Branch 4
Names, Soul, and Self
Maimonides warned: be careful with the names for the soul, because it is easy to get confused. The same name can point to different realities, and each use must be understood from its context. This branch follows that warning into the question: what is even meant by "self"? If the names we use are equivocal — if "soul" means one thing in one context and something else in another — then the thing we think we're describing may not be what we think it is.
Books & Manuscripts
In development · 17-chapter architecture · Chapters 1–2 approved
Emes: Translation Not Truth
Every English translation of Maimonides renders the Hebrew word אֱמֶת as "truth." That rendering sends you somewhere you didn't intend to go. The book begins with a translation problem — the name for something that may not be a thing — and follows it into questions about existence, knowledge, disagreement, and what any human being can claim to know.
Manuscript
שעה אחת קודם — The Quiet Before
The practice of pausing before prayer — before what appears has been named, explained, or claimed. What shows up in experience before we decide what it is? The book on the hour before prayer as the space where "self" can be examined without the names that usually hold it in place.
Manuscript
Combined Grammar Book
Verbs, agents, and the illusion of a doer. If "self" is a noun, who is doing the verbs? The grammar book as an inquiry into what "self" refers to when the noun is allowed to melt back into the verb it came from.
Essays
Essay
Eyelids Open and Eyelids Closed: The Phenomenology of Seeing and Knowing
Appearances do not stop when eyes close; they change mode. An essay on perception, knowing, and what shows up in experience before we decide what it is — the practice of noticing what appears before explanation takes over.
Essay
Abraham Did Not Discover God
Rambam's account of Abraham: he did not discover God. He discovered that God is not discoverable. What that distinction means for knowledge, faith, and the limits of what can be named.
Essay
No Such Thing as Emes — for David Bashevkin
A long-form essay on truth, language, and selfhood. What the most mistranslated word in Judaism reveals about certainty, disagreement, and the limits of human knowledge — and about what "self" means when the word for truth turns out to be equivocal.