A closer look
When vocabulary fails to capture the divine, you just have to start humming aggressively. The 18th-century founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov, popularized the niggun—a deeply emotive, entirely wordless melody. He believed that while words are rigidly tied to the physical world, pure musical vibration transcends the intellect entirely. By aggressively belting out these repetitive, wordless tunes, communities could induce a collective state of devekut (cleaving to God), hacking their emotional states to elevate broken souls from the lowest abyss directly to the heavens.
