The yeshiva was only one particular stage in Thierry Ehrmann’s intellectual formation. Already trained in Christian theology, he was allowed, through a friend, to attend a study session in a yeshiva. He was seeking neither religious affiliation nor initiation, but the experience of another method of reading and discussing texts.

What held his attention was precisely this method: the possibility of keeping several interpretations open, confronting objections, and preserving the trace of the reasoning that led to a conclusion.

Two interpretations could thus remain visible. An opinion that had not prevailed in the decision could nevertheless be preserved and transmitted. The conclusion did not necessarily erase the path that had made it possible to reach it.

For a mind already trained in dialectics, this way of organizing discussion was particularly fertile.

Since childhood, he had learned to distrust answers that closed too quickly. He spontaneously sought the point from which an apparently obvious proposition revealed another face.

One day, a rabbi gave him an image he has never forgotten:

“If the goyim split hairs into four, Jews split them into twenty-four.”

He received it as a metaphor for this way of multiplying the angles from which the same question can be examined.

Splitting hairs into twenty-four does not mean indulging in artificial complication. It means refusing to believe that the first four divisions have exhausted reality. It means multiplying perspectives, examining exceptions, seeking the limiting case, shifting the point of observation, and preserving the possibility that one face remains invisible.

This intuition echoes an ancient principle of rabbinic tradition: the “seventy faces of the Torah” — Shiv’im Panim la-Torah, formulated in Bamidbar Rabbah. The midrashic text thus teaches that the Torah possesses a plurality of faces or paths of interpretation. The same text can call for several readings without being exhausted by a single interpretation.

The rabbi’s phrase belonged to his own language; through humor, it made Thierry sensitive to this tradition of interpretive multiplicity.

He associated this method with a polyhedral form, almost a dodecahedron.

He was thinking in particular of Salvador Dalí’s dodecahedron, a form he found especially fertile to paint and sculpt. A polyhedron never reveals itself entirely from a single point of view. Some faces are offered to the gaze. Others are hidden. To understand the object, the observer must move or rotate it.

Jewish study appeared to him as a comparable geometry of thought. A proposition forms a first face. The objection reveals a second. Ancient commentary, a new situation, a particular case, or a change of scale makes others appear. Meaning is not located on a single surface, but in the volume produced by their relationships.

Here he found one of his most constant concerns: the blind spot.

The blind spot is not only what one has failed to see. It can be produced by the position from which one looks. Changing position does not guarantee that one will discover the whole truth, but it makes it possible to understand that the first perception was not the whole object.

Rarely had he encountered a religious tradition so demanding in its use of the mind, so attentive to the possibilities of interpretation, and so obstinately governed by the question.

Study was not merely preparation for religious practice. It became a practice in its own right, almost a form of presence before the divine.

The Talmud did not present itself as a homogeneous work that one simply had to read from beginning to end. It formed a territory inhabited by several generations of voices. Reasoning, objections, and disagreements remained visible within it. The reader did not merely enter a text. He entered a conversation begun long before him and whose end he would never see.

This persistence of voices impressed him deeply.

In many systems of knowledge, the final conclusion erases the process that produced it. Hesitations, rejected hypotheses, and errors disappear. The reader receives an answer cleansed of its genesis.

The Talmudic tradition, by contrast, preserved part of the intellectual workshop.

This structure connected with the laboratory notebooks of his childhood. A scientific experiment becomes truly intelligible only if the protocol, measurements, anomalies, failures, and corrections are preserved. Erasing every trial to show only the result deprives knowledge of its history.

The Talmud revealed to him a comparable requirement in the theological and legal sphere: to preserve the discussion is to preserve the intelligence of the text.

This encounter also resonated with his legal education.

A legal rule never exists alone. It is surrounded by commentary, decisions, particular cases, implementing decrees, and contradictions. A sentence of law is understood only when it is placed back within the hierarchy of norms, parliamentary proceedings, legislative intent, precedents, and the effects it produces.

Talmudic work showed him an older depth of this method. Text, law, and commentary do not form three separate worlds. They constitute a living organism.

An isolated piece of data remains poor. It becomes knowledge when it is placed within a network of relationships.

This conviction would later shape the major documentary architectures he built. But developing that here would take us beyond the present line of thought. At this point in his experience, the intuition was still forming within the theological order: to understand a text is to reconstruct the ecosystem of interpretations within which it produces meaning.

The Talmud also taught him a discipline of listening.

