ll understand a bit more what is meant. “I will imagine You, I will nickname You, though I have not known You.” And then: “By the hand of Your prophets, through the counsel of Your servants, You likened the splendor of the glory of Your majesty.” That is, we have some sort of image of this glory. “By the hand of Your prophets,” by the hand of Your prophets, through the counsel of Your servants—yes, Moses our teacher, and Your prophets, and Your servants, all those who continue him. So they are the ones who bring us some kind of image of this glory. And it is that image of this glory that enables us to recount the glory of the Holy One, blessed be He, and then “I will speak of glorious things.” And now we’ll come to some kind of introduction. In a moment you’ll simply see what follows and why this introduction is needed. “The majesty and beauty of Your might are but a designation for the force of Your action.” It is some kind of designation. “They have imagined You, but not according to Your true being.” The theme continues—it is only an image. It is not the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself, only an image. “And they have compared You according to Your deeds.” According to Your deeds we try to say something about You. “They have allegorized You through many visions; You are one in all the images.” All this imagery somehow points to one thing. That means it is something that does not stand on its own. It is not disconnected. Again, this image—we are not to see that form, no, no, no. The revelation itself, the revelation itself, I do not see. That is what is written here. The whole meaning of this revelation is that I do not see it—that I need to see it. And he says: I cannot speak of the revelation without having seen it. That is the contradiction at work. Yes, I do not see the revelation. In a moment we will see more precisely what this means. But now look. Then it begins. Why all these preliminaries—“they imagined You, but not according to Your true being,” all these preliminaries to remove any corporealization? Why? Because after that comes a whole series of anthropomorphic images. “They envisioned You as old age and youth.” As they see You here and there, at the sea and in Sinai, yes, with all the midrashim. “The hair of Your head in whiteness and blackness.” Old age on the day of judgment and youth on the day of battle. And there we resolve the contradiction, yes? “A man of wars, whose hands wage battle.” But in the end they do see Him as an old man, as a young man, as something tangible, yes? That is anthropomorphism. “He placed the helmet of salvation upon His head; His right hand and His holy arm saved for Him.” Every place where Onkelos simply gathered all the places that he translates in order to remove us from this mistake—he gathered them, yes? Onkelos always translates in order to remove us from anthropomorphism. Everywhere it says the hand of the Holy One, blessed be He, or something like that, Onkelos always translates it as only an image, yes. “May He raise me to the crown of beauty; pure gold is the likeness of His head; inscribed upon His forehead is the glorious name of His holiness. The locks of His head as in the days of youth, His curls are black ringlets. He showed the knot of the tefillin to His humble one”—that is already more abstract, of course. Well, that’s more or less it. In other words, there is here a collection of anthropomorphic expressions. Why? Because when I speak of the glory of the Holy One, blessed be He, I speak of how He is revealed, yes? Glory is the ways in which He is revealed. Now when He is revealed to me, He is revealed in my terms. And in my terms He is revealed like a person in this way, a person in another way, white hair, black hair—but these are the ways in which He appears to my eyes. Now this too needs to be understood, that all this is only images, all this is visions and things of that sort. And all this is only images, and all this is visions and things like that—that is the expression. And this is perhaps also a good place to explain a bit what these things mean, what their significance is. We won’t go into that now. But this poem, on the one hand, deals with anthropomorphizing the Holy One, blessed be He—with a very concrete description of how He is revealed. Of course at the beginning it gives some kind of introduction and says that all this is imagery and none of it is really God, but still we can describe Him through “the counsel of Your servants, by the hand of Your prophets.” And this whole poem deals basically with how we see the Holy One, blessed be He; that is why it is called Shir HaKavod, the Song of Glory. How do we see the Holy One, blessed be He? In other words, the glory of the Holy One, blessed be He, is what we see of Him, how He is revealed before our eyes. In some sense, revelation is a visual thing. When He is revealed to my eyes, that means I see Him among us. What does it mean that He is revealed to my eyes? If He shouts to me from the next room, that is not called revelation. Revelation is to my eyes—that is already built into the expression. Revealed to my eyes and not to my ears. It is a visual expression. The Holy One, blessed be He—certainly one cannot grasp Him visually in a sensory way. We said that sight is an expression for the five senses, not only for the sense of sight. But sight is the strongest, most dominant sense, so sight for the prophet serves as an expression of sensory perception, and