The Tree

The Tree

Chapter 1: The Nature of Truth

There are different kinds of truths. We know this from everyday life. There are scientific truths. But on the other hand, there are moral truths and religious truths. These two operate in fundamentally different systems and aren’t necessarily comparable. But they don’t necessarily contradict each other. Rather than that, they answer different questions.

Science will not answer questions regarding God, just as religious belief will not explain nuclear fusion.

Chapter 2: The Search for Deeper Truths

When searching for truth myself, I am looking something different, yet. When experiencing nature or prayer or sometimes art, when I manage to completely immerse myself in them, I feel a different kind of truth emerging. It often feels like a layer beneath the surface of our everyday reality. When I look at a large lake, get lost in the woods, or lose myself in painting, I often feel reality dissolving slightly, allowing me a glimpse of whatever lies behind it.

Unlike what Neo sees in The Matrix, reality doesn’t disappear but rather subtly changes its meaning. Things move closer to one another, and answers to different questions become slightly more similar, slightly more connected.

Chapter 3: Abstraction and Connection

With this connectedness comes a bit of abstraction. This is where the work behind us comes into play. I often imagine our reality as the surface and the smallest leaves of a treetop. We all live on the surface of that treetop. So what we see is an endless number of different leaves,of different shapes, different textures, different colors. But once we choose to look beneath the surface, we see that the leaves next to us might actually be connected to the same branch as our leaf. And so, suddenly, we see that these two leaves are merely two manifestations of the same branch.

Digging deeper again, we might find that two separate branches rest on a bough. To make that move to the bough, we have to let go of some of what keeps us on the surface of things. Above all, this means accepting a certain level of abstraction. Insisting on the differences in appearance between our different leaves will make it hard for us to see the branch.

Chapter 4: Languages as an Example

That sounds a little esoteric. Can you explain what you mean?

Yes, let me give you an obvious example: languages. I grew up with Hebrew. If I listen to someone speaking Arabic, I understand next to nothing. On the surface, these two languages are different. But then, if I listen to the word for “house” in Hebrew, “Bayt,” and in Arabic, “Beyt,” I notice that these languages “sit on the same branch.” I just had to abstract a little bit. If I dig a little deeper, accepting a bit more abstraction, I might find similar connections with all Semitic languages. I think genders, for example, work pretty similarly in all Semitic languages. Each Semitic language is simply a manifestation of a “proto-Semitic” abstraction of a language. That language might not exist in real life, but the idea of it exists within the sum of all Semitic languages.

Chapter 5: Universal Grammar and Beyond

But why stop there? If we accept even more abstraction, we can go with Chomsky’s comcept of Universal Grammar, which is basically the idea that all languages are manifestations of the same underlying cognitive framework. This means that despite their differences in vocabulary, syntax, and phonology, all human languages are simply different manifestations or expressions of the same fundamental linguistic principles. Again, we traded concreteness in favor of connectedness. We found the unifying element emerges when we accept abstraction. And we can go down that rabbit hole a whole lot deeper.

Chapter 6: The Connection Between Beauty and Truth

One of the connections that I feel very strongly is the connection between beauty on one hand and truth on the other. Of course, I’m not the first person to notice that connection. There is a vague but very present feeling of the same kind of order and balance in both truth and beauty. Despite any kind of rational “coating” that might claim differently, both are two manifestations of the same underlying order. However, I can only feel that connection if I clear away all the ideas, words, and reasoning that might otherwise block my view. Again, Connection, unity, and understanding of how things work on deeper levels can be found if we do our best to let go of concreteness and accept the abstraction that will appear instead.

Chapter 8: The Role of Tradition

It sounds like a path to extreme universalism.

Indeed, that idea may lead us to limitless universalism. If no matter where we start, we end up in the centre of the same treetop, why not borrow somebody else's leaf?

But, that ignores one important duality: the universality of rationalism versus the particularity of whatever is not rational. Anyone can become a great scientist because rationality is universalist in nature. There is no essential difference between a high IQ of a Japanese physicist and a high IQ of an Argentinian physicist. They both have the same access to the same scientific ideas.

But when digging deeper and deeper, we will sooner or later reach a point where we meet our limitation to how abstract we can think, how deep we can penetrate the treetop. There is a limit between that which is still graspable and containable in words and thoughts and that which is too abstract for words and thoughts.

Chapter 9: Beyond Words and Rational Thought

If we want to go beyond that point, language, form, ideas, and perhaps even a sense of self, will hold us back due to their concreteness. It is a place where we have to give up words in order to take one step further into the depths of the treetop. At that point, we inevitably have to find other tools to guide us, tools that don’t rely on words or forms. We need to trust our intuition.

And that intuition is more particular to each tradition than the universalism of rationality. Each of us is the dialectical result of hundreds of generations of digging—none of what we personally think just appeared in a void. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. Those giants are slightly different for each of us. Each tradition, each ancestry, has put us on a different set of shoulders. Now, we can of course climb down from those shoulders, but without those shoulders, we are left with only rational thought. So if we are to let go of rational thought, we must rely on our own traditions. Each of our traditions will probably eventually lead us to a similar place of abstraction. But the path there may be vastly different.

Chapter 10: The Significance of Hebrew Letters

• So how does that bring us to Hebrew letters?

To me, Hebrew letters are agents of abstraction in our world. These letters are planted right in front of us every day, used in the most common, utilitarian sense. But if we go back to Sefer Yetzirah, we already know that the universe was built on letters. In the minds of our ancestors, the world was built on 22 (or 23) Hebrew letters, so they are the most fundamental elements of existence. These letters connect the most profane—like a nutrition list on a package of milk—to the very core of creation, to the universe, to the macrocosm.

Chapter 11: My Connection to Hebrew Letters

Now, I’m not very concerned with the question of whether the universe was really created by 22 letters. As I mentioned, there are different kinds of truths. But the fact that an endless string of people before me lived their lives in light of that idea, loading those letters with that content, means they carry it regardless of a scientific, rational, or even orthodox Jewish truth regarding the creation of the universe.

That is why my tool of choice is Hebrew letters. Simply because these are the letters that carry the attempts of the people who came before me to dig toward the core of the treetop, as they have been passed down to me. While Japanese letters may carry just as much weight, or just as much wisdom, or be just as much vehicles toward abstraction and truth and the center of the treetop, they are not my vehicle. The path that is relevant to me is illuminated by Hebrew letters.

Chapter 12: The Role of the Body and Tradition

But even my access to Hebrew letters becomes interesting only at the point where it goes beyond what I can learn from a book. Much less than in our brains, that access, those traditions, and intuition and wisdom are rooted and planted and anchored in our bodies. I know what it feels like to intuitively know I shouldn’t et a specific food or trust a specific person or spend a specific amount of money on something. And I know how prayer feels and the vast spaces that it opens, I know the taste of Yiddish, a language I’ve never personally experienced, but I intuitively feel, because so many generations before me have spoken that language. Those are experiences ingrained in my stomach, in my feet, in my heart, in my hands. It is our bodies that carry our ancestors’ thoughts and hopes and fears.

Chapter 13: The Importance of Tattooing

Which is why tattooing is important to you?

Yes. Absolutely. Tattooing brings all this together. Drawing Hebrew letters on Jewish skin unites these two ideas. Drawing Hebrew Tattoos for the better part of two decades, I found that Jews inevitably have a very intuitive connection to them. Of course, many of us speak Hebrew, and even more of us learned to read Hebrew when we were kids. But that intuitive understanding of those letters is based much more on two millennia of Jews them literally every day, from the age of three. We have been trying to find the secrets of the universe in those letters and tried to connect to God, reading them. That is ingrained in us, even if we are absolute atheists. Even if we don’t remember we are Jewish. Those letters are contained in our bodies just as much as the memories of pogroms and persecution.

And tattooing is placing those symbols in our bodies, the bodies that carry the memory of everything we have experienced as a collective in the last so many generations. It often feels like magic. But it isn’t. Rather than that, I feel more like Hebrew Tattoos on Jewish skin are road signs. Often, we might not be able to read them when we get them done. But our bodies do. Maybe, in many years of carrying those road signs under our skin, we can learn how to read them.