When I was young, my dad used to tell us stories. The stories always involved two young children, a girl and a boy, adventurous analogues for my brother and me, who would be sent off by their parents to undertake great adventure. When the going got rough and the children couldn’t go on, they would call out to a dragon for help. There was only one way to summon the dragon, by his name. The children would muster all their strength and call out: “Shlabump! Shlabump! Shlabump!”

The children were cautioned to only invoke the dragon when truly necessary. The word, the name, carried the power to summon the dragon, to introduce new possibilities into the world. The word itself bore inside it a sense of salvation, possibility, accompaniment.

In semiotics, the study of language and meaning, the name, “Shlabump” is a sign, a building block that is coded by the speaker with meaning and decoded by the receiver. In this sense, as the children cried out from the woods, the sign, “Shlabump,” was coded up with a tangle of meanings.

Who knows what Shlabump decoded when he heard his name? Possibly, he heard desperation, or the joy of being needed, or the terror and necessity of living bravely. There was a covenantal relationship that existed between the two parties, as each time the sign was spoken, Shlabump appeared.

The Ba’al Shem Tov understood semiotics; he understood the power of words and spoke about this power beautifully. In a teaching attributed to the Besht by Rav Yaakov Yosef, he is said to have said, “Every word is a microcosm containing the entire world.”

Every word is alive, in other words, teeming with possible meanings. It is up to the speaker to unite herself with her intended meanings, in an act of dveikut, to elevate these signs, these building blocks, into harmony with their meaning. Or, as the Besht taught, “Every word contains the entire human-cosmic structure, and all of one’s efforts must be placed into each word. And if one does not do so, it is as if the body is missing a limb.”

There’s a story of the shepherd boy who cried wolf. The boy cried, “Wolf!” not with the intention that the hearers assumed, but rather to get attention. Day after day, the boy would cry, “Wolf!” and the townspeople would come running, ready to save the boy’s flock from the mouth of the wolves. Every day, they would find the boy, doubled over with laughter, delighted that he had succeeded at drawing such a crowd with the simple utterance of a word.

One day though, as I’m sure you know, the boy was grazing his flock on the edge of town and found himself face to face with a hungry wolf. The boy cried, “Wolf!” and no one came. The boy cried, “Wolf!” again and nothing. The boy’s flock was destroyed, devoured by the wolf. The word had lost its meaning, lost its ability to awaken in the hearer the intended meaning of the speaker.

There is one word, however, that we are taught never loses its meaning. The ineffable name of G-d is held up as a word that is unchangeable and bears such profound power within it that, even when the ink that wrote it is dissolved in water, the force of the name is imbued in the water itself. We are taught that even the uttering of the name in air with the right kavannah has the power to bring crowds of people to their knees, even to kill.

What of the way we speak of each other? How do the ways that we speak of each other build reality, shape our sense of ourselves, of each other? How do words like “beloved,” “achi,” or “teacher,” shape the way we understand ourselves, our relationship to those around us? Depending on our experiences, depending on our perception of our standing in relationship with others, we receive those words, we build our realities on those words, our futures. Words function to undergird our whole lives and we use them, we misuse them, we lose them every day.

In a fascinating article detailing the state of affairs in post-industrial America, I found that in 1930, the average American 10-year old had a 25,000 word vocabulary; by 1990, this had been reduced to 10,000. This linguistic degradation of expression makes it difficult to speak poetically, to speak about our lives, to imagine new futures. Our range of building blocks is disappearing; what tremendous responsibility then, for those words still active, still alive for us.

In the last weeks, as Israel and Palestine clashed and communities globally reeled with pain and confusion and despair, I was struck by the use of words. Combing Facebook and Twitter, two wellsprings of communication, I was pained by the frequency of use of words of division and enmity, of profound distrust.

What happens when I call a person my enemy? What happens when I call a person evil? I felt like the discourse itself degraded the conversation, upped the temperature, deepened the gulf. Words became weapons, became fences. Words calcified, fell like stones.

Take a moment. Take some time to reflect on these last weeks. How did you experience words during the conflict? What words lost their meaning during those weeks? What words wounded, what words worked to heal?

In a few days, it will be Chanukah, a holiday where for eight days, we bring light into a dark time and celebrate the rededication, the re-sanctification of space. What was profane becomes holy, what was in shambles is reconstituted. If we understand words as building blocks, what words can we rededicate this holiday, what words can we make whole, reconnect with its universe of meaning?

Image attribution: Photograph by Isaac Wong 惡德神父, via Wikimedia Commons.