Let My People Know

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz: “The ability to develop a keen sense for things that cannot be said.”

There are some skills that are not included in any course of study, yet everyone must learn them.

Sometimes a person must dedicate much of his life to these skills.

One of these skills is the ability to develop a keen sense for things that cannot be said.

Every Jew has his own inner dilemmas, but everyone shares the universal problem of faith – whether it is faith in God, or in other things.

In matters of faith, anything that can be studied or articulated in words is irrelevant and unhelpful.

If only we had a kind of window that would give us a direct view of God’s glory!

But there is no such window.

What remains is the responsibility to learn to sense, to intuit, that something exists that is beyond our comprehension, beyond the range of man’s ordinary perception, and to learn to relate to it.

We must reach a point where we have, in addition to the vague awareness that such a thing exists, the maturity to understand that there is more to explore on the other side of the curtain, a continuation of our path.

There may be no way to reach it, see it, or explain it, but it is possible to sense what lies on the other side of existence.

Our task, in any form of faith, is to develop an awareness that beyond the place that I know lies a place that I do not know.

If we can accomplish this task, we can truly claim to have experienced even that which “no eye has seen.”

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz