The Fourth Law of Unique Self Encounters

You Never Know

By Marc Gafni

The goal of Unique Self consciousness is to fully receive and be received in
deep understanding and empathy. Yet how often are we simply unable to
understand one another? Receiving each other becomes next to impossible
because of distance, strangeness, hurry, deafness, carelessness, or inevitable
differences in the languages of our Unique Selves. Try as we might, the
Unique Selves of so many people are ultimately unknowable to us–just like
the Unique Self of God.

Are we to give up, or is there a path of receiving what is true even when
you cannot fully grasp the Unique Self of other? And is there a way that an
other can honor you in your Unique Self even if they cannot fully receive
you in understanding and empathy? Is there a way to receive what seems so
unreceivable, whether human or divine? This quandary inspires one of the
more subtle ideas of St. Thomas Aquinas, the medieval writer who did so
much to define Christianity, and of Moses Maimonides, perhaps the most
important Jewish philosopher of the last thousand years.

For theologians like Aquinas and Maimonides and many others past and
present, the very essence of God is God’s incommunicability. According
to these two medieval philosophers, God is unknowable. In the language
of one scholar, “If I knew him, I would be him.” And yet at the same time,
they held that the summum bonum of human existence is to know God.

But how can you know the one who is not knowable? Aquinas and
Maimonides proposed an ingenious solution, which they called via negativa or “the affirmation of not knowing”–that is, we know God in acknowledging
that we do not know God. In the words of one of French writer Edmond
Jabès’s characters, “I know you, Lord, in the measure that I do not know you.”

It is in the same way the Unique Self mystics teach that we receive
another even if we do not know them; the Unique Self encounter takes
place through the affirmation of not knowing.

For years, I thought the “affirmation of not knowing” was a classic example
of irrelevant if clever medieval sophistry. Until on a rare stormy day
in Jerusalem, I made my way through the rain to the small neighborhood
grocer right next to my house to pick up some essentials for my bad-weather
hibernation. A gust of smoke greeted me at the door. The source of the
noxious fumes, I soon found out, was a swarthy-faced middle-aged man,
loitering in my corner store! Shirt open to the chest, large gold necklace and
all, he stood there smoking his 9 a.m. cigar.

Coughing and fanning my way through his smoke, I mumbled to the
grocer my consternation at the torrential rains that had soaked me through
and through, trying to hide my growing annoyance at this obviously
uncouth and obnoxious loiterer.

And then, ever so slowly, the man with the gold necklace turned and
looked at me–I promise–with the gentlest look you could possibly imagine.
All his features suddenly appeared handsome and majestic. The gold
necklace seemed regal, the smoke sweet as an incense offering. “Don’t you
know,” he said, “it’s raining today because a holy man has gone to his world.”

I felt like some gate had swung open inside of me. Something in my
heart just fell open–I just wanted to reach out and hug him for being so
beautiful. It was an epiphany pure and simple.

Only later when I got home and read the paper did I see that one of
Jerusalem’s great mystics had in fact died that morning–the Rebbe of Gur,
a Hasidic master and leader of a thriving community with origins in the
Eastern European town of Gur, a community that had been virtually wiped
out during the Holocaust. This master had slowly, painstakingly, and with
endless love, passion, and daring, rebuilt his community in Israel over the
past forty years. The world felt darker without him.

I had totally misjudged the man at the grocer’s. I thought he was a boor–
coarse and crass, involved only in his immediate needs. However, the shiningbeauty and the subtle and deep knowing on his face as he told me that a holy
man had died let me know how superficial my vision had been. I had assumed
I knew him, and I had not truly known him at all. I had not received him.

“You never know–you never know–you never know.” A Unique Self
encounter is only possible in the felt humility of not knowing. And realizing
that at the end of all knowing is–not knowing.

The temptation to label, categorize, dismiss, or otherwise try to put
another person in a box is the desire for conquest through knowing.
People in boxes threaten us less. Instead, we must seek to receive an other’s
Unique Self, even as we are aware that the other remains mysterious to us,
ultimately unknowable, just like God. We are called to honor the Unique
Self by gently saying to ourselves, “You never know–you never know–you
never know.”