The Ladder Runs Out

The claim, stated flatly, that thought is higher than speech, and that there is a rung above thought which no word reaches. Song is the traditional name for the vehicle that goes there.

⭐⭐⭐ THIS IS THE WHOLE WING IN ONE SENTENCE, AND IT IS AN ARGUMENT RATHER THAN A FEELING. A tradition that believes the world was SPOKEN — ten utterances, twenty-two letters, a name held back — has an unusual problem: its own cosmology says language is the machinery of reality, so what do you do about the part of God that is above the machinery? The answer the Hasidim gave is not poetic. It is procedural: you use a sound with no words in it, and you use it on purpose, and you repeat it until the person singing stops narrating themselves.