The word soul in Hebrew is nephesh. In Hebrew literature, nephesh means throat. Whatever else we make of words figuratively, and there is plenty to make of them that way as I’m about to show, we take literature literally for the same reason we take music musically. We start there so that it can take us somewhere.

The Hebrew language is earthy and imagistic, thick with metaphor, and nephesh is characteristic Hebrew. Think about your neck. It connects what thinks with what feels, to say nothing of everything else. Your neck or throat is where the wind goes up and down between your nostrils your mouth and your lungs. It’s a place where everything comes together. Everything has to go between the head and the body. Cut your neck and it’s all over. There’s nothing. No nephesh no soul, no ‘you’. Notice that the word itself doesn’t have anything to do with the invisible. It’s visible. It’s the neck, the throat.

On 22 May, 1986, my first child was born at 3:42 in the morning. After a long day prior of contractions and a longer night of labor, when our nurse and our obstetrician recognized that the baby was in severe distress, they rushed blessed Victoria and me too into the operating room where I watched my son Evan delivered by emergency caesarean section. When the coast was clear, I went out to a waiting room and closed the louvered doors of an old-fashioned phone booth to call my parents. The phone rang once, and again, then my father picked up and said hello. At the sound of his voice, all that I’d wanted to say I couldn’t say. I couldn’t speak. Something was stuck in my throat, and it was this recognition: All my life I thought I knew my parents loved me, and now I know I had no idea.

In the English language there are idioms that have nothing to do with Hebrew. Stuck in the throat isn’t one of them.