There are moments when the veil thins.

A man sits at his Shabbat table. He sings Shalom Aleichem, and something shifts. Before kiddush, he turns to his wife and says: “My zeidi is here. He came to hear my kiddush”. He sees him. Not with his eyes, but with the clarity of another kind of seeing — the mind’s inner vision. The figure moves, appearing first at the doorway, then beside him, smiling. There is no fear. Only presence. Only consolation.

What is happening here?

The Zohar (Shelach 172a–b) describes a phenomenon of sacred expansion. A man gazes at a heichal — a spiritual chamber — and it first appears small. Then, as he continues looking, it grows. Then it grows again. Until a single hair’s breadth becomes immeasurable. The more one sees, the more there is to see.

Modern minds may reach for a different metaphor: the passage of a four-dimensional object through our three-dimensional world.

When it enters, we see only a small slice. As it continues, the object seems to grow. At its midpoint, it appears in full. Then it shrinks and vanishes — but it was always whole. We simply intersected one thin layer of its presence.

So it is with consciousness.

Sometimes, the intellect receives more than it knows how to process. In moments of merit — not always in meditation, not always in longing — ruach hakodesh may arrive, if G-d so wills. But even then, the soul must make sense of what it is granted. And it does so using the only tools it has: comparison, interpretation, partial language. The eternal passes through the now, and we catch a sliver of its face.

But that sliver is enough.

Enough to know that the world is larger than its matter. Enough to feel a smile from the other side. Enough to realize that what we call “vision” may be the dimmest edge of something far brighter — and that when the soul is ready, more of it can be seen.

And then it fades again.

But not because it’s gone.

Because you have returned.

Rabbi Avraham

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