Epiphanies Are Us

Cultural Dyslexia

Photo by Matthew Ball on Unsplash

I was filling in an on-line form recently when I heard my wife laughing in the living room. I was concentrating on the form--very little multi-tasking at 66 I have learned--but still her laughter registered in one of the dusty closets of my brain. I was on edge. The form I was filling was from an American site and the dates had to be in the "mm/dd/yy" format. Talk about dusty closets. Next, they will be asking for my height in feet and inches too. Multi-tasking would be of no help here. Multi-focal tasking maybe. A case of cultural dyslexia.

In my younger years I would have rushed to her side to see what was so funny because she rarely laughs full steam and when I was younger, I was more agile than I am now. In fact, there is only one way I know to automatically trigger laughter in my wife and that is to have her watch Laurel and Hardy. It never fails; she laughs until she cries. Confused by the form and confused by her surprising laughter, I did what we do at this age. I simplified. The form was in front of my eyes so everything else was dumped, forgotten, de-confused. Sometimes this works well but still, as a rule that we all know, things concerning your life partner come first. How many pounds in a kilo could have waited.

This time I forgot that rule and remained focused on the form. Until I lost focus. I was remembering something else: that because of some mistake in converting from Decimal to Imperial a billion-dollar Mars lander either crashed onto the planet or missed it altogether, I forget which. My filling out the form properly was not a matter of such budgetary concern, but I couldn’t get out of my mind the vision of some hapless engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory receiving a message from the lander echoing that New York Yankees broadcaster who always announces home runs with a hearty “See Ya!” as it looped out towards the Andromeda galaxy. That helped me re-focus on my immediate goal: finish the form, press submit and say “see ya.”

That had been a joint American-European project. For the record, the reason it wasn’t an American-Russian project because what could the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Russian counterpart be called, except The Nyet Propulsion Laboratory? You couldn’t get to Mars with that. Unless they called in the experts from the Jet Propulsion Lavatory, home of aerospace engineers who tend to overdo it with spicy foods. Anyway, at the time I remembered thinking that there was no way that the “mistake” was not an intentional act. The best engineers on two continents were running this. What could it have been? I remember imagining some proud French engineer moving a decimal point to the right saying: “I am sick of having to convert to their shitty little system all the time. Let them eat cake in the galaxieee!”

The divide. Between cultures, between languages, between light and emptiness, between good and evil. There is a sometimes frightening starkness when considering the dialectic between contending extremes. But it is exactly there, before the abyss that divides us, that moments of pure serendipity appear like flashes of neural nexus in the void—a few times in a lifetime if one is lucky. It is a life-confirming moment that registers in the deepest recesses of our souls. It is a moment that has within itself the power to change the DNA of our consciousness. For the most part, by definition, it is unspeakable but we, by definition, can only but speak. And write.

Epiphanies are us. There is the world before, and there is the world after. A similar world, but our perception of it has fundamentally changed. We hear a speech, a lecture, read a book, listen to music, and we change. Isn’t it a fact though, that these “epiphanies” are important for ourselves only? It wasn’t too long ago when I saw a light and ran to inform my wife Dvora. “Honey, I just realized. I’m not cut out to be a businessman.” Without looking up from her crossword she said: “That’s nice sweetheart. I’m happy for you.”

But even for ourselves, how lasting are these moments? They are mostly fleeting, and though our perception of reality may have changed profoundly, it seems that for most of us the instinctive reaction is to seek solid ground, to project business as usual, and if possible, to forget. It is as if we have in our nature a drive to self-censure. Why would that be?

On the evening after I filled out the form, I began reading “The Guide For The Perplexed,” by Maimonides, a book I had last read more than thirty years ago. This passage struck me as serendipitous:

At times the truth shines so brilliantly that we perceive it as clear as day. Our nature and habit then draw a veil over our perception, and we return to a darkness almost as dense as before. We are like those who, though beholding frequent flashes of lightning, still find themselves in the thickest darkness of the night.

This book is a thousand years old. Maimonides answer to my question “Why would that be?” is that it is “our nature and habit” to be so. Meaning, he doesn’t think that it is a question that needs to be asked. That is simply the way it is. We perceive in flashes of light and insight, and then we “draw a veil over our perceptions.” If we were in Plato’s cave, we would be snatching quick peeks outside and running back into the dark depths. Better than staring at the sun but still, back into the darkness? Maimonides goes on to write:

On some the lightning flashes in rapid succession, and they seem to be in continuous light, and their night is as clear as the day. This was the degree of prophetic excellence attained by (Moses) the greatest of prophets, to whom God said, "But as for thee, stand thou here by Me" (Deut. 5:31), and of whom it is written "the skin of his face shone," etc. (Exod. 34:29). [Some perceive the prophetic flash at long intervals; this is the degree of most prophets.] By others only once during the whole night is a flash of lightning perceived. This is the case with those of whom we are informed, "They prophesied, and did not prophesy again" (Num. 11:25). There are some to whom the flashes of lightning appear with varying intervals; others are in the condition of men, whose darkness is illumined not by lightning, but by some kind of crystal or similar stone, or other substances that possess the property of shining during the night; and to them even this small amount of light is not continuous, but now it shines and now it vanishes, as if it were "the flame of the rotating sword."

Once Dvora was describing the birth of our youngest son to my mother. Over twenty straight hours of birth pangs. I remember it well; I was there with her in that hospital in Beer-Sheba. My wife said to my mother: “Finally it was too much. They told me that they were going to have to use toys to help the baby come out.” My wife had obviously meant to say “tools.” She saw the look on my mother’s face and asked her: “What did I say?” My mother said: “You said toys.” The three of us, without fuss or fanfare, knew to leave it at that. That was a vision too precious to correct: A midwife shaking a rattler in one hand and holding a doll in the other. “It’s time to come out into the world, little one. The world is good. Life is good.”

We are not prophets, but we can strive to obtain and nurture that small continuous light, in ourselves, to share with others, as they share theirs with us, and in so doing expel the darkness of the chasm, to reveal the bridge spanning the divide.

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Pete Rose and Maimonides walk into a bar. The bartender says: “What’ll it be fellas? The usual?” Pete Rose says “I’ll have one of those” and Maimonides says “I’ll have onides.”