re: #616 marjoriemoon

This is the meaning of Kabbalah, the deeper, esoteric or allegorical meanings. Abstract or spiritual.

The traditional teaching is that each verse of Torah has four types of meaning:

Peshat—the literal, or intended meaning, what the verse says.

Remez—the alluded-to meaning, what you learn if you read between the lines.

Drash—the interpreted meaning, the understanding you pull from the text

Sod—the mystical, or hidden meaning

(Conveniently, in Hebrew, this turns into the acronym ‘Pardes’, which means ‘orchard’, and by common literary allusion ‘paradise’.)

The idea that there can be one, single, literal understanding of what the text means is just antithetical to Jewish understanding of text.