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A Legacy of Faith
Inspiration, Essays, and InsightsAlter Shapiro
A Legacy of Faith
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Book Excerpt from A Legacy of Faith
From Just One Word
I once asked my class to tell me what quality is entirely unique to one’s face that is not true about any other part of the body. Right away a student responded that each person’s face is different from everyone else’s.Very good, but so are a person’s fingerprints. I was looking for the quality unique to the face.
We finally come to the observation that one’s face is a window to his inner feelings and even thoughts. One’s face can show if someone is happy or sad, angry or calm. One cannot tell these emotions by looking at someone’s knee, shoulder, or back of the head. Only one’s face is like a window to see what is going on inside his heart or mind.
Is there a language whose word for one’s face describes this unique quality? In English the word face emphasizes the front, the facade, the surface of one’s head. It focuses on the external character of a face. In Hashem’s language, in Hebrew, the word for face is panim. The word panim comes from the word penim, which means “inside.” One’s face, then, is the window to one’s inner thoughts, feelings, and self, his penim.
This etymology reveals a profound difference between Western culture and Torah. The external is the focus of Western culture. The internal is the focus and the essence of the Torah. Even the mitzvos we use our external limbs to perform are only to influence our hearts.
I read a most moving expression of this idea, that all material, external things are the handmaidens of our inner spirit, in an account Mrs. Ettie Rosenbaum wrote about her father, Rav Yaakov Moshe Kulefsky, zt”l, rosh yeshivah of Ner Yisroel in Baltimore. Rav Kulefsky’s nine-year-old grandson, Leib, died from a terrible car accident. At the funeral, Rav Kulefsky was holding the hand of Leib’s twelve-year-old brother. As Leib was being buried, Rav Kulefsky said to his twelve-year-old grandson, “That’s not Leib down there. That is only his coat. Leib is up in Shamayim.”