Va'era: The banality of talking about Trump

“The human being became a speaking being” (Genesis 2:7). This is how Onkelos, the Aramaic translation of the Torah, translates the Hebrew phrase nefesh chayah, which would seem to literally mean “a living being.”

Though Onkelos’ rendering seems far-fetched at first, it has a textual basis. The Torah describes other creatures — cows, insects — as “living beings,”¹ but when it comes to humans, the Torah relates an additional element of God’s creative activity²: “YHVH Elohim… blew into his nostrils the breath of life” (Ibid.). How do we explain the fact that the words used to describe the product of these creative processes are the same, but the process itself is different? Onkelos concludes, it seems, that nefesh chayah must mean something different when it comes to humans.

All translation is, of course, interpretation, and adds — like God’s breath — something to the words it animates. In stating that Adam “became a speaking being,” Onkelos suggests that it is our ability to speak that makes us what and who we are. Speaking itself is an act of interpretation: we transform our experiences into language that never quite “gets it” — never quite captures the richness, complexity, messiness of our lives — but which still is our best and only way of communicating and reflecting upon those experiences.

In its discussion of this week’s parshah, Va’era, the Zohar states that “when the congregation of Israel is in exile, its voice departs and its word is forgotten.”³ The experience of catastrophe, pain, and violence are often untranslatable: the words, phrases, frameworks which we have employed are insufficient to communicate the trauma of the experience. In fact, the inarticulability of that pain itself brings into question the languages we have until now used: what use are our everyday ways of speaking if they cannot communicate that which affects us most?

The early months of Trump’s first term felt like this: a rupture in what we’d thought we’d known, one crisis after another (often multiple crises in a single day) that strained again and again our very ability to simply articulate to ourselves what was happening. This time, too, there is speechlessness, but of a different sort. If eight years ago, we didn’t know what to say, today it feels like there couldn’t possibly be anything left to say. The inauguration feels far less like a rupture and more like a return to normal. We can only speak in terms of increasing degrees: Trump is more dangerous, more fascist, more unfettered, the Democrats are more feckless, the Republicans are more cowardly, big business is more nakedly supportive of authoritarianism. This is also how trying to describe the massive violence in Gaza so often felt: what could be said in December that couldn’t have been said in August (and what could be said in August that couldn’t have been said in March) except that more Gazans had been killed, more hostages abandoned, more buildings destroyed, more limbs blown off?

It’s hard to know what to suggest as an antidote that doesn’t itself sound like it could have been said eight years ago: to say that we must resist the feeling that any of this is “normal,” that we must refuse to surrender our ability to imagine other futures.

But this very feeling — that there is nothing more to say, that there is no escape from a closed loop of a language in which we merely rehearse the same outrage again and again — itself serves fascism, which relies on our numbness and our loneliness, and that alone is enough to reject it.

“When a person speaks,” the Ba’al Shem Tov teaches, “that which they speak becomes their life-force… And so those words draw down new life-force for that person, which allows them to live, even though with each word life-force leaves them. But each word also brings in new life.”⁴

For the Ba’al Shem Tov, our ability to speak is what gives us life. It is what brings us back from the undead monotony in which we are unmeshed. Adonai Sefatai Tiftach — Lord, open up my lips (Psalms 51:17). These are the words we say three times a day before beginning the Amidah. They are an incantation against silence, against the drudgery of meaninglessness, against the vague nausea that stops up our throats. Again and again, we ask God to make us speaking beings.

This is why the Jewish mystical tradition associates the Messiah (moshiach) with speech (siach)⁵: when we return speech from exile, when we force ourselves to speak in spite of the apparent impossibility of doing so, because there is too much to say and nothing to say at all, we open up the possibility of stepping off this doomed conveyor belt upon which we find ourselves.

By speaking, I don’t just mean writing, though we’ll have to do that, too. It’s the full range of speaking — sharing our grief with each other, singing together, protesting together, taking action and risk together — that may yet breathe God’s life into our open mouths, noses, hearts, and hands.

1. See Gen. 1:20, 24. JPS takes the opposite tack, translating Gen. 2:7 as “living being” and nefesh chayah in other cases as “living creature” and “breath of life.”

2. Technically, this is the second time the text describes humans being created — the first time doesn’t use the term nefesh chayah.

3. Zohar II:26a. In Kabbalah, “Voice” is associated with the sefirah of Malchut, the lowest sefirah of God, which is understood to be in exile as well.

4. Sefer Ba’al Shem Tov, Genesis 93

5. See, for instance, the Me’or Einayim on Ki Tissa and Pinchas.