hearing for a more inward kind of perception. Glory also comes from the root meaning weight. Dearness comes from the Aramaic yakira. Yakira means honor. Glory and weight are the same root, and dearness and yakira are the same root. Glory is basically, in some way, how an abstract concept is revealed in this world, takes on weight, acquires mass. Suddenly it becomes something. Like a person who wants honor—what does he want? To be something. That is what it means to want honor: to become more actualized, because he wants to be grasped more as something concrete, more important, to take up space in the world. That is why I said it is also somewhat connected to our everyday concepts of honor. In any case, regarding divinity, glory is as though some kind of weight it has, some kind of something that manages to turn a spiritual thing—which is, as it were, from non-being into being—into something that exists in this world, drawing it downward, as it were. But all this is only metaphor. It is metaphor in the sense that will now be explained. Section 3. The image—let’s just return for a moment to section 2. “The light of glory”—I spoke only about glory because I think that is really the subject of this whole complicated sentence. “The light of glory”—let’s read it now once more: the prophetic vision. What prophecy sees is the light of glory. It does not see the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself; it sees the light of glory, the way in which He is revealed. Notice: prophecy sees this, we do not. This relates to what was asked here earlier. Even the light of glory is seen only by prophecy, not by us. That is why it says here, “I will recount Your glory though I have not seen You.” I after all have not seen You, so how can I recount Your glory? I, as an ordinary person, not as a prophet. And they say, “By the hand of Your prophets, through the counsel of Your servants”—that image exists, meaning they did indeed see Your glory. But an ordinary person does not see even the glory of the Holy One, blessed be He. “In the place of the Holy Land, upon which the eyes of the Lord your God are”—that is where it is found, that is “the place of His glory, to revere Him.” There is the place of the glory of the Holy One, blessed be He: in the place of the Holy Land. The Holy One, blessed be He, Himself is not in the Holy Land—that has no meaning—but His glory, His most essential revelation, the root of His revelation, is in the Holy Land. I do not think that poem is saying anything else. I think it is saying: “I will recount Your glory though I have not seen You.” I can recount Your glory even though I do not see You, because I do see Your glory even though I do not see You. Now the prophets—this imagery, all the images of the mighty hand and so on—that is what the prophets saw. Then he brings all sorts of examples from the prophets: an old man on the day of judgment, a young man on the day of battle; that is, when He is, as it were, executing judgment, that is the image. But in general he does say: I can recount Your glory even though You are not seen, because I do see the revelation. And you can see the revelation of the Holy One, blessed be He, somewhere. We’ll see—we’ll just sharpen the concepts on the next page, and then we’ll see in which senses yes and in which senses no. Let’s leave that discussion for the moment. The place, the place where the glory is found—and we said that glory has a place, “Where is the place of His glory?”—that place is the place of the Holy Land, “upon which the eyes of the Lord your God are.” There is that glory, that light apparently—light usually. “The divine matter in the imagination of the sanctified intellect.” How do we hear it? In the imagination of the sanctified intellect, yes, not in the ears. In our imaginative faculty we hear it, basically. This too will be explained later. “In the prophetic sanctified intellect that imagines and allegorizes.” I’ll leave those terms because they’ll be explained in the following sections. But basically, that’s how the sentence should be read; it’s just not very clear syntactically as he wrote it there. Do prophets see or hear? Prophets, relative to us, see. That is what was discussed earlier about “seeing the voices.” When the people of Israel were, for one moment, all at the level of prophecy, they saw the voices. When I am not at the level of prophecy, I hear the voices. So what do they see—do they see the voices? The voices, yes. An inner thing that, at least according to our interpretation, is called voices. But they see it because for them it is much more tangible, much clearer, whereas we only hear it. Hearing is indeed a way of grasping deeper things, but it is a more vague way. Seeing grasps the external thing but grasps it clearly. Seeing grasps very clearly. The prophets see voices. That means they clearly see deep things. I understand—so what they see, clearly see, are deep things, meaning inwardness. What they see is an image of something more inward in a more concrete form. That is always true of sight. Let’s leave it, because that’s really the subject of the next section and the one after that. Maybe there is also an issue of distance here, not only concreteness—that one hears things that are farther away, and sees things that are apparently closer. Closer, but not geographically. Fine. Clearly. Because they themselves are at a higher place, therefore they can see. Everything that is on our level, we see. Things