字

I learned the first words I had to describe my spiritual yearning in Chinese. I don’t think my revelation for Judaism could have come about without the visual cues I received from the language. I won awards in black and white photography in high school, I have been a visual person all my life. I’ve had a strong sense for color, a good hand at sketching geometric structures, and a flair for arranging flowers and dinner plates. My childhood, rife with tension over the Jewish part was too fraught for me to find solace in magic of Hebrew. But my introduction to Chinese freshman year of college with endlessly copying hundreds of characters to memorize them set a meditative, redemptive, tenor to learning Chinese. I was drawn to the characters with a primal mysterious power (mysterious to me, that is). In hindsight I doesn’t take much of a leap to make the connection between Jews and language, “people of the book”, a world created by G-d’s speech. But my thoughts were elsewhere. However, I was acting out something very natural. After all, ours is the tongue from which all languages stem. Even Chinese.

悟了！

My friend said to me. ”You’ve gotten some awareness” as I poured tea with concentration into our cups. Tea 茶 a wonderful representative of Chinese’s grace and majesty with people 人, the linking point between leaves 艸 and trees 木. So tea just like heaven and earth cannot be made without man. 悟，I’d heard this word in the Journey to the West, arguably the most famous Chinese epic, about an powerful but morally vile Beautiful Monkey King, Sun Wukong, who becomes refined through his adoption of Buddhism and Daoism. I’d heard it in relation to waking up. Okay, file it away for further examination. Actually, 悟 connotes being awoken. Or awakening to something. Awareness the product of awakening.

For a long time I loved this character. It was my cherished friend. It’s sheer communicative power regularly amazed me. It’s ingenuity. 忄heart on the left 五 five at the top right 口 orfices at the bottom right. Pause. Think for a moment. There are five orfices in the face. Five senses. A sixth if I include the heart. “Get awareness” or “[you have] awoken!” was something about the various five senses and the heart. Aha! There is some sense beyond our five senses as the heart seems to imply. It also seems to allude to my question, beyond known knowledge what is beyond that ledge?

Chinese is a fascinating language to an English speaker because it plays a lot on tense in a way that English would never dream. A more ancient language, it breaks the rules of tense, requiring a double or a triple pass on every word. 悟 is a good example of this. It is related to “awoke.” We immediathhely crash into our problems of tense. Is it, “you awoke” or are you “awakening to something?” If we reduce it down are you the doer of the action or the receiver? That is pretty significant when it can seem to imply both. That then poses the question: to what have we awoken?

China is where I awoke to “seeing” the signs of my own yearning for G-d. It’s where I first realized that piercing cry.

Imagine a person who is halfway around the world in a remote location far away from someone they had a brief but passionate flare with and he realizes he have to go back and get married. Awakening to that piercing cry is like that. It seized me and overpowered me and I didn’t know what to do with it. I was so damn far away in every sense.