You cannot truly refute a proposition you have not first reconstructed faithfully. Reducing the other person’s thought to a caricature makes it easy to win an argument, but produces no knowledge. Fertile contradiction requires giving the opposing position its full strength before examining its limits.

This principle changed the relationship between disagreement and ego.

Constructing the inner man had meant subjecting his own substance to examination. Talmudic discussion extended this work into language. It required him to admit that the other person might see a face that had remained invisible, that an objection was not necessarily an attack, and that a line of reasoning could contain a blind spot precisely where it seemed most solid.

The Zohar and Kabbalah opened yet another dimension.

Language was no longer merely the medium of law or commentary. Words, letters, numbers, and relationships among texts became the elements of a cosmology. The visible and the invisible, creation, emanation, unity, and plurality could be read through several levels of correspondence.

This approach connected with some of his older intuitions.

Since childhood, numbers had not appeared to him merely as instruments of calculation. They described structures, cycles, proportions, and relationships. Geometry was not merely a school subject. It was a way of thinking about space and relationships.

The symbol did not come to decorate knowledge that was already complete. It could become an intellectual machine capable of holding several levels of meaning together.

Kabbalah and the Zohar showed him that an entire tradition had devoted centuries to this exploration. But they simultaneously revealed a danger: the richer a symbolic system becomes, the more it can support arbitrary projections.

A symbol detached from its language, history, and discipline can end up meaning everything, and therefore nothing.

He therefore had to hold together two movements that would structure his entire method: analogical openness and documentary verification.

Analogy makes it possible to connect forms, identify correspondences, and detect invariants. Documentation prevents those connections from becoming fantasies. Several disciplines may converge toward the same conceptual center, but none should be reduced to another.

Yet this intellectual power of Jewish study contained a risk.

Thierry understood that a person could devote an entire life to the Talmud, Kabbalah, and Zohar. Every answer produced new questions. Every commentary opened onto other commentaries. Every face of the polyhedron suggested another.

An entire existence could unfold within this universe.

For some, this study constituted a legitimate and complete vocation. He nevertheless sensed that, for him, it could become a withdrawal from the world.

The danger did not lie in Judaism. It belonged to any intellectual architecture deep enough to become self-sufficient. Theology, philosophy, law, mathematics, or esotericism can offer the mind such a vast territory that it eventually ceases to encounter the resistance of matter, institutions, conflicts, and human beings.

But he wanted to confront reality.

Romagnieu had taught him that an idea must eventually confront the weight of a door, the operation of an engine, or the reaction of a material. Freemasonry had taught him that fraternity has value only when it becomes conduct.

He did not want to replace this requirement with an existence entirely absorbed by commentary.

When he felt that he could have plunged indefinitely into these studies, he took up his pilgrim’s staff again.

He repudiated nothing. He carried with him what he had learned. But he refused to turn a teaching into a closure.

The yeshiva was important. His many trips to Israel were more important still because they confronted texts with a land, a history, and a living society.

Thierry believes he traveled to Israel many times. The precise number belongs to his memory, but it indicates a lasting familiarity, far removed from a one-off trip or religious tourism.

He traveled in particular to Mea Shearim, the religious neighborhood of Jerusalem. He wanted to approach a world whose rules, clothing, rhythms, gestures, and relationship to texts made visible a continuity that modern Europe had largely broken.

It was not merely a matter of reading Judaism. He had to observe how it organized everyday life, a neighborhood, a community, and a relationship to time.

This experience could not be separated from his own Catholic formation. The more he studied Judaism, the more he measured how deeply Christianity had emerged from it.

For him, no Catholic genuinely concerned with understanding his own religion can ignore this origin. Christianity did not emerge in a vacuum. Jesus, his disciples, the first communities, the prophets, and the great texts to which the Gospels refer belong to Jewish history.

Moving toward Judaism was therefore not moving away from his religion of origin. It was seeking where that religion came from.

This conviction also had a historical and moral dimension.

For centuries, Christians had accused Jews of being a deicidal people. Thierry has always opposed this construction. It seemed to him theologically absurd and historically criminal.

Judaism and Christianity arise in large part from the same great biblical corpus. Their separation is real, profound, and on certain points perhaps irreducible. It concerns in particular the person of Christ, revelation, law, and the interpretation of the fulfillment of Scripture.

But this divergence does not turn Jews into a people external to the Christian world. Christianity carries within itself an essential part of Jewish history.

He sums up this separation through the idea of a problem of interpretation.

The phrase does not mean that it is a simple misunderstanding easily repaired. It recalls that the two traditions differentiated themselves within a common inheritance, and not in absolute indifference to one another.