that are above us—by height I mean spiritual height—those we need to listen to. We cannot grasp them with our eyes. They are deeper things. Now the prophets are at the level of the things they see. Indeed, the Arizal wrote that every prophet was at a different level. There were prophets who reached one level, and prophets who reached another—he writes for each prophet how far he reached. So every prophet had a certain height, and there he saw. And this is one of the things that keeps coming up in this distinction between prophets who saw and prophets who heard. Those are differences of degree. We once discussed how the Nazir writes—I think maybe even here in this essay somewhere, I’m not sure, but I think it’s here—the Nazir writes somewhere that the whole Talmud always speaks in the language of hearing, yes? When someone wants to say, “I didn’t understand,” he says, “I did not hear it.” And in the Zohar: “come and hear.” Yes, we once discussed this. “Come and hear,” and everything is in the language of hearing, because Torah study is given in the mode of hearing and not seeing. So someone asked here in the lesson—I don’t remember, maybe last year, I really don’t remember—he asked: but in the Zohar it always says “come and see.” There it’s as though “come and see,” not “hear.” And of course that’s exactly the point. The Zohar, which deals directly with inwardness, says “come and see”—I’ll show you the things themselves. There it is not hidden behind something; it is the thing itself that one is dealing with. So there one sees it and does not hear it. Down here, when we deal with those same things, I speak about oxen and cows and pits and ditches and caves, yes? And behind them there are all sorts of other worlds. To grasp them we can only listen. We cannot see, because they are hidden behind things taken from our world; there is some kind of screen. Therefore here the language is hearing. The Zohar deals with those same things that in the Talmud are hidden, and there you see. So it simply depends on what you are dealing with. And it’s the same thing. The prophet basically dealt with those things. Kabbalah is based on the visions of the prophets. The image, as the appearance of a form of light—fantasy—has no name in the holy tongue except imagination, which imagines and allegorizes. Every sight, when we see something, there is some object in the world and we look at it, and thus some image is created within us, which is a translation of the object in the world. An image, yes—a painting that one paints—apparently the painting itself does not represent, or at least nowadays does not necessarily represent, any object in the actual world. At least not necessarily. The whole essence of painting is that it does not represent anything in the actual world. Have you ever thought about the word “kitsch,” and why it’s considered inferior? Why is kitsch considered not… a kitsch painting—what is kitsch? A crying child, a sunset, all sorts of pictures like those from the central bus station. If we try to think about it: there are kitsch paintings that from the standpoint of the craft of painting, the technique, are excellent. There is no problem there in the technique of painting; it is not a technical issue. Why are those pictures considered something low, not art? Because what brings us to an experience in that painting is not the painting itself but the situation. Precisely because the painter chose things that are so easy to be moved by, it becomes more transparent—the transition is so direct. Exactly, that’s the point. In an ordinary picture—it’s not my idea, I once read an article by someone named Thomas Kulka, and I think he’s right—he analyzes why kitsch is bad art. There is a very interesting analysis there. He tries to characterize what good art is, and in light of that, why kitsch is bad art. He tries to show that according to all the accepted criteria of good art, it’s hard to understand why kitsch is bad art. And his conclusion—and I think he is right—is that good art is something that arouses some experience in me not because of what it represents. If the situation itself described in the painting arouses in me that same experience, then what did the painting do? It’s a photograph. It simply brought me the situation, and what moves me is not the painting but the situation itself. Good art is a situation in which the experience I receive comes from the painting, not from the situation it represents—or at least from the added value that the painting contributes to the situation. Sometimes a painting does represent a situation, and then it adds something—a perspective, say, that one looking ordinarily at the situation would not see. Fine? So good art always has value precisely because of the representation, not because of what it represents. It is the value of the representation itself, not of what it represents. That is called good art. That is the whole essence of art. The essence of art is, in some sense, illusion; the illusion is the artistic value. The same thing that goes beyond the depicted reality—even, say, in realistic painting that depicts reality—the artistic value of the painting is always what goes beyond what the painting represents. The illusion, the interpretation, the point it comes to illuminate—and again, that is a subjective dimension that is not in reality itself. That is artistic value. And again, that can be done through a picture; that is, even by truly painting reality itself, but