A father set out one day to teach his young daughter a powerful lesson. When she woke up in the morning, he took her in front of a mirror and asked her, “What do you see?”
She smiled and answered, “I see myself!”
He then took her to the window, and asked her, “What do you see now?”
“I see houses, and trees, and grass, and a whole world outside,” she said, this time with a sense of wonder and joy in her voice.
That night, before tucking his daughter into bed, the father again brought her to the mirror.
“What do you see?”
“I still see myself,” she answered, a bit confused as to why they were doing this again.
He then took her back to the window. “What do you see now?” he asked.
“I see…me?” she answered, suddenly very confused. “Did the window turn into a mirror?”
“Be patient, stay focused, and keep on staring at the window. What do you see?”
After a long, silent moment, her eyes lit up. “I finally see it! I see houses and trees and the world outside!”
Her father smiled and explained to his daughter: “Sometimes, we get so caught up in our own lives that we think everything in life revolves around us; instead of seeing the true nature of things, we see everything as a mirror of ourselves. As a result, we project our views onto everything we see and everything we hear. Instead, we each need to learn how to peer past the surface, past ourselves, and see the endless beauty, wisdom, and depth that lies beneath that surface. When we do so, we turn the mirror into a window, revealing a world of depth behind it.”
Limitless
Human beings are creative, intelligent, and powerful, but at the same time, we are incredibly limited:
- Our experience of this spectacular physical universe is limited to our five senses.
- We can only be in one place at any given point in time.
- We have limited strength and energy.
- There is a vast, almost infinite world of wisdom that we have no grasp of whatsoever.
But what if this wasn’t the case? Imagine a life beyond the one you currently experience – one with new senses and sensations, new colors added to your field of vision, and new sounds to your range of hearing. What if you had abilities that far surpassed anything you can imagine? Consider a reality in which you had access to all wisdom and could experience and grasp it all instantaneously. It is so difficult to imagine this because it is nearly impossible to think about something that you have never experienced before; just try thinking of a color that doesn’t exist.
Moshe’s Prophecy
The Rambam famously formulates thirteen principles of faith that he believes to be the absolute foundational pillars of Jewish belief, emphasizing that every Jew must believe in these principles. The sixth principle states that all the words of the Neviim are true. The seventh principle specifies that the prophecy of Moshe Rabbeinu is true, and that he was the greatest Navi of all time (Rambam, commentary on Sanhedrin, perek Chelek.). The sixth principle is obviously crucial; the seventh seems redundant. If all of the Neviim’s words were true, of course Moshe’s were true as well. What is so fundamentally important about the superiority of Moshe’s prophecy that the Rambam deemed it necessary to state it as a separate principle of faith?
More broadly, what does it mean that Moshe was the greatest prophet to ever live? Hashem Himself attests to the greatness of Moshe and his unique level of prophecy (Bamidbar 12:6-8). What was so unique about Moshe’s prophecy? We know that Moshe received the Torah from Hashem and brought it down to the Jewish People – a role he seemed uniquely suited for. The Torah itself is even called “Toras Moshe” (Malachi 3:22), indicating an intrinsic tie between Moshe and the Torah. Why was Moshe’s nevuah fundamentally different from all other Neviim who came before and after him?
In order to understand Moshe’s prophecy, we must first develop an understanding of nevuah in general.
The Nature of Prophecy
We live in a world devoid of prophecy. Therefore, attempting to understand it is like trying to understand a human sense by hearing someone describe it to you. However powerfully you can describe sight, it won’t mean much to a person who has been blind from birth. Likewise, a deaf person could read about hearing, but he has no past experience or mental framework in which to place it. Similarly, in a world devoid of prophecy, it becomes exceedingly difficult to understand or even relate to the experience. However, we will try to paint as clear a picture as possible.
Throughout the Middle Ages, there were various attacks against Judaism by secular and non-Jewish philosophers. One area commonly targeted was prophecy, resulting in many Jewish thinkers attempting to clearly describe their understanding of nevuah. While there is variance within their opinions, the basic consensus is as follows: A prophet must be a great tzaddik, spending his or her entire life building to the stage where he is worthy of receiving prophecy, including a mastery of Torah knowledge and commitment to its observance, as well as complete command over one’s middos and intellect. Once he achieves this exalted status, he is capable of receiving prophecy, and Hashem will choose whether or not to grant him prophecy.
