Human Language, Intelligence, and Torah

In my quest to understand the large language models currently spinning our world around, I recalled a discussion on the topic of human language the Rebbe delivered in 1957 and the brilliant way our teacher, Rabbi Yoel Kahan, delivered it to us.

As I reread it and examined the sources provided, it seemed to me that many of today’s most pertinent questions are addressed right here: What is the difference between a machine talking and a human speaking? Can there be intelligence without a soul? What is the relationship between language and intelligence? Can a machine be alive?

I’ve blended some of the source material into the original text, restructured some of the sections, and added explanation where necessary. Otherwise, here are the thoughts of the Rebbe from 70 years ago illuminating our world today:

The Four Voices of Our World

Everything that exists in our world, from the earth beneath your feet to this person who is writing to you now, has a voice. Our world is a spectrum of living things, each a distinct fusion of body and spirit, each with its own voice expressing its inner life in its own way.

That is what it means to have a voice. A voice is a making-accessible of something beyond our grasp. A person’s voice carries their inner world outward. The voice of life carries the inner spirit of our world into tangible forms.

The voice of water, sand and all inert matter is silence. They speak by existing, by being that which they are, and by allowing external forces to work upon them in the way those forces work.

The voice of fungi, plants, trees and all vegetation is growth.

The voice of insects, fish, reptiles, birds, and all animals is their livingness.

And the voice of the human being is the sharing of language.

These four domains reflect the underlying structure of reality known as the four worlds. These, in turn, reflect the four letters of the divine name.

And since, as the Zohar says, “G‑d looked into the Torah and created the world,” those same four levels are woven into Torah itself.

Marriage, Torah, and the Giving of Self

And yet, as the sages note, Torah enters our world with not four, but five voices:1

“It came to pass on the third day when it was morning, that there were kolot and lightning flashes, and a thick cloud was upon the mountain, and a very powerful kol of a shofar …

The kol of the shofar grew increasingly stronger; Moses would speak and G‑d would answer him with a kol.”2

A kol is a loud sound or voice. Kolot is plural, meaning at least two voices. With the other three instances of kol, that makes five.

A wedding, as well, the sages point out, has five voices. Jeremiah names them: the kol of joy, the kol of gladness, the kol of the groom, the kol of the bride, and the kol of those who sing in thanksgiving to G‑d.3

Why do Torah and marriage share the number five? Because they are both intimate relationships—not a transaction of goods or a giving of information, but a giving of one’s very self. As the bride and groom give one another their innermost self, so too, in every teaching and every mitzvah of the Torah, G‑d provides us His very self.

And that is the fifth voice—that sharing of the innermost self.

There are many ways to attempt to understand this sharing, this voice from the innermost. One way is to examine more closely the four voices of existence. Then we can better understand the voice from beyond existence that Torah carries, the inner voice of the Creator’s essential self.

The Silent World of the Stone

The sharpest divide in all of nature is between a stone and a blade of grass.

A plant, an animal, and a human all tell you that they are alive. The domem stands completely alone. A stone’s voice tells you nothing but that it is here and it is a stone. Whatever spiritual dimension it possesses it keeps to itself.

The classic work of Lurianic Kabbalah, Eitz Chaim, tells us that the stone has its own spiritual force, a kind of soul.4 It has a nefesh hamarkevet—a soul that bonds together the fundamental elements to form this particular stone, drop of water, or breath of air.

If that soul were to be removed for but the slightest moment, those fundamental elements would return to their primal state, as mere potentials in the Creator’s mind. Not even a memory would be left of the object they had combined to form. It would be as though it never was.

But that’s all the soul of this stone provides: to be this moment what it was the moment before. Whatever change occurs comes from without, not from its voice within.

A plant, on the other hand, has a soul that leaves its past behind, extending and expanding itself over greater territory, each day reaching beyond its yesterday. The inner life of which the stone is silent and passive, the plant speaks out loud and clear.

And yet, when we further generalize the four categories into two groups, the plant is lumped together with the stone—and the animal with the human. Indeed, before the Flood, humans were forbidden to eat meat, yet plant food was permissible.5

What is it that categorically separates animals and humans from plants?