actually painting only a certain point in reality, in doing that I give my interpretation. Meaning, it’s not necessarily that I paint strange things that make me think. Good surrealism—personally that’s actually the kind of thing that interests me. Me too, but I’m saying that’s a lower level. I think a higher level of art is really someone who creates a situation and doesn’t make it into… Exactly. Because a real situation exists, but the very fact that you painted only a certain point in it and so on—that created a new situation. In any case, it is something that, had you looked at reality itself, you would not have seen. That’s the point. There is always some addition to raw reality as such—a point of view. There has to be something extra here. In other words, the value of a painting is always what it adds to reality, not its representation of reality. Fine? The imagining imagination he is speaking of here—that image of light, or the glory of God spoken of earlier—is some kind of image that appears in the consciousness of, say, a prophet who sees it, but that image has no root in reality. It is different from every other image—a painting on the wall or an image of, right now, the door I’m looking at. In my head I have an image of a door. That image has a root in reality; there is some object called a door, and it creates in my consciousness some image of a door. Fine? In actuality, there is no door sitting in my consciousness; what sits there is an image of the door. But that image has a root in reality; it was created as a result of some reality I am observing. The prophetic vision is different from this. In the prophetic vision, the Holy One, blessed be He, paints an image within you. It is not that you see something and therefore an image is formed within you. Rather, this image has no root in reality. In that sense it is imagination or allegory. That is what he means when he says imagination. In other words, it is imagination in the sense that here this is image in its pure state. We spoke earlier about artistic painting. Artistic painting—even realistic painting—is something that takes reality, creates an image from it, and adds another dimension. The image of the glory of God is only the value, so to speak, without the representation. There is no real root at all to the image one sees when a prophet beholds the glory of God in some aspect of the glory of God. It has no root in reality whatsoever. The image he sees is not some projection of an object onto his consciousness. There is no object. He sees no object. There is only an image. In other words, there is only consciousness here; it does not represent anything in the world. Therefore in that sense it is imagination, something imaginary. Imaginary in the sense that it has no root in reality—not imaginary in the sense that it is just an illusion. Yes, clearly not—on the contrary. Therefore he says it has no name in the holy tongue except imagination, and he apologizes for calling it imaginary. Why? Because it is not really right to call it imagination. Imagination usually means some subjective illusion, a dream, I don’t know what—aside from the fact that a dream is one-sixtieth of prophecy, but “falsehood speaks in dreams.” So illusion is taken to mean something with no root at all, not merely no root in reality. Prophecy does have a root. The Holy One, blessed be He, implanted this prophetic image within the prophet. Only, it is not seeing in the sense of looking at some object in reality and forming an image from the object. In that sense he called it imagination. But he says: “it has no name in the holy tongue except imagination.” Meaning, I have no other term, so I use the term imagination. Here he explains the terms: the imaginer and the allegorized. Right, and for that very reason the next stage follows. Therefore indeed hearing, according to the Nazir, all along draws from the prophetic power. The ability to hear—true, you are not a prophet—but your ability to hear, even when you think there are processes of hearing, draws from prophetic power. No, the prophet doesn’t pull this from a book; the Holy One, blessed be He, simply puts an image into him—it’s not allegory. No, it’s a process. What explains it is that there are prophets. The prophet hears, and this hearing is not just that he has some hearing of some theoretical relation to some pure thing, hearing of something more abstract. The prophet who hears, by virtue of hearing a certain thing, is also able to picture it. Yes, but there is one difference in the root: how clearly he sees it. He sees the voices, and I hear the voices—that’s the difference we discussed earlier. But here I think another difference is also indicated. The difference exactly is this: there are things that I am not at all capable of hearing; from a book I am capable of hearing. We learned—for those who weren’t here—that reading a book is hearing, not seeing. Because seeing is seeing a situation as it is and simply transferring it to consciousness. Reading a book—even if in the end I use my eyes—the image formed in my mind is not a translation of the object I see. It is not a projection of the object I see onto the optic nerves. The optic nerves see letters; from them I form a situation in my mind. That is hearing, not seeing, in the senses we’re talking about. It is hearing done with the eyes. Reading a picture book is seeing. I just wanted to say that for anyone who wasn’t here. In any case, the prophet—and