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⌇ Come and see, come and hearתא חזי · תא שמע

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Two corpora, two invitations. The Talmud produces a text with תא שמע — ta shma, come and hear. The Zohar opens its eyes with תא חזי — ta chazi, come and see.

The tidy version is that law is heard and mysticism is seen, and the tidy version is worth about a minute. The interesting version is in three moves.

① At Sinai the senses crossed. Exodus says the people saw the voices.
② And every rule afterwards keeps them apart. Written Torah may only be read from sight; Oral Torah may only be said by mouth. The founding experience is a sensory crossing and the founding law is a prohibition on sensory crossing.
③ Then each corpus took one half and each betrays itself. The Talmud is the Oral Torah — the thing that must be heard and must not be written — and it was written anyway, and still says come and hear, in a book.

⚠ And the symmetry is not clean, which is the best part: the Talmud has its own seeing. See puk chazi.

⚠ Reference only. Nothing here is a rite.

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The hand over the eyes אסתכל באורייתא — He looked into the Torah ⚠ What the rendering claims, and what it does not תא חזי — come and see תא שמע — come and hear ⚠ פוק חזי — but the Talmud sees too ⭐ "And all the people SAW the voices"⚠ "You saw no form — only a voice"⭐ The law against crossing the senses אספקלריא — the lens, clear and clouded אפרכסת — make your ear a funnel ⚠ What this app is: a clouded glass, an eye, and a mouth with no ear ⭐ חורז — the stringing of beads, and the fire it makes Havdalah — the seam of the week, taken in through four senses ⭐ The shofar — a sound the tradition lost, and kept anyway The book named after a brightness

⇗ walk this live in Tehiru →

Tehiru is a walk-in model of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and its kindred ways — built to be explored, not read. This page is a still frame of one node; the app is where it moves.