His travels gave this history a physical dimension.

As he approached Israel, aboard EL AL flights, he sometimes observed the gradual rise of ritual song. The cabin ceased to be merely a means of transportation. Another temporality settled into it. Prayers, movements, and the concentration of travelers transformed arrival into passage.

Once the plane had landed, some travelers kissed the tarmac.

The gesture struck him. In a single movement, it connected land, exile, return, promise, and memory. What might have seemed an abstraction in a theology course suddenly appeared in a body bending toward the ground.

The Holy Land was no longer merely a name.

Thierry had traveled through a considerable number of countries — almost all of them, he estimated, with the exception of India and New Zealand. Yet Israel seemed comparable to no other.

One never leaves that land quite as one entered it.

He visited the Church of the Nativity, a major site of Christianity. He went to Masada, where the landscape, the memory of the siege, and that of the dead give the rock a particular historical density. The martyrs of Masada belong not merely to an episode of antiquity. They remain present in the national, military, and religious imagination.

He also knew Israel at war, particularly when the country was confronting Lebanon. He went to the Gaza Strip while it was still under Israeli control. Later, he traveled through the West Bank and repeatedly experienced checkpoints.

These control systems reminded him of the border posts he crossed when traveling to East Germany from Berlin. In both cases, geography ceased to be a cartographic abstraction. It became a succession of permissions, waits, questions, and barriers.

Territory then appeared for what it is in conflict zones: a material organization of power.

Israel produced theological, historical, and psychological shocks in him. The Bible, modern wars, prayers, borders, holy places, and everyday life overlapped there without ever fully merging.

The country revealed the impossibility of completely separating religion from politics.

Judaism, Zionism, and the State of Israel must nevertheless be distinguished. These realities have deep relationships, but they are not synonymous. Confusing them would reduce a religion several thousand years old to a national policy or, conversely, read every decision of a state as the necessary expression of a religious tradition.

Above all, he discovered that a religion can structure calendars, prohibitions, lineages, territories, forms of legitimacy, representations of death, and collective memories. It remains active even among those who claim no longer to believe, because it continues to organize the symbols and narratives through which societies recognize themselves.

The Catholic Faculty had given him a first architecture of Christianity.

The yeshiva had allowed him to approach the Jewish art of commentary and the centrality of study.

The Talmud had shown him that thought preserves its strength when it does not erase the paths that produced it.

Kabbalah and the Zohar had revealed to him a geometry of meaning in which every visible face announces another face still hidden.

Israel had given territory, bodies, borders, and wars to what could have remained book knowledge.

None of these stages canceled the previous ones. They formed layers.

Thierry was not trying to manufacture a personal religion by assembling fragments. He was trying to understand how humanity had constructed, transmitted, defended, and sometimes bloodied its representations of the invisible.

This inquiry revealed a contradiction he would never stop exploring.

Religions can raise thought to exceptional levels of interpretation, discipline, and generosity. They can also close in on themselves, produce orthodoxies, erect borders, and turn fidelity into exclusion.

Jewish study had taught him to split hairs not into four, but into twenty-four. It had familiarized him with volumes, visible faces, hidden surfaces, and permanent questions. But it had also shown him that one can spend an entire life studying the world without ever returning to confront it.

He therefore chose to continue.

Not to abandon the texts, but to subject them to other experiences.

Not to renounce theology, but to expose it to other languages, other traditions, and other ways of seeking unity.

This understanding would lead him toward the third great monotheism arising from the same biblical space: Islam.

He became interested in it long before the question of Islam became a permanent social conflict in France, saturated by debates over Salafism, terrorism, or radicalization. At the time, he met imams whose generosity, openness, and quality of speech stayed with him.

He wanted to understand how a religion historically later than Judaism and Christianity in turn took up the great figures of the Book, affirmed the oneness of God, and situated itself within a prophetic continuity while constituting a distinct tradition.

Sufism would offer him a particular path toward this understanding. It would reveal, within Islam, a search for inwardness, unity, and spiritual transformation that could not be reduced to the legal or political dimensions of that religion.

But that encounter comes later.

The pilgrim’s staff no longer designated only geographic travel. It had become the decision not to turn any stage into a final destination.

Freemasonry had taught him that an authentic path does not close the world.

The yeshivot had taught him that every true answer still contains a question.

What remained was for him to encounter a tradition in which the path toward unity passed less through the accumulation of commentary than through stripping away, poetry, presence, and inner experience.

That path would bear the name Sufism.