the difference between us and the prophet is two things. First, at what height we can create interaction at all—meaning what exactly we are capable of hearing at all. There are voices of the Holy One, blessed be He, a certain voice of God, that we are not capable of hearing; only a prophet can hear it. From a book we can hear, and from the reality around us we can also hear—and that is called a bat kol. But there is also—and the second difference is what Yair just pointed out, and really what we said earlier—that the prophet also turns it into an image. The prophet sees it; he doesn’t hear it. The prophet is able to see it even though it is only a voice, a subtle thing. It may be that from his perspective it really isn’t a voice, because if he is at that level, then from his perspective it is at his own level. It isn’t subtle; it is something of his own density, a thick sort of concreteness. So that is the explanation of the terminology that appears at the end of section 2: “the imaginer and the allegorized.” Yes? The light of the glory of God is grasped by us through imagination, which imagines and allegorizes it. But again, imagination here does not mean imagination in the sense of illusion—not even fantasy, as he writes here, in the usual sense. Fantasy in the usual sense is just something rootless, branchless, some kind of mirage, what you would like to see, like water in the desert. But here we are talking about something that does have a root—just not a root like every other seeing has. Every other seeing has the root of an object, but here… The mirage has its root inside. The root is inside, not outside. There is nothing in the thing itself. And fantasy hangs itself on some shape—say, of dust or something you see, or something maybe, I don’t know. But it seems to me that many times it hangs on something that also exists in reality. But from cloud and dust it creates forms of trees and water and such things. But that’s totally in the air—that’s a mirage. I don’t know if anyone knows how one could test such a thing. To test such a thing would mean lining up ten people, telling them, “look at a mirage,” and checking what they see. You don’t need a mirage—you can just close your eyes and imagine things. Then you see things that have no root, yes, clearly. The Hebrew quality of allegory. The quality of allegory is already one step further on—or a sharpening of what he said earlier. This imagination, as we said before, is only a borrowed term. It is not imagination; it really is something that does have a root, only not the root of an object but the root of the word of God. Therefore this thing, like ordinary visual perception, also constitutes some kind of allegory. The image of the door that I see in my head is some kind of allegory for the door itself. That is, the door itself, as I grasp it, is an allegory for the door itself. In that sense, the imagination he spoke of earlier is the same—it too is an allegory. Because it too represents—it does represent something behind it. It is not a mirage, not just rootless imagination; it gives concrete form to something; it has a root that it comes to represent. Therefore this comes to qualify what he said earlier. Earlier he called it imagination, and had already apologized for it. It says, “it has no name in the holy tongue,” therefore I call it imagination. And now he explains the apology. Meaning: because it is not really imagination; there is something behind it. That is, the Hebrew never sees the thing in itself. By “the thing in itself” he means here ideals. The ultimate object, the absolute. Rather, what is revealed and seen to him in his eyes is something beyond, higher than itself, hinted at within it, an image of it. This includes the special allegorical quality unique to Semitic Hebrew reasoning. Here some introduction is needed for those who don’t know. Kant divided between the thing in itself and the thing as it appears to our eyes. When I look at a table and see that this table is green, the table in itself is not green—that’s nonsense. The greenness of the table exists only in my mind. If someone else were equipped with visual means different from mine, he would translate that color as yellow. It’s only a question of what appears to the eyes. The green in that color—what I see in consciousness as green—is not something that belongs to the table. It has no meaning at all with respect to the table in itself. The greenness of the table exists only in my mind. If someone had—if we carry this further, many times over—if someone, for example, connected his hearing apparatus to the visual center in the brain, he would see voices. There would be no such thing as sound in the world; there would be acoustic waves. In the world there are acoustic waves, and when they strike our eardrum we hear them. But the acoustic wave itself is not sound. Although we hear it, in our consciousness a sound is formed. There is no sound in the world, no sound. Everything exists only in my consciousness; that is the only place where sound exists. In the world there are acoustic waves. If someone connected his ear, his eardrum, which is nourished by acoustic waves, to some nerve that goes to the visual center, he would see the voices. Like an oscilloscope—it sees voices. An oscilloscope is something in which one sees voices, right? If there were an oscilloscope world, if we worked like an oscilloscope, then there would be no concept of sound in the world; we would see