The monopoly on truth

He isn’t talking to you. He’s talking past you, because you can’t see what he can. It might be God, or the end of God. It might be the market, the climate, trauma, the ego, or the hidden logic of political events, where only he can connect the dots. The content changes; the posture doesn’t. He knows something about how reality is built, and you don’t, and every conversation is another opportunity to deliver it.

Sometimes he is you.

It usually begins with something real. The fourth day of a silent retreat, when the world turned transparent. A second year in yeshiva, or the year after leaving it, when the entire structure suddenly looked like a stage set. A book read at three in the morning that rearranged everything you thought you understood. The insight is genuine, and so is the exhilaration that comes with it: the sense that a door has opened onto how things actually are, and that you are standing, at last, on the right side of it.

What happens next is a train skidding off the rails in slow motion. You come home to dinner with your family, who are discussing the price of apartments, and the next morning your colleagues are arguing about a television series, and you notice, with a mixture of pity and impatience, that they are asleep. You try to explain what you have seen, what you are seeing. They nod, or argue, or change the subject, which only confirms how much they are missing.

Over the following months, you stop asking questions to which you don’t already know the answer. When someone speaks, you listen for the place where they go wrong, the way a cardiologist listens to a heart for a murmur. In your head you rehearse arguments in which the other person finally understands. Your messages grow more elaborate and your replies more impatient. You sort people into categories: those who get it, those who almost do, and those who never will.

Your body speaks the same language. There is a small, warm rush in being right, and a restlessness when you have to keep it to yourself. There is a taste of contempt, faint at first, metallic, almost like blood. And a fatigue settles in, because vigilance is exhausting: someone who must correct the world cannot afford to rest in it.

Certainty works, for a while, like a drug. You see everything so clearly that it feels superhuman. But like any drug, it numbs. Nothing anyone says reaches you, because you already know it before they finish the sentence. Surprise disappears first, then curiosity, and finally tenderness, which needs another person who might see something you don’t. Your spouse says you have changed, and you hear resistance. Your children stop telling you things. The loneliness is real, but you call it clarity, or fate.

Then the insight itself begins to wither. Belief, whether in God or in anything else worth the name, lives inside a relationship with something larger than you, something that can still address you, contradict you, and look different tomorrow. Once you know, it can no longer do any of that, because nothing is permitted to exceed what you have already understood. God becomes a fact you own. The Kotzker Rebbe read the second commandment, “You shall not make for yourself a carved image,” as a warning about God Himself: do not turn Him into a fixed thing, carved in stone. But you did, because you couldn’t help it. You know.

The practice that once opened a door becomes a way of standing in the doorway with your arms crossed. The meditator who saw through the self now has an omniscient self that has seen through things. The newly observant man becomes an inspector of other people’s lapses; the newly secular woman explains religion to her mother the way a doctor explains symptoms to a patient.

And then you notice that nothing moves you. The words are all still there, and your lips still move, but the words fall dead at your feet; it’s a silent movie now. You can’t confide this to anyone, because you are the one who knows. The certainty has gone cold in your hands, and your heart has turned to stone.

There is a story in the Zohar, the great book of Jewish mysticism, that approaches this from an unexpected side. Two Talmudic sages are on the road and stop at a village in the Galilee, Kfar Sakhnin, where they lodge with a widow. Her young son comes home from school and sees the guests. He refuses to go near them: they did not say the Shema, the morning declaration that God is One, on time. He is right. They had spent the morning helping a poor bride and groom who had no one, and one commandment, they explain, exempts a man from another. How did he know? By the smell of their clothes, he says.

At the table they ask about his father. His father has left the world, he says, and every day, when holy men set out on the road, his father walks behind them driving their donkeys. Since they were not worthy to meet his father on the road, he will not tell them who his father was. Then he teaches them, and his brilliance is astonishing. When it is time for grace, he claims the bread as his own, “you ate my bread and my food of Torah,” and so the blessing is his to lead. He picks up the cup, and his hands shake, until he says a verse from Psalms, “I will take the cup of salvation,” and the cup steadies. The text never gives his name. It calls him the Yannuka, “the child.”

As the sages leave, his mother begs them to look on her son with a kind eye. He answers for himself: “I am the son of the great and precious fish, and a fish does not fear the evil eye,” a Talmudic reference. His father, like a fish under water, is hidden from the eye. The boy cannot stop showing himself.

When the sages tell the story to Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, the master of the Zohar’s circle, he deciphers the riddle: the Yannuka’s father is Rav Hamnuna Sava, one of the great sages of the generation before. In Aramaic the name can be heard as “the great old fish”: rav, great, nuna, fish, and sava, old. The father’s light shines on the boy, Rabbi Shimon says, and that is to remain a secret. Later he has a foreboding: the boy’s light will flare for a moment and go out.

Read today, the Yannuka is every gifted kid who corrects the teacher, the prodigy everyone admires and keeps at a distance. Later stories say he died young, and people still visit a grave in Safed said to be his. And the Zohar has him teach, of all things, about a flame: light cannot rest on nothing; it needs a wick and oil, something plain and humble to burn on, or it goes out. He describes his own fall exactly, and cannot see himself in it.

The sages are the other half of the story. They answer his rebuke once, plainly, and then stop defending themselves. They stay, and they listen to a child. Their not-knowing gives the light somewhere to land.

If you are the one who knows, none of this is an argument for doubting what you saw. Perhaps you did see something. The question is whether knowing it has put out the flame: whether a conversation can still surprise you, a practice or a moment of prayer still move you, God still disagree with you.

In the Jewish tradition the disagreement runs both ways. God is someone you are allowed to argue with, and creation itself is a kind of argument with Him. That is the paradox at its root: a finite world inside the Infinite, whose very existence seems to deny Him. He makes room for it anyway.

Back to you and me. The test is as simple as it is challenging. Can you be a little like God, but not in the way you have been, as the one who knows? Can you make room, as He does, for something that denies you? When did someone last change your mind about something that mattered? If you can’t remember, the light may still be burning, but there may be very little left for it to rest on.