About five years ago I officially left my tenured position in Hebrew linguistics at one Israeli university mainly because my awakening from the illusions of the ego gradually dissolved my interest in language as I had known it.
One of these illusions directly concerns language. Many people, including myself until this awakening, habitually label everyone and everything conceptually. Much of what passes for depth in academic research in the humanities is, in truth, a dance of labels detached from lived experience. This becomes especially problematic if you try to conceptualize what you've never experienced directly, for example, defining Hasidism without experiencing it as life wisdom.
In our daily life labeling is automatic, thus unconscious. Many people are also programmed to equate knowing with labeling, but fail to distinguish knowing someone or something from knowing about them. Labeling someone or something prevents us from knowing them.
Language is supposed to serve us, but if we are obsessed with labeling, we end up serving language. In this sense it limits us, or to use a harsher language, it subjugates our mind. Imprisonment is said to be at its best when prisoners are unaware that they are imprisoned. Imprisonment can be not only physical but also mental.
Yet this isn’t the whole story. Through my work as a Jewish life coach I've come to realize that language can also expand our mind by giving clarity to what was vague when we verbalize our direct experiences. This is the opposite effect of labeling what we haven't experienced directly.
Most of my clients, it turned out, had never been taught how to put their experience into words, so they had a very hard time when I asked them to do so as part of my Jewish life coaching. I had to be flexible enough to break one of the rules of coaching by verbalizing their direct experiences.
Every time I did this, I saw how their faces lit up with such excitement and joy as if they were trapped in darkness and saw light for the first time. This never failed to move me deeply in turn. In this case language apparently serves us instead of subjugating us.
And so, with a more conscious eye, I now seek to use language not to define reality, but to reveal it - to let it serve as a lamp rather than a leash.