Plants and Animals

The Hebrew category of plants, tzome'ach, means “a growing thing,” not “a living thing.”

Hold a carrot in one hand and a rabbit in the other. The carrot is an orange stick. You know it's alive because if you stick this stick in the ground, this stick will become more stick. The carrot is a thing that has life—life in service of a stick. That’s all its voice reveals: “There should be more of what I am.”

But when you hold the rabbit, you hold life itself. You feel its warmth, its heart beating, its mouth nibbling, its struggle to get away.

The rabbit has a nefesh—a soul—in the full meaning of the word: It is its own agent. It has its own express will. It wants things. It is driven by its desires, its pleasures, its own volition.

Yes, it responds to the many factors of its environment, but not like that stone or (in lesser part) the carrot. It moves, it eats, it reproduces not because some external factor caused it to do so, but because it decided to. In its every activity, it says, “Life begins here.”

The voice of life rings so clear within the rabbit, even its body resonates, transcends its physicality and becomes life. When you hold the rabbit, you hold not a body containing life, but life embodied.

That’s why the carrot stick is stuck to a specific place. Uproot it and what made it a plant is lost—it withers and dies. Because the carrot’s life is all about the physical. Physicality is defined and bounded by place.

But the rabbit is certainly not stuck anywhere. That’s an expression of genuine life—the transcendence of the limitations of physical space.

Self-Transcendence

To be truly alive is to transcend the limitations of this moment now. The plant transcends form. The animal transcends space. Each rung up this ladder provides a whole new meaning to transcendence.

There’s Yiddish word for that: oisgetonenkeit—from the verb ois-ton so, to undress or divest. It means to perpetually shed your definition, never settling into a fixed and final form. In English, we might use “self-transcendence.”

Physicality is the opposite of oisgetonenkeit. A physical thing has edges, boundaries, location. It's stuck wherever it's been put. It's so stuck there that it cannot allow anything else to occupy the same space. That's the defining characteristic of a physical thing: exclusion. The voice of a physical thing says, “Where I am, you cannot be.”

Spiritual reality is the opposite. True, a spiritual thing must have some character that distinguishes it from other spiritual things—but within that, it transcends itself.

Think of emotions in the heart, or concepts in the mind—both quite metaphysical. They don’t hold rigidly to their form. They don’t exclude. Many opposite emotions can reside in a single heart. The more refined and subtle a concept, the more readily it coexists with other concepts, the less it pushes back against what is different from it.

Then there’s another way self-transcendence expresses itself: A spiritual thing is naturally drawn toward that which is higher than itself—toward its own origin.

That’s why we often compare spirit to fire. Fire is the most rarified of the four elements—fire, wind, water, and earth—and so it perpetually strains upward. So too it is the nature of the spiritual to perpetually shed its present form and merge into higher, more primal realities.

The Speaking Being

This capacity for oisgetonenkeit reaches a whole new level within the human being. The human mind is a self-transcendent mind. And what’s behind that transcendence is not our capacity to think, but our capacity for language.

Animals, after all, also have minds—just as they have senses and emotions. Many can perform cognitive tasks no human can begin to perform. But the animal, with all its will, agency, and cognition, is locked within its own nature.

Your human brain, on the other hand, allows you to jailbreak your own instincts. You can act against your inclinations, override your habits, even override your nature—and sometimes eventually change it. As a human, you’re not confined to any single mode of being.

That’s one reason why the human being is called “a small world”: Each of us contains all possibilities of the world within ourselves, because we aren’t defined or bound to any of them.

And in the human mind’s search for transcendence, we are naturally drawn toward what is higher and greater than ourselves. “The spirit of man,” wrote Solomon the Wise, “ascends upward”—toward what is deeper, truer, more infinite than what is here and now, like a fire incessantly reaching towards the heavens.

What does our capacity for language have to do with our capacity to transcend ourselves? To get that, we’ll have to retrace all these four categories of nature as they exist within the human being.

The Four Realms Within the Human Soul

That’s another way the human being is a small world: Everything found in the world at large is found within us—both in our bodies and in our souls. The same four categories that structure the external world form the underlying structure of the human psyche.

