“The Language the Torah Speaks”

When a person reads the Torah, one thing may puzzle him: God is spoken of there in human language. “Sees,” “hears,” “is angry,” “remembers.” And unless one stops to think, a simple and almost automatic picture arises — as if it were about someone like a human being, only stronger.

But Judaism warns from the outset: this is not a description of God but a way of speaking to man. Because a person understands only through words familiar to him. If everything were said in precise, “non-human” categories, it would simply be incomprehensible and useless.

The problem begins the moment a person forgets that this is a language of translation. He hears a word — and takes it literally.

It says God “sees” — and a person thinks of eyes.
It says “is angry” — and he imagines an emotion.
It says “remembers” — and it seems something had been forgotten before.

But the meaning of these words is different.

“Sees” is not about vision. It is about complete understanding of a situation. Not only the actions, but also the causes and the consequences. A person always sees a fragment. Here it is about perceiving the whole picture at once.

“Anger” is not a mood. It is a description of a situation in which a person’s actions go against the order of the world and inevitably lead to destruction. Not “someone got angry,” but “if this continues, it will get worse.”

“Remembers” is not about memory in the human sense at all. It is the moment when something that has accumulated begins to manifest.

A person performed an action — and it did not disappear. It became part of the system. Sometimes this is not visible at once. But at some point it begins to work.

When it is said that God “remembered” someone, it means that the situation has reached the point where that person’s accumulated actions have produced a result. As if there were a process, and it has ripened.

And here there is a very practical point.

A person often lives as if his deeds were separate episodes. Done — and gone. But Judaism says: nothing passes away. Everything is taken into account, everything is connected, everything has an effect.

You may not see exactly how.
You may not understand when it will show itself.
But it works.

And then the language of the Torah begins to read differently. Not as a set of strange expressions, but as an attempt to explain: in the world there is a connection between what you do and what happens to you.

It is just that this connection runs deeper than it seems at first glance.

And if you keep this in mind, the text stops confusing you. It begins to give you a bearing — not about how God is made, but about how the reality you live in is made.