The midrash tells of an angel who accompanies the soul in the womb. This angel teaches the unborn child the entire Torah and all the wisdom of the world, only to tap the baby’s lip just before birth, causing it to forget everything.
It’s usually read as a charming explanation for the philtrum—the indentation beneath the nose—but the story intends much more. It speaks to the profound sense of alienation most of us feel from our own innate self. According to the myth, we once possessed a perfect, intuitive knowledge of who we are. Birth is the moment we lose it. The rest of life becomes a long, halting effort to remember.
Birth, in this reading, is a kind of exile. And the trauma of childbirth—leaving the warm, floating cocoon of the mother’s body, being squeezed through the narrow canal, expelled into cold light, poked, prodded, assessed as your lungs strain for their first breaths—is not incidental to the myth. It is its first proof.
Even the recent return to home births, meant to soften the harsh sterility of the hospital environment, can only go so far. But birth is only the first trauma of life.
The next arrive almost immediately, when your nascent sense of self collides with your absolute dependence on the people who keep you alive. As you grow stronger and more cognitively aware, those two impulses—independence and dependence—begin to grind against each other. You develop innate tastes and traits, early intuitions of who you are and how the world touches you. And at the same time, family expectations, household values and rules, and the norms and conventions of your immediate world begin pressing inward.
This is traumatic—not as a singular emotional shock, but as a continuous shaping force that leaves marks. As surely as the body carries scars from repeated blows, the psyche carries scars from repeated collisions with the expectations of others.
The process intensifies once we enter school. It is worth remembering that the modern classroom—rows of desks, the teacher at the front, bells, grading—was designed during the Industrial Revolution. The goal then was explicit: to mass-produce standardized workers with maximum economic efficiency. The system was not designed to cultivate the individual needs of children but to ensure conformity, predictability, and output. Even though educators have spent generations smoothing the rough edges, the basic structure remains.
Under these pressures—family, school, peers—we develop personas, masks in the original sense, to help us function within the rules of the game. But the more skilled we become at wearing masks, the more the question presses: what becomes of the authentic self we began with? The one closest to our emotional essence? The one the midrash says we once knew perfectly?
For some, the discontinuity is manageable. For many, it becomes a lifelong struggle that we tend to label as emotional dysfunction. I think it is more accurately a spiritual struggle—a yearning for reconnection with one's innate nature, the self that was lost at birth.
Viewed through this lens, the angel’s touch is not simply the cause of forgetting but the beginning of alienation. And the re-learning of Torah throughout life becomes a metaphor for personal rediscovery. To learn is to remember who we were.
If we take this seriously, then education should not be a mechanism for further alienation. It should be its antidote—a process that encourages self-rediscovery rather than conformity. Learning would not be defined solely by the acquisition of skills, although those matter. It would be defined by the deepening of one’s connection to one’s own nature: one’s innate feelings, predispositions, curiosities, and gifts.
In that sense, the highest purpose of education is not to prepare us for the world, but to help us find our spiritual path to our authentic place in it - not the place assigned to us by others, but the place remembered from before we were born.
