By Rabbi Mattis Kantor

It makes sense that somehow, somewhere, this purpose is, was, can be, communicated to man.

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If archaeologists were to find a rock engraved with a description of a grand battle between two kings and their armies 3,500 years ago, we would assume that such an event occurred.

The description could have been the fanciful dream of an opium smoker, but how are we to know?

If historians had other clues or related information about this battle, the rock-carving would take on an air of validity.

If a similar description is found elsewhere hundreds of miles away, it would become historic fact.

Imagine, though, that there were hundreds, no, thousands, of families who owned rock-carved inscriptions, in all parts of the world, each describing the battle exactly the same way. This would certainly become a valid historic fact ascribed to that time.

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Such a document actually exists. The Torah.

It has been all over the world, among Jews who have not communicated for centuries.

Each Torah is exactly the same as the other, thousands of miles away.

It even describes the Jewish people then as being disgruntled and dissenting.

Two million dissenting people (600,000 of army age) saw the revelation at Sinai described in the Torah. Yet there is no dissenting version.

Only one Torah.

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"Moses was there (on Mount Sinai) with G-d forty days and forty nights; bread he did not eat and water he did not drink" (Exodus 34:28).

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Imagine you are sitting with other people, trying to solve a problem. Each one thinking on his own.

Suddenly you have the answer.

You jump up and exclaim, "I have it! I have it!"

"What is it? What is it?" everyone asks.

"Sh! Sh!..."

You brush them off. You push them out of your mind. You don't want to talk. You just close your eyes and signal with your hands for them not to disturb you.

But you had the answer, didn't you? How can they disturb you by asking you to tell it to them?

Yet you can't. You know that you have the answer, but you can't (yet) explain it to anyone. You have to think about it. You don't even know yourself how it answers the question.

All you know is that you have the answer, and if those people don't stop bothering you, you'll forget it.

Forget it? Why? How?

Because the answer is still too abstract to be fully understood by the conscious mind.

It is like a bolt of lightning-a bright intense flash that can disappear if not given the proper attention.

(No wonder an idea is symbolized by a flashing light bulb.)

Yet in this small point, ray, or flash of intellectual concept lies the answer to the problem at hand -- that is certain. You can feel it.

How it will answer the problem is not yet consciously known, but what is certain, at this stage, is that this is the answer.

Given the undisturbed time to contemplate this bright and flashing idea, we can relate it to the problem at hand; the details soon begin to emerge, but the brightness and the sheer thrill and delight begins to dissipate.

We are now using our intellectual faculty to comprehend, and it is a different intellectual experience.

First we conceive of the new idea, and then we understand what it was that we conceived, how that bright conceptual flash relates to this problem. We can also relate it, with our comprehension, to another problem, and another and another, even though it may take opposing positions in different problems.

Many questions can be answered, many problems solved, and many theories may evolve from one such conceptual flash.

It is only that the details of all this intellectual content were completely outshone by the brilliance of the initial concept. But they were there -- in a pure and intangible form. Everything, including the specific word choices we later use to articulate these details, is included within, and dictated by, the initial flash of illumination.

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All knowledge, be it mathematics, philosophy, physics, psychology, geology, or anatomy, comes from one perfectly pure and abstract, inconceivably intense and bright, inhumanly all-encompassing and self-complete, spark of conceptual light.

No human can reach this spark of all-truths on his or her own -- that is, it cannot be fully grasped by anyone's intellectual faculties.

If one idea, in one subject, related to a specific area in that field, can be, for us humans, an intense and thrilling experience to the extent that we may forget our surroundings, how is it possible for a human to accept in his size six, seven, or eight head a single concept that holds in it all existing (past, present, and future) knowledge?

It is humanly impossible.

But this was given to Moses at Mount Sinai.

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You’ve heard of the absent-minded professor who misses his train stop, forgets where he parked his car, loses his coat, forgets to eat lunch, etc. because he is deeply involved in thinking.

He was so immersed in the solution of a mathematical problem when he was taking his coat off that he forgot where he took it off.

A new idea occurred to him half an hour before he was due for lunch, and he didn't realize that two hours had passed while he was theorizing.

Yes, the absent-minded professor is very familiar to us because we see him in ourselves so very often.

When we are struck by the lightning of intellectual conception, we can become so absorbed as to forget our surroundings.

The brilliance of conceptual inspiration can give us a new surge of physical energy, even when we are most tired and hungry. Time, in such instances, passes by unnoticed.

Imagine, then, that a man conceived the most pure and sophisticated concept, that one all-encompassing concept, the spark of all truths.

Surely this would be the experience of experiences, an abnegation of the physical, for the physical cannot receive it, but if it were given to him, it would be the supreme inspiration.

Time would not exist for the duration of that experience. Food and physical matters would not enter his mind. The inspirational surge would provide more than enough energy for life.

It could take days of a continuous trance for a person to accept this pure flash of knowledge, but after it was over, it could be recalled as a split-second-experience that had not drained him of either time or energy.

So it was with Moses.

Had we been there to ask him why he was on the mountain so long, he may have replied, "Long? I was only there for a few seconds!"

Excerpted from "Chassidic Insights: A Guide for the Entangled" by Rabbi Mattis Kantor