acoustic waves. In other words, all the forms through which we look at things are really forms that exist only in our consciousness. They are not in the world. Color, sound, light—everything by which we describe things—all the forms, really all the characterizations, all the predicates—these things are in our heads, not in the world. Then you’re not actually sure that we see the same things. That’s another difficulty, another problem. Yesterday I actually thought of an interesting point: you’re not sure that the green you see is the green I see. Yes, we discussed that once too. It just occurred to me yesterday in an interesting way, and you already brought it up. If when I look at this color I see green, and when he looks at this color he also calls it green, it could still be that in his consciousness he sees the color that I would call red. He calls it green from the outset because that is the name of the acoustic wave. No, but green is not that—green is the name of the color. A color that strikes my consciousness is green. And I see it this way and you see it that way, and it strikes consciousness. That is what you call green. Why do you—just think for a moment why you call it green and you’ll see. It’s not a matter of language; it’s a matter of language use. No, that’s not right. Okay—when you see this color as blue and I see it as red, and both of us call it green. Right, so what? So that means that for him “green” is a sign for the color blue, and for me “green” is a sign for the color green, and it is still a sign for a color. It is not true that it is a sign for wavelength. Really? Do you call that same green a wavelength? What are you talking about? Green is the experience formed in me when a wave of such-and-such length strikes my eyes. But green is my inner experience; it is not the wave. The word green is the name of an experience. Exactly—that is all I’m talking about now. The name of the other thing is a wave of so many angstroms. That is the name of that thing. Green is what that wave does in my consciousness; that is the word green. Fine? Now it could be that from birth someone actually sees this color as something I would call red. But he always calls it green, and that one is green, and that one is green, and all those times he actually sees them as red—but he knows that this red is called green, yes? So he always calls that green, and I also call it green. So every sentence I say he agrees with, and every sentence he says I agree with, but we are in fact talking about completely different things. Right? I’m talking about green. How could one test that? Do you have an idea? Apparently one can’t—that’s what I thought until yesterday. One can’t test whether we both see the same color even though we use the same word. How can one test that the word has the same meaning? Maybe it could be connected to something else. Why? Maybe, say, red is happy, a happy color? You got there much faster than I did. What I thought yesterday was that metaphors might make it possible to test it. If I tell someone, “Listen, I had a black day,” and he says, “That hurts, may you merit commandments, excellent”—he understands me completely. Why? Because when he says black, maybe in his consciousness he actually sees white. White, I assume—and there is a certain assumption here, one second—there is a certain assumption here that this plane is objective. That is, for every person black inspires gloom and white inspires optimism. But that’s not enough proof. Still, for some reason it seems more convincing to me. You can argue about it; I’m not going to prove it. It’s not true, to the same extent, because the relation between colors and emotions may also differ from person to person and be constructed in each person relative to those colors. Why should it be constructed? Only if you assume it is acquired. But if you assume it is innate—metaphors, I don’t think they’re acquired. There is a certain acquired aspect, yes, yes, I know. Fine, that’s obvious, completely banal. There are long discussions about whether metaphors are acquired or innate. It is completely clear to me that there is an innate layer here. That is completely clear to me. In other words, I think only a certain aspect of it is culture-dependent. Never mind; we won’t get too far into this side remark. I really do think—since you brought up this point—that maybe metaphors are a way to test it. Fine, so back to our subject. Let’s return for one more minute. I’ve wasted a lot of time. Where were we? Ah, yes. We were basically in the Kantian picture. In other words, when we see a certain object, we look at it and some image is formed within us. The object itself, of course, is neither white nor black nor green. This object has certain physical properties that emit electromagnetic waves of such-and-such a length; when those waves strike my consciousness, they create a sensation of green. In some alien’s consciousness they might create a sensation of black. In someone else perhaps they would burn. That is, it depends on the sensory apparatus through which you observe that electromagnetic wave, yes? It is simply a matter of sensory apparatus, not a matter of the thing itself. Therefore he says here that there is a difference between things as they are in themselves and the way they appear to our eyes—by “our eyes” he means all our senses. I’m using eyes here as an expression for all the senses. There is a difference between the thing in itself and the form in