A key word here is the Hebrew word, otiot—usually translated as “letters.” In Chabad thought, however, it means much more than that. Otiot are condensed energy-packets that emerge from the core of the soul like photons from an atom, articulating an inner realm to a more outward one. Or you might think of otiot as the intergalactic spaceships of the soul, transporting information from one world to the next.

Those articulations, according to the Kabbalists, come in 22 forms. They are best represented by the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the sounds you make when you read them aloud, or the way you articulate these thoughts in your mind. The articulations of music are sometimes called otiot as well.

Each person has their otiot, their distinct way of expressing themselves, but in general, we all share the same otiot. They are the otiot by which this universe was created, by which it is sustained at every moment, and that dictate its fundamental parameters.

Otiot are domem—they are inherently silent. You need otiot to speak, but the otiot themselves have no voice—like rocks.

If you’re hearing a person’s words, that’s evidence that you’re not getting their meaning. The words are meant to be lucid containers. Good containers say nothing about themselves—they only present their contents, just as a faithful messenger delivers the message without commentary or embellishment.

Even the presence of self is absent in them. In your emotions, we can feel you, who you are, what sort of person you are. But your words are detached from you entirely, a kind of neutral channel. They’re shared tools, common to all who speak the same language, and at a more fundamental level, common to all speaking humans everywhere.

Just like the chasm between rocks and plants, so too between otiot and emotions. Emotions are where the human voice begins to be heard.

Emotions and the Mind

Emotions are unmistakably alive. They grow from infancy to maturity. They are in constant flux, like a lush garden at the fork of a stream.

And yet, the voice of emotions is not a true, inner voice. Like plants, emotions are “things that grow,” rather than “living things.” In a certain way, emotions are far closer to otiot than to intellect, just as plants and domem get lumped on the other side of the hill from animals and humans.

The very word for emotion—hitpa’alut—means to be affected, moved, excited by some external force. Like a rock that has been kicked or waves of water stirred up by the wind, emotions are always a response to something outside of you. Love is love of something. Awe is awe of something. Your soul in emotion is your soul oriented outward—toward the other. It is not you within yourself.

Not so your mind. Your mind works from within. You remain composed, settled within yourself. You surmise the situation, but rather than it dictating how you must be, you determine what it should become. Your emotions say, “This is what is.” Your mind says, “What is this? Why is it like this? How should it be?”

So that when your mind chews the matter over and comes to a conclusion, it is your decision. All of you is engaged in carrying it out. When your emotions decide for you, you will likely have regrets by the morning, but a decision well thought out doesn’t change so fast. As the rabbit’s body is pure life, so the thinking person’s decisions engage all of him through and through.

And, like plants, emotions are rooted and fixed in their place. If you are a loving person by nature, you will always move within the orbit of love. Your love may grow from small to great, but it remains love. If you’re a person of restriction and restraint, then that’s your orbit. Until some mighty, cognitive shifts come around, emotions cannot on their own break free of gravitational fields that define them.

The mind knows no such confines. A person can understand—genuinely understand—a position entirely contrary to his rational nature. More than that: If you can tap into the true essence of your mind, that place that is entirely beyond emotion, you can reach back down and reshape your emotions, altering their very character and direction.

Your mind is your human animal, a creature that works from the inward out, molding itself and its environment to align with its demands, capable of escaping its boundaries, free to move wherever it desires to be. Your mind is what makes you a living being, not just a thing that has life.

Language: The Human Within the Human

Yet, for all its self-transcendence, intellect is only the beast of the soul. If you want to get down to the essence of the human being, our true oisgetonenkeit, it’s found in our capacity for language. That’s why the human being is called medaber—the speaking being—not maskil, the understanding being.

We are not parrots that have been taught language. Language emerges from our very essence and being. When Genesis says, “G‑d blew into his nostrils the breath of life and Adam became a living being,” the classic, ancient translation of Onkelos reads that as “and Adam became a speaking spirit.”

Otiot emerge from us, and otiot are the only way that a human can think as a human. Without them, we have no consciousness——we cannot know what we know. In the language of Kabbalah, otiot transport light from wisdom to understanding. Without otiot, there is no wisdom, no abstraction, no categories, no generalization——none of those amazing feats of the human mind that allow us to traverse space and time.

