Revelation

Chapter 8 addresses the nexus of God’s perfection to the Torah’s charge. Since prophecy is inevitably poetic, it demands hearers who are intellectually alive and can see that God’s perfection invites emulation, through a union of moral strength with intellectual depth. Jewish sages find a key to such wisdom in God’s Anokhi, the “I” that opens the Decalogue, or even in the opening aleph of that word, read as a sign for God since aleph stands for singularity. One sage read that aleph as a kind of mandala, its form suggesting a face made up of two yods, a traditional marker of God’s name, the two letters facing each other like two eyes, as if to remind us that we find God when we find ourselves—and to suggest a thought as old as Socrates and as fresh as Levinas: that we find ourselves when we discover one another.