“Hear, O Israel! God Is Our God, God Is One.”
When men attempted to usurp God’s place
By building the Tower of Babel
God dispersed men among parallel linguistic universes
Paradoxically rendering universe plural
While, as ever, remaining one
Paradox, then, is built into each one
Of our multiplicity of languages
And every time we encounter paradox
By speaking it or hearing it
We should note it
Writing it down again and again
Until it dawns on us
That all paradoxes
Are occasions of the original paradox
That all words are defined by yet other words
But for one word
God
Which is undefined
But for the fact
That God defines all other words
In other words
Every word in every language
Are all just different ways of saying the same thing:
God is one
We are all saying it
But the moment we really mean it
We too shall be one
Because a paradox can only be solved
By the simplest of numbers
