On Attempting to Write of Ineffable Things

4 min readDec 17, 2020

A few years ago, when I was still living in Israel, I met each week with two female friends in what’s called in Hebrew, a chavruta, a pair or small group formed to study Talmud or other Jewish texts on a regular basis.

The experience was a first for me and it was brief, but it provided two now-cherished takeaways. One was my friend Sara, who I first met in the chavruta and who I still learn with informally today via long-distance WhatsApp voice memos, and the second is the word ineffable.

At the time, we were studying a text written by rabbi and Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel. I was, and still am, a little embarrassed to admit that in my late 30s, a professional writer, I had yet to happen upon the word. But as soon as Sara told me its meaning — beyond description, or inexpressible — I fell in love with it.

“To become aware of the ineffable is to part company with words,” Heschel writes. “The tangent to the curve of human experience lies beyond the limits of language. The world of things we perceive is but a veil.”

Isn’t that gorgeous? Since then, I’ve secretly harbored the desire to write the ineffable: to convey to you exactly the fleeting experience of my deja vu, to call to your mind the precise nature of my now-fading dream.

Certainly, poets have more experience with meeting this particular challenge than essayists. And I imagine the draw, for me at least, to lyric essay, is knowing that if I am ever going to write the ineffable, it will be in hybrid form, if it is in form at all.

But, tell me, is it hubris to even try to reach this particular peak?

To attempt to write the ineffable makes me feel a bit like the Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark who were brazen enough to gaze at that which emerged from the Ark of the Covenant, but whose faces melted as a result. Perhaps there are some experiences, some feelings that we should just leave alone; grateful for the awe and moved by the wonder.

I read once that the three main reasons why writers write are to persuade, to inform, or to entertain. What’s blatantly missing from that short list is that at its most basic, to write is to connect with another. To write the ineffable seems to me an attempt at connecting to source, to consciousness, to the divine, to the Inner Voice (capital I, capital V) — and to then be a channel for that energy so it may be shared by another. In other words, to humbly lift the veil.

There are practices for this: automatic writing, stream of consciousness writing, or simple sitting meditation.

What’s worked a bit for me, however, is dream journaling. I find that there’s a certain kind of letting go I allow when I am just beyond a dream, in a stage of sleep officially known as hypnopompia. (The opposite of which is called hypnogogia.)

Originally an attempt to track whether or not my dreams were predicting the future, my almost-daily dream journaling practice has morphed into a useful writing tool. I find I’m less rigid about my language when I am exploring the narrative of a dream, less concerned by how realistic the setting or how likeable the narrator is. Often I find that my dream stories are manifested lyrically as if my pointer finger, twirling in the air like a magic wand, conjures up a scene out of the ether. It was something like … someone similar to …

There is a certain freedom, I find, in the not needing to be precise.