Before you were born, you knew everything. According to Niddah 30b, an angel teaches each soul the entire Torah while the baby is still in the womb. A light burns above the child's head, and by that light, the soul can see from one end of the world to the other.
The baby in the womb lives in a state of perfect knowledge. It sees all of history—past and future. It understands every mystery of the Torah. It knows secrets that even the greatest scholars spend lifetimes trying to recover.
Then, at the moment of birth, the angel flicks the baby on the upper lip—that small indentation between the nose and the mouth, the philtrum—and the baby forgets everything.
All of Torah study, in this framework, is not learning but remembering. The knowledge was already inside you. The flick erased it. Every page of Talmud you labor over, every verse you struggle to understand, is a fragment of something you once knew perfectly and lost in a single instant.
The Talmud also teaches that the baby in the womb is made to take an oath: "Be righteous and do not be wicked. And even if the entire world tells you that you are righteous, consider yourself wicked in your own eyes." The soul enters the world already bound by a promise it cannot remember making.
The passage has profound implications for the nature of knowledge itself. If every soul once possessed complete understanding, then wisdom is not an acquisition but a recovery. The scholar does not build from nothing—the scholar digs through the rubble of a forgotten inheritance. The verse says: "He has made everything beautiful in its time; also He has set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God makes from the beginning to the end" (Ecclesiastes 3:11). The angel's flick is both a curse and a gift: it creates the need to study, which creates the merit of effort, which creates the possibility of earning what was once given for free.