A child is swimming right near a sign that says, “DANGER NO SWIMMING ALLOWED. The lifeguard exclaims, “Good God, child! Can’t you read the sign?” The child responds, “Of course I read the sign, silly. It says, DANGER? NO! SWIMMING ALLOWED!”

Chaim Nahman Bialik said reading a poem in translation is like kissing your bride through her veil. Robert Frost, poetry is all that is lost in translation. On some level… perhaps. In translation we lose much of the cryptic acrostics and secret allusions, the nuance and angels hiding in the latticework of letters, carefully placed there by an artistic hand, the precise science of poetic expression. However, it is also true that every time a poem is read, even in its original language, it is translated by the perspective of the reader. Every time it is set to music it translated. Every time it is breathed upon it is translated anew.

The Torah has no vowels, nor does it have any punctuation. The Hebrew consonants are the clay, like that out of which Adam was formed. The vowels are the breath, like the breath of God that brought the clay to life.

The consonants are all that is corporeal and the vowels are all that is spiritual. There is no Torah, no scripture, no sacred story at all, without the living breath lifting the stagnant letters and sending them soaring through the air like dandelion spores, in search of new places to blossom. The Hebrew prayers in our siddurim, our prayer books, give our service its history and substance, its clay.It is our breath, however, which resurrects the ancient text into the miracle of being.

Perhaps the greatest teaching of the Torah is that it has no punctuation. This way, it can be read in countless directions. Everyone’s perception can be worked from the text. It is disorienting to us because it is a taste of God’s ultimate awareness, comma-less, boundary-less, period-less but not pointless. Sometimes, one may read the Torah and translate it into something harmful, like the child swimming in dangerous waters. Other times, the message is life-affirming and peaceful.

Sometimes we need a momentary glimpse at the ALL to be amazed by the particular. May we merit those moments when dots and dashes fall away, when ego melts, and we stand witness to totality. May we be blessed to encounter, in you and me and tree and everything, the ONE.

“All mankind is one volume. When one man dies, one chapter is torn out of the book and translated into a better language. And every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators. Some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice. But God’s hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to another.” – John Donne