And yet, these otiot, this capacity for intergalactic transport, originates in some place beyond the mind. For this capacity escapes the self in a way that the mind cannot.

True, intellect can override instinct and choose a path contrary to its own nature. And it strains upward, recognizing things beyond its own grasp—not just gaps in its knowledge, but things that are fundamentally beyond the reach of understanding altogether. Our mind tells us that there is something beyond mind.

But notice what’s happening in both cases. When your mind overrides instinct, it does so because this is what your understanding of the situation demands. When your mind reaches beyond itself, it does so because your mind has recognized that this is something even better, even higher than itself. The self is still the one doing the reaching—and you’re still stuck inside that self. As they say, you can’t pull yourself up by tugging at your own hair.

Language is something else entirely. The urge to speak with another and the capacity to do so draws from a place in the soul that precedes all self-definition—a place so deep that the distinction between self and other hasn’t yet formed. At that root, the person isn’t reaching across a divide to connect with someone else. There is no divide. Humanity, at that level, is a single being speaking with itself.

True, each language has its own alphabet, its own set of sounds, and its own vocabulary that expresses meanings impossible to translate into other languages. Nevertheless, the fundamental syntax of language is shared across humanity. We all share the same fundamental otiot because we are all fundamentally the same human being emerging out of the same universe and the same Creator. And those otiot by which heaven and earth were made are the otiot, with their inherent syntax and semantics, that emerge out of us.

Without language, we are locked within ourselves, our own thoughts, perceptions, and sensations. With language, we enter the shared space of humanity, where my mind is thinking your thoughts and your mind is imagining how I think your thoughts. Indeed, no human being ever thinks alone—whenever you think, the words and voices of thousands of other human beings converse in your mind.

This is why the root of the capacity for language surpasses intellect. In intellect, self-transcendence is something the self does. In language, the self opens into a space where it was never enclosed to begin with.

The Four Worlds

Everything we’ve traced so far—the four categories of nature, the four levels of the rational soul—reflects a single underlying structure that runs through all of reality. That same structure appears in what Kabbalistic thought calls the four worlds.

The four worlds are four coexisting planes of reality, nested within one another, each one a different depth of existence. We inhabit the outermost plane—the world of Assiyah, the world of action—the most defined, concrete level of reality. Above it, and within it, are Yetzirah (Formation), Beriyah (Creation), and Atzilut (Emanation), each one progressively less defined, more interior, closer to the divine source.

Assiyah and Yetzirah correspond to domem and tzome'ach—worlds of defined, concrete form. In Assiyah that form is specific and particular; in Yetzirah it is more general, but form is still the dominant reality. Both are worlds of things, so to speak—existence that presents itself as a solid, bounded something, like the rock and the carrot.

Beriyah is the first point at which somethingness emerges from the void. But divine light shines through so powerfully that this somethingness is lost within something so much greater than itself that it loses all independent significance. If you were a being of the world of Beriyah, you would sense that you only exist because something is causing you to exist.

That’s what makes Beriyah the world of intellect. Like intellect, straining upward beyond itself, Beriyah exists in a state of perpetual self-transcendence.

Atzilut is something else altogether. It is not a created world at all. It is pure, condensed divine light—pure nothingness, no assertion of existence whatsoever. This corresponds to the capacity for language in the soul: Not a self reaching beyond itself, but a place where the self was never enclosed to begin with.

And yet even Atzilut, for all that it is divine, is still, in some sense, a something. It is, after all, a world. Which means that even the four letters of the divine name—which are the source of these four worlds—do not yet reach the absolute simplicity of the infinite light. That is what the fifth voice carries.

The Fifth Level: Beyond All Definition

We’ve traced a single four-level structure running consistently through nature, through the soul, and through the four worlds—all of it rooted in the four letters of the divine name, which is the generative source of all four worlds and everything that flows from them.

But even the four letters of the divine name, for all their transcendence, still carry some trace of defined existence. Even the yud—the highest and innermost of the four letters—still has a form. The four letters do not yet reach the absolute transcendence —the oisgetonenkeit--of the infinite light, of G‑d as He is in Himself, prior to all name and definition.

That’s what the fifth voice of Torah transmits. The essence of Torah is united with the essence and absolute transcendence of the infinite light, prior to all worlds, all names, and all definition.

Although there’s nothing in nature corresponding to this quintessence—indeed, not even anything within the divine name—there is a corresponding level of the human soul: yechidah.

Yechidah means “singular.” There's a difference between something singular and something that is one. Many things can blend together to become one. They may even fuse to become a perfect whole—such as subatomic particles forming an atom. But a singularity is not a union of parts. A singularity implies that there were never any parts to begin with.

That is yechidah: That level of the soul that does not need to bond with the divine because it never left. It never became a separate entity to begin with, and as far as yechidah is concerned, there is not and never was anything other than G‑d.

Now apply that same model to the voice of language in Torah and Torah’s fifth voice, the quintessence-voice:

The faculty of language is a voice of oneness. Language, in particular Torah language, brings self and other together on common ground. You and I are separate individuals, but when we speak Torah together that separateness dissolves—because on this level, we are all expressions of the one true existence we call G‑d. Like rays of sunlight within the sun, our distinctions become inconsequential within our shared origin.

But the fifth, essence-voice of Torah goes further still. At this level, there is no self to become insignificant. Existence has yet to occur, and there is no reason it should.

This is where the parallel with marriage holds all the way down, and why it is so apt a parallel for Torah:

The generative power of marriage is potentially infinite. There is no ceiling on the number of generations that can emerge from a single union. A couple brings children into the world; those children bring grandchildren; those grandchildren bring great-grandchildren—without end, in principle, forever. Each generation is genuinely new, genuinely distinct, genuinely its own. And yet all of it flows from a single act of two becoming one.

That unboundedness—the capacity of a single union to generate an endless chain of new existence—is not a finite power. It is the entry of the essence, of the absolute transcendence of the infinite light, into the most intimate and mundane detail of created life. A defined, bounded force could not generate endlessly. Only something that draws from beyond all definition can do that.

The Whole Point

If Torah’s fifth voice transmits the ultimate essence of all things, beyond all worlds, all names, all definition, why was Torah given with all five voices? Why bring that fifth, utterly boundless dimension down into the same transmission as the other four?

Because bringing down is precisely the point. That was what the event at Mount Sinai is all about: Bringing the very essence of the divine down to earth.

Before the Torah was given on Mount Sinai, there was a decree in place, one built into the very structure of existence. The Midrash describes it with a parable:

A king declared that the citizens of Rome may not descend to Syria, and the citizens of Syria may not ascend to Rome. So too, G‑d decreed: “The heavens belong to G‑d, and the earth was given to humankind.”6 Neither could reach into the other. But when G‑d gave the Torah, He annulled that decree. The lower shall ascend to the upper, and the upper shall descend to the lower.7

The five voices heard at Sinai are that annulment. The four lower voices draw the four levels of the soul each upward toward their corresponding origin in the four worlds and in the four levels of Torah. The fifth voice draws yechidah, the quintessence of the human soul, and through it the essence of G‑d Himself, all the way down into all those four levels of soul, Torah, and world.

In each teaching and every mitzvah of Torah, the absolute transcendence of the infinite light—that which precedes all existence, all definition, all worlds—illuminates every layer of the human being. And through the human being, every corner of the created world.

The first port of entry is the human capacity for language—which is why the study of Torah must be through the spoken word, aloud, for all to hear. We have to leave ourselves behind and enter into the common shared space where all Israel is one every time we learn Torah, so that this transcendent light has a portal to enter.

From there, the Torah must enter your mind, and from your mind, your heart, and from your heart it must emerge as action here in our world. So that the boundless should shine through the bounded, the most transcendent in the most concrete, the highest in the lowest, and the decree separating heaven and earth should remain permanently annulled, not just at Sinai, but in the entire world for all time.

Sources:

Likutei Sichot, Vol. 6, pg. 107 (Yitro 1)

Torat Menachem, Hitvaduyot, vol. 19, pg. 226 (Metzora 5717)

Torat Menachem, Maamarim (Shavuot 5713 Anochi)