which I grasp it. Form exists only in my consciousness. The object in itself exists in the world, but it is naked, stripped of properties; it has no properties. All the properties are in my consciousness. This is the thing in itself in Kant’s doctrine, or the noumenon as he calls it in Latin. And the phenomenon is the phenomenon—the appearance of the thing in my senses or in my consciousness, the thing as it appears to my eyes. I don’t know of a Hebrew term for that. What? Appearance? Maybe. I could offer translations, but I don’t think there is a commonly used term. So this is what he says: the Hebrew never sees the thing as it is—that is, in itself—the ultimate object, as though the thing itself, the absolute. Rather, what is revealed appears to him, and in his eyes is something beyond, above it, hinted at in it, an image of it. Here there is an important point. In the Kantian picture I described earlier, Kant too is a Hebrew in this sense. That is, he too understands that he does not see the thing itself, only the way in which… What? He thought there was no connection between the appearance and the thing itself. Right, I think that is the point he adds here. The seeing of—let’s take an example. If there are two identical tables, it is impossible that I would see one as green and one as red, right? Meaning, true, the greenness and redness are in my consciousness. But clearly there is some root there in reality, right? Something in reality causes that. An acoustic wave, an electromagnetic wave—these things are real objects. All their properties, when I speak about them, are in concepts that belong only to me as subject, as observer. These are not properties that exist in the world. But clearly these descriptions have a root in the real world. When I see one table as green and one table as red, it is perfectly clear that there is also something different in the tables themselves. The interaction of my vision with the table creates a different phenomenon. Right? So in fact, although all the predicates exist only in my consciousness, it is not true that the thing itself has no characterizations. The language I use to characterize the thing is a language that belongs only to me. The predicates themselves—red, green, light, dark, lazy, generous—all the descriptions of all sorts of things that I use are descriptions that somehow exist in me. But clearly they describe some aspect of the object as it is in itself. I just don’t know what that means to call it. I think it’s not… it’s not my inability; it is something undefined on the logical level. In other words, I cannot see the thing as it really appears; that has no meaning. How a thing appears means what is formed in human consciousness when eyes look at the thing. That is what it means for a thing to appear. There is no meaning to the question of how the thing “really” appears. It is not a human inability to grasp the color of the thing as it really is. There is no such thing as the color as it really is. Fine? But what… On the same level, sound waves too. What? On the same level, sound waves too—you don’t see them. Waves corresponding to color, yes, but not color. But I can… If you ask what is the wavelength emitted from this table, the wavelength is such-and-such nanometers. Fine, that’s all right, but the green color of the table does not exist until I observe it. Shlomo also had something about this, by the way: that wavelength too is really human measurement, and one could speak of that too as a human construction—not of the senses but of the intellect. So those too are human constructions. In other words, it could very well be that someone else… What? Everything you know is in any case… That’s why I say one could carry this further as well. But even without that, let’s talk about color, which we all agree is such a thing. And because of color there really is… There is some sense… The fact that I reduce it to color means I know something about the thing in general because of the wavelength. But even the thing that I know, the wave that has a certain wavelength—you are saying that too is really a description in my terms. Correct. The thing in itself also has properties. That is exactly the point. The form in which I see the properties—however far you go, fine, wavelength ten angstroms, green color, whatever it may be—right, right, these are all my forms of expressing the thing itself. So the definition, the properties of the thing itself, are the properties we attribute to it. Yes, correct. No, correct—but not exactly because of inability. Rather, if you want to know it, then tell me by what instrument you are looking, and I’ll tell you how you will know it. It’s not a matter of inability. No one is stronger or weaker. The instruments by which one looks are the instruments by which one grasps. It may be that a blind person has an inability, because he won’t grasp light waves at all, not that he will grasp them differently. But if there were someone who heard those light waves, he would not be limited; he would be different. First of all there have to be the instruments. One must first have the instruments. Yes, fine, that’s obvious. Why is it obvious? Because one must be within instruments; we cannot detach from instruments. Of course, what do you mean? That may be a limitation—perhaps. Even that I’m not sure of—in the sense that I truly cannot grasp, understand, attain, let’s say, the thing. There are only a few minutes left in the lesson—forgive me.