Physical Potency: The Agency of Creation
The Sefer Yetzirah refers to the 22 letters of the aleph-bet most often as otiyot yesod -- "foundation letters." "In the simplest sense this is because it was through the letters of the Hebrew alphabet that the universe was created. The Sefer Yetzirah itself therefore says of the letters, 'With them he depicted all that was formed, and all that would ever be formed' (2:2)" (Kaplan, p. 26). According to Scherman (1984), Rabbi Dov Ber, the Maggid of Metzerich, suggested that the letters of the aleph-bet "arouse spiritual forces" in the very fabric of the universe. The letters themselves are agents of creation. One clue supporting this theory is found in the opening passage of the Torah: "Bereishit bara Elokim et ha-shamayim v'et ha-aretz. / In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." A traditional Kabbalistic reading of this passage is, "Bereishit bara Elokim ET [aleph-tav]" -- signifying, in other words, the entire aleph-bet. The primal forces contained in these letters were then used as the instruments of all further creation.
This interpretation is logically consistent with the rest of the account of creation. The first statement, that God created the heavens and the earth, uses the Hebrew verb bara. This verb carries the connotation of divine activity, because it means to create something out of nothing. (Other words for creating are yotzer, "to form," and oseh, "to make," but these suggest making something out of something else; thus, they are also human in scope, not exclusively divine.) The text gives no indication of the process by which this creation occurs, since that is a mystery which only God can know. However, after this first act takes place, each subsequent act of creation is expressed in this format: "And God said, 'Let there be...'; and there was...." Pirkei Avot 5:1 states, "B'asarah ma'amarot nivra ha-olam. / The world was created with ten utterances." God literally spoke each object into existence.
This was a linguistic phenomenon; therefore, it depended on the existence of some kind of language, of which the letters of the aleph-bet were the fundamental units. "The decrees through which God brought creation into being... consisted of words, and these words were formed out of letters. Hence, it was through the letters of the alphabet that the universe was created" (Kaplan, p. 26). Thus, says Scherman (1984), the letters "are, in effect, the raw material of Creation. When God combined them into words, phrases and utterances, they brought about Creation, translating his will into reality" (p. xvi). The Hebrew alphabet we possess, in which the Torah was given to us, is the shadow of that divine language of creation.
How could 22 letters bring about the endless combination of things in the universe? Scherman's analogy (a commonly cited one) is that of the elements, combining in chemical formulae. When we see that the formula of water is H2O, and that of carbon dioxide is CO2, and that of glucose is C6H12O6, we learn something fundamental about those very different substances: the precise composition of each, and more imporantly, how closely interrelated they are, and by what means one may be transformed into the others. Ginsburgh (1991) draws another analogy: "Letters build and enliven reality much as the encoded `letters' of DNA build and define the characteristics of the human body" (p. 6). This comparison is perhaps more apt, since DNA consists of only four "letters" (A, C, G, T), yet their combination -- almost infinitely intricate -- produces the diversity of life on Earth.
Centuries before the periodic table of the elements was discovered, the Kabbalists treated the aleph-bet in very much the same manner. The Sefer Yetzirah (literally "Book of Formation," but usually translated "Creation"), which dates back (at least in oral form) to the seventh century C.E. (Kaplan, p. ix), indicates several methods of permuting the aleph-bet into vast arrays. This is the essential foundation of what was known as "practical Kabbalah": applying the Kabbalistic teachings for magical purposes. Its theoretical basis could be called `metaphysical chemistry.'
Aryeh Kaplan (1990) defines three major branches of Kabbalah: the theoretical posited knowledge (through revelation or deduction) about the structure and nature of the Divine and spiritual realms; the meditative used a variety of methods to reach states of higher consciousness, in an effort to approach the Divine; and the magical was closely related to the meditative; it required the same intense concentration and used it to [attempt to] change or cause physical events. The Sefer Yetzirah, he says, is essentially "a meditative text with