渴望

This character started with a conversation about G-d which poured out of my mouth. It came forth to a dear brother, Hejun. It was the first word I had to describe my yearning for G-d and it came in Chinese.

I was parsing the meaning of this word sitting on the floor of my home, my immediate surroundings only lit by a few candles. My smallish home which rested atop a wooden platform I had built. In my rented farm plot which was beside a mountain with nineteen snowy peaks and eighteen craggy canyons and rushing icy water.

My HP computer in front of me, sitting Japanese style on my knees, I was working through a snarly problem on Microsoft word in my yurt.

I had the enchanting song by Joey Weisenberg “Nishmat Kol Chai” on repeat, trying to parse what haunted me about this melody. I couldn’t put it down down. After many long hours of labor I hashed out my notes:

• 回音，God’s searching for us, our searching for God, yearning, longing, 渴望, kewang, literally to thirst for, describes literally god’s thirst for us and our thirst for god, a fully embodied experience, felt throughout one’s entire body.

Let me draw our attention first to the second word, 渴望 to long for. With a careful exegesis of the word we can bring our thoughts to the significance of the left side 渴 thirst. To long for something in Chinese is imbued with a quality of thirst. Lets explicate this word to further unpack it. First we can compare thirst with its analogue, hunger.

Thirst isn’t just something mentally ‘experienced,’ it is simultaneously an emotion and a physical reaction, an emotional-physical reaction wrought throughout our entire body. Thirst, unlike hunger, is something we can deny only for a very short period of time compared with hunger. People can go on hunger strikes for weeks and weeks and weeks but in only three days without water we simply perish. So to thirst for something, by definition, is a much more powerful pull than to hunger.

Compare the experience of relieving your hunger after a whole day fast versus the quenching of a thirst after just a short few hours working under the hot sun. Parched thirst feels much worse than gnawing hunger. Without water, you can truly feel like you are dying and in three short days you will but without food you can mentally push away the idea. On a hot day, a person can easily succumb to heat stroke and dehydration without water; there are no ailments other than low blood sugar and a headache that can be caused by a short term lack of food.

渴望 was the foundation of my belief in G-d. And it still is. Torah is considered the water of life. I was literally thirsting for G-d. The sensation was so intense for me. It still is. I’m fully hydrated and I have a desperate feeling of a need for water that is only attributable to that.

Now let us take detour to 回音 where we will make a brief rest stop at Chinese grammar. 回音 meaning to echo and reply is itself an amazing term. One cannot escape the curious play on words once again. On the left 回means to return. On the right 音means sound. 回音Is it a noun or a verb? What is replying to whom? Who is replying to what? 回音is a word that is a verb and a noun. There is a dialogue of some kind happening. Sound goes out, it returns.

In Chinese, 回 is in the word to answer and give a response. It is in go home, return to your home country, come back, go back, recall, recollect, turn one’s head (to reflect on something). Those are about all the common words I can recollect when I see 回. When I look at 回 I don’t just see return, I see all the compound words used with this character. Chinese words always have compounds. In fact, speaking good Chinese is to use compound instead of single words when you speak.

So for me, I see an amalgamation of terms around this word. 回 is also a homonym for very commonly used 会(although it’s tone is not the same) which implies future tense. It is also a homonym for fennel seed 茴香, grey 灰色 (different tone) and ash 灰. The associative patterns are nearly endless. So the word is connected to a hundred different study sessions, conversations and configurations. I may be distinct in this but I have very strong recall for all the ways in which this word is used.

Now we have to tackle 音 or sound. First we need to take another rest stop at Chinese grammar. Some characters in Chinese are representative of a whole class of words. For example, in English, we can say air, wind and oxygen but oxygen is the most formal and therefore encapsulating of the meaning. It sort of has the weight of scientific grade terminology. 音 is the same way. It’s not just the character for sound. It’s the character for sound! It carries the symbolic weight of the concept. It is a high grade term. All words possibly related to sound have this word. It’s weightiness asks for us to pause and contemplate it, the same way in English we would consider Nature with a capital N. It also looks like a bell, itself another symbol for sound. Fundamentally, it is connected to sound 声音 and music 音乐. It is also a category of diagnosis is medicine (as in the tenor of someone’s voice). It is like a force in language as gravity or resistance in physics.

With that small detour let us now return to the whole word 回音. The echoing cries of the female soloist in the song were Martin Buber’s treatise “I and Thou” in one word. They provoke a relationship with Hashem. Her haunting calls stimulate our soul which responds. Our soul soars and reaches Hashem evoking his attention. It’s Heschel’s proposal that G-d can reach us. It’s fantastic, amazing, unbelievable. It’s a musical term which even means to turn. It’s Teshuva!

My dear brother, Hejun was thirsty for something more dynamic, after his static sixteen years in Son of Man (to be explained). I was thirsty for G-d after my sixteen year slog through secular high school and undergraduate. Hejun had a dynamic relationship with G-d, I had a dynamic plan for my life.