Words Create Worlds

One of my favorite quotes on the power of language comes from the Jewish thinker and philosopher Abraham Heschel.

Heschel is one of those “blow your hair back” kind of writers. Though he lived in the 20th century, in the wake of the horrors of the Halocaust and through the radical cultural revolutions taking place in the 1960’s, Heschel still somehow held on to this belief that the God of the Jewish people could be known through the Word that had been passed down to them.

One of his more influential books is on the Prophets themselves (which of course would have resonated with the era of revolution in the 1960’s when he wrote) - yet Heschel always comes back to this vision of God the prophets captured. It wasn’t so much the social change Heschel wanted. It was the vision of the God who demanded social change from his people in order to realize the created order God had originally made.

So how then does God move and act through the world? What is God’s instrument to bring about the social change God intended?

Well the answer is not quite what you expect. My first instinct would be to focus on the prophets themselves. Those incredible revolutionaries who poured forth their lives for the change they wanted to see. Yet Heschel, soaked in the Hebrew Scripture, offered an alternative explanation in a later work entitled, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, he simply pens,

“Words create worlds.”

Now get this - his daughter Susannah, writing the introduction to the work offered even more context. She notes,

Words, he often wrote, are themselves sacred, God’s tool for creating the universe, and our tools for bringing holiness — or evil — into the world. He used to remind us that the Holocaust did not begin with the building of crematoria, and Hitler did not come to power with tanks and guns; it all began with uttering evil words, with defamation, with language and propaganda. Words create worlds he used to tell me when I was a child. They must be used very carefully. Some words, once having been uttered, gain eternity and can never be withdrawn. The Book of Proverbs reminds us, he wrote, that death and life are in the power of the tongue.

I need this kind of radical picture to help me enter into the wisdom of James. If we can grasp the monumental, revolutionary, world creating power of our words, we can begin to see the stakes. Yet far too often, James and the Bible descend into belittling invectives against gossip or careless social media posts.

We need a bigger vision of the stakes of our worlds if we are to begin to turn the overwhelming tides of violence, hate speech, condescension, and malice that pour forth around us. Perhaps James 3 is where to begin.

With hope,

John