As it is said, "And no man shall see Me and live."
So that as soon as I cross the abyss, I cease to be a human being.
And it is not necessarily a matter of man seeing beings of the angelic order, but rather of growth.
For what is the highest revelation possible to a man?
It is the revelation of his own soul.
And when a man reaches such a supreme revelation of his soul, he ceases to be a man.
Which is again the same paradox.
A person lives by virtue of his soul, but he can never really approach it.
So that we are forever enjoying only the sparks of the great fire and remain fearful to come too close to it.
And if we ever do come too close, we cease to exist.
In this sense, we are always holding on to something, except that this something is so distant, so disconnected, that our expressions are always partial and inadequate.
The other side of the matter is that if we were not created thus, we could never attain, to such a degree of speech, a capacity of even conceiving such thoughts.
The fact that we can even relate to the very essence of faith stems from the fact that we are a part of the Divine.
Our very speech flows from this vital source, but here are also the limitations.
Were we, God forbid, creatures of the Devil (not that we believe there are such creatures, or that there is a Devil—in spite of a lot of credible evidence to the contrary), we would not be able to speak about that which we are conversing.
The little we are able to talk about God is by virtue of the fact that a part of us is of God, even though the rest of us is a creature of God.
Between these two, in this extremely narrow gap, are we bidden to overcome the barrier of our humanity.
–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
From The Sustaining Utterance by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz