The Other Side of the Veil: On Friedrich Weinreb’s Question

Guiding question:

When Friedrich Weinreb speaks of “the other side,” he means what lies beyond the veil of the Maya, the illusion. He asks: where are all the people who lived millions of years before us? Or he asks — where does the flower’s organization come from, the branches of a tree, where do its roots come from? Where does a dream come from, an experience, an image, a longing?

The Reversal

When Weinreb speaks of “the other side,” he is inverting the usual relationship between reality and illusion. In the ordinary Western picture, the “real” is what can be measured, weighed, counted — while the inner world, the imaginative, the world of dreams, is treated as secondary, a mere by-product of matter. Weinreb turns this upside down: the measurable side, the world of number and quantity, is only the veil — the fabric through which some wholeness that cannot be measured at all shines through. And so it is precisely the seemingly naive questions that tear the veil open: Where did all those people go? How does a flower already know exactly how to be itself?

The Question of Millions of Years

The question about the people who lived millions of years ago is really a question about time itself. If time is only the mode of appearance of this side — an axis along which wholeness is stretched out so that we can grasp it piece by piece — then “the past” is not a place where things disappear to. It does not fill up and it does not empty out. What has been is not “gone”; it exists in a way that does not depend on sequence at all — much like a book exists as a whole the moment it is closed, even though we read it page by page. Asking “where did they go?” is only a valid question from the standpoint of someone living on page 347, who mistakenly believes that pages 1 through 346 have evaporated.

The Flower and the Root

The same logic applies exactly to the flower. A branch does not invent itself as it grows — there is already a pattern, a form, which growth merely reveals in time. Weinreb (and this is also familiar from Kabbalah, in the idea of Atzilut, emanation, which precedes Beriah, creation) sees material growth not as creation out of nothing, but as the unfolding in time of something already whole on the other side. The root does not “search” for where to grow — it already knows, because in some sense, it is already there.

Dream, Image, and Longing

This is exactly what turns Weinreb’s thought from theory into something felt — and carries it into dream, experience, image, and longing. These are precisely the moments when a person, without planning and without sufficient material cause, touches for an instant “the other side.” A dream is not built from the cause-and-effect residue of the previous day (that is only the flattened explanation); it is a crack through which something from that other side enters. Longing (ga’agua, געגוע) is perhaps the sharpest expression of this — not merely the memory of some concrete thing, but the sensation of a rupture from wholeness, a bodily trace of a connection that existed before there was a separate “I” able to remember it in the ordinary sense. There is an echo here of what the midrashim say about the soul “knowing” before it is born — and forgetting at birth is exactly where the veil appears.

A Note on the Word Itself

It’s worth noticing that the Hebrew root of longing is doubled — ga-ga (ג-ע repeated) — like galgal (wheel), kirkur (rattling), bakbuk (bottle): a pattern that in Hebrew usually marks repeated motion, an echo. Longing is not a single, one-time event but a reverberation that keeps rolling forward — much like a sound that continues after the word itself has already been spoken, which is exactly what Weinreb himself discusses in his lectures on the sound that precedes the word (Gedanken über die hebräische Sprache).