Fighting Chaos with Words

Some of the most familiar words resounding through our common and almost universal consciousness are “And the earth was void and a chaos….” (Genesis 1:2). Sigmund Freud, like many before him, realized that certain stories are multi-dimensional — at one level they may use what sounds like literal descriptions, but at the same time, they wish to describe something universal, timeless, and worthy of constant consideration.

Such are these words, which on one dimension aim to provide us with a cosmogony — a description of the cosmos’ creation, but which in a different dimension aim to describe the universal human condition.

Most of us spend a great deal of our lives ignoring, even fighting the observation that at the heart of all existence lies a chaotic void. Our inner core is not the ordered, controlled reality we like to project outwards. There are so many moments where things are not going as planned and it is as if like has met like and the external failure opens up a channel for our inner chaotic core to identify with the chaos on the outside. The result is anger, frustration, error, and all the characteristic qualities of the person out of control that we so powerfully try to avoid. The truth though is that this chaos is constantly threatening to overwhelm the safeguards we have put in place to contain it. It is constantly lurking in the shadows. We fear it, because it reveals a part of us that we would rather forget exists, that we find hard to admit is so basic to our existence.

Peterson usually describes the chaos as external to our selves, but that is merely an artefact of the fact that he is “discovering” the chaos through myths that picture it as the likes of a fire-breathing dragon a hero must vanquish. The fact of the matter is that the greatest chaos is to be found inside our selves.

The rabbinic sages say something amazing about this chaos — that it is not a topic to be discussed. They do not claim that it does not exist, rather that it lends no one very much honor or benefit to do anything more than passively acknowledge its existence. In their special style they write, “If these words were not said by the Bible itself, they could not [should not] be spoken.” They add a parable to explain why these words are in a sense better left unsaid. “There was a king who built his palace on a marsh that was filled with a foul stench. When a visitor has an audience with the king, if he is wise he commends the king for palace’s architectural beauty. If he is a fool, he reminds the king that all this beauty is sitting on top of a dung heap.”

But, how can this be done? What is the secret remedy that can take us beyond the darkness of our inner chaos and push us in a productive direction?

The Bible’s third verse provides the incredibly universal answer: “God said, ‘Let there be light!’ and there was light.” To create light, hope, direction, one must begin to speak. “God said.” Every spoken word has the potential to be an act of creativity. Words take the chaos and order it. That is what we do when we talk to others. When we write out our thoughts. We are adding order to the system, slowly and surely transforming the darkness of chaos into the light of healing words.

Indeed, many words are spoken and many have discovered that words are necessary to heal the soul, to build stability, to strengthen hope. One might say that all psychological therapy is based on the notion that we need to express, we need to find words, be they literal of figurative with which to illuminate the darkness of our inner chaos. But, says the prophet Amos in a seminal passage:

Behold, days are coming, says the Lord God, and I will send a famine in the land, not a famine for bread, nor a thirst for water, but for hearing the words of the Lord. And people shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it” (Amos 8:11–12).

It is the role of the Torah taught to all peoples of the world to provide the truly illuminating language that can replace chaos with structure and death with life.

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