The prophetic experience itself was an other-worldly, transcendent experience. Hashem opened and expanded the Navi’s consciousness, allowing him to connect to a higher dimension of existence that lies far beyond the limitations of time, space, and the capacity of the regular human mind. In doing so, the Navi became capable of experiencing lofty ideas and intellectual truths that he would otherwise have no access to. These ideas and truths would then filter down through the Navi’s intellect and get translated by his imaginative faculties, resulting in his unique, subjective experience of these lofty objective truths. In a very deep sense, nevuah was a transcendent, angelic experience of the spiritual world that a Navi experienced while still in this world.
Building off this general understanding of prophecy, we must now ask: What made Moshe’s prophecy unique?
Clarity of Vision
The first unique characteristic of Moshe’s prophecy was his level of clarity (See Rambam’s introduction to perek Chelek. See also Mishneh Torah, Yesodei HaTorah 7:6.) The Gemara explains that while all other prophets saw through a clouded lens, Moshe saw through a clear lens (Yevamos 49b). We all perceive reality through our own unique lens. A tremendously developed and wise person will see the world through a much more sophisticated lens than an immature child. One of them sees many layers of depth behind every aspect of reality, while the other sees nothing more than the surface. One of them looks at the Torah and sees layers of wisdom, while the other looks at the same words and sees meaningless scribbles. As the child matures, he will have the ability to expand his understanding and develop a more sophisticated approach to life.
The same is true regarding prophecy. There were many different levels. As humans, our consciousness is limited in that we only see the physical, not the spiritual. Since prophecy is a window into the spiritual world, the metaphor Chazal uses to describe the quality of the Navi’s vision is an “aspaklaria,” loosely translated as a window, lens, or mirror. The greater the prophet, the clearer his vision and the better his understanding; the lesser the prophet, the more opaque and cloudier his vision and the hazier his understanding. As the Ramchal puts it in Derech Hashem, Moshe saw through a “glass window”; he saw the spiritual world as it is with absolute clarity, while all other Neviim’s vision had some measure of cloudiness. In other words, while other Neviim saw a reflection of the spiritual world and its truths, Moshe saw the spiritual world itself, with no filters.
Rav Dessler beautifully explains that this is why the word “aspaklaria” also means mirror. The prophet’s experience was a reflection of himself, as the prophecy was filtered through his own consciousness. If there is even the slightest degree of ego involved, or the smallest distance between the Navi and Hashem, the prophecy will be blurred accordingly. This is why, as many commentators note, each Navi had their own unique style of writing. Each prophecy was filtered through the Navi’s unique mind and personality and was then shared and written accordingly. The ideas were transmitted completely from Hashem, but they were received according to how they flowed through the Navi’s personal consciousness. (For example, there are different episodes in Nach that describe the Kisei HaKavod, and each description is different. One way to understand this is that they all saw the same prophecy, but each of them received and transmitted it according to their own unique style and level.)
Moshe, however, completely negated his ego. He was a transparent reflection of Hashem, and his nevuah was one-hundred-percent pure. He experienced his prophecy without any translation, filtration, or distortion; he received it exactly as it was given by Hashem. The words Moshe wrote were the actual objective truth, not a filtered or watered-down reflection. Moshe added nothing of himself to Hashem’s words; he was purely the vessel through which Hashem gave the Torah. This is what Chazal mean when they say that “Shechinah medaberes mi’toch grono shel Moshe – [Hashem] spoke from the throat of Moshe” (Ramban, Devarim 5:12). Moshe wasn’t speaking; Hashem was. Moshe simply gave over what Hashem said, as opposed to other Neviim, who received prophecy from Hashem and then expressed it in their own unique way.
As a result, Chumash and the rest of Nach are on two fundamentally different levels. Chumash is absolutely pure and reflects spiritual reality in its most potent and true form. All of spiritual truth is contained within the Torah. The rest of Nach, while still transcendent, is a manifestation of Torah on a lower level, in a more limited form, reflecting the lower level of the Neviim who received and transmitted it. This is why the Gemara teaches the principle that no halacha can be derived from Nach that wasn’t already introduced in the Torah (See, for example, Bava Kama 2b.) Torah is the root, the absolute truth, while Nach is its expression. There is nothing in the expression that cannot be found within the root, just like there is nothing in a tree that can’t be traced back to its original seed. In our next article, we will delve deeper into this fascinating topic and try to Moshe’s unique level of prophecy in a more profound way.
