Walt Whitman, addressing ‘Workmen and Workwomen’, has this to say about sacred texts:
We consider bibles and religions divine—I do not say they are not divine,
I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still,
It is not they who give the life, it is you who give the life,
Leaves are not more shed from the trees, or trees from the earth,
than they are shed out of you.— Whitman, ‘A Song for Occupations’
Turning signs return as the leaves to the earth, as scriptures to their trees of life. It takes the whole bodymind, living the time, to read a scripture and be author of its meaning (its interpretant).
The connection between the body and the letter of scripture was vividly expressed by the adepts of Kabbalah. Since each letter in the sacred Hebrew alphabet is co-ordinated to a special member of the body, according to the Yetsirah, Abulafia warned against moving a consonant or vowel from its position (in the practice of combining the letters), because that could tear a member out of its place and cripple the reader (Scholem 1946, 138).
Scholem (1960, 65) quotes Isaac Luria:
… there are 600,000 aspects and meanings in the Torah. According to each one of these ways of explaining the Torah, the root of a soul has been fashioned in Israel. In the Messianic age, every single man in Israel will read the Torah in accordance with the meaning peculiar to his root. And thus also is the Torah understood in Paradise.
And Scholem continues:
This mystical idea that each individual soul has its own peculiar way of understanding the Torah was stressed by Moses Cordovero of Safed (d. 1570). He said that each of these 600,000 holy souls has its own special portion of the Torah, ‘and to none other than he, whose soul springs from thence, will it be given to understand it in this special and individual way that is reserved to him.’
Matt (1995, 160) quotes Cordovero to the same effect: ‘Faithfully God will make you aware of aspects of the divine Torah that no one else has yet attained. For each soul has a unique portion in the Torah.’
And, if a reading is deep enough, even of a single verse, Paradise is here now. Scholem (1960, 76) quotes H.J.D. Azulai:
When a man utters words of the Torah, he never ceases to create spiritual potencies and new lights, which issue like medicines from ever new combinations of the elements and consonants. If therefore he spends the whole day reading just this one verse, he attains eternal beatitude, for at all times, indeed, in every moment, the composition changes in accordance with the condition and rank of this moment, and in accordance with the names that flare up within him at this moment.
All this is possible because we can dip into the implicit intricacy in reading, just as we can in the writing process as intimated by Eugene Gendlin:
The words retrieve themselves from their old schemes—by coming. What is this coming? How do the right words ….. come?
We don’t control this coming. If words don’t come, we have to wait for them. … It is bodily—not so different from how hunger, sexual appetite, emotions, tears, and sleep must come; we can’t just will those either. … The new working of a word retrieves it from the schemes it brings. So also does the word ‘retrieve’ retrieve itself from earlier uses.
— Gendlin (1992a, 56, 58)
Gendlin’s retrieval is a semiotic redemption, and a resurrection of the body.