A Sentence is Completed2 min read

A few minutes ago, I was working on a future book, merrily pounding out words on the keyboard and minding my own business when something suddenly caught my eye. As I typed, I noticed a small creature, so tiny it was barely there at all, scurrying frantically between the keys on my laptop. It is still there now, running to and fro between the uneven grid of letters. It seems scared, frustrated, and lost.

I wonder how this experience must feel from the bug’s perspective, hopelessly trapped by seemingly endless rows of cumbersome blocks towering above it. I’m sure it feels as though it were caught in a maze of meaninglessness, unable to understand why the terrain is ever-shifting, beams of light displacing the shadows as the mountains suddenly sink into the ground only to pop right back up once more. Perhaps it is bitter, cursing the absurdity of this predicament it has been subjected to for no reason at all.

What this insect can’t possibly know is that those “meaningless mountains” are each marked by a symbol of communication called a “letter”. It can’t possibly know that the sinking and rising of what it perceives to be mighty obstacles around it represent the marking of those symbols and their combination with others to form words that convey messages recorded for posterity. The bug can’t possibly understand that the very obstacles so frustratingly and meaninglessly falling and rising all around it are actually recording the experience for the sake of a greater purpose – the communication of a lesson for which it was brought into being in the first place, a message that represents the very premise of its simple existence.

What is the lesson produced by the insect’s struggle caused by my typing these words? That we are all this insect. That the mighty mountains springing up around us throughout our lives – all those fearsome obstacles that mark the confounding maze of the human experience, are produced by Hashem’s stringing together letters and words, sentences and paragraphs, “v’chol maasecha b’sefer nichtavim.” Our struggle is the result of Hashem’s writing about that very struggle, recording our response in realtime for a greater goal, for an ultimate purpose. Indeed, our very existence is validated by those poetic expressions produced by our courage, our fortitude, and our faith that the mountains rising and falling before us along the journey of life are keys on a laptop, that the absurdity of our lives both produces and is ultimately produced by a great book of ultimate lessons we alone must bring forth.

I just checked again and it seems that the insect has escaped the maze. Perhaps it was redeemed – not despite my words but because of them. Perhaps it was freed because it sensed the lesson within the absurdity, the light within the darkness, and meaning within the meaninglessness. Perhaps it escaped because I finished what I had to say.

The sun is setting here, and darkness approaches once more. Another mountain has risen. Another mountain has fallen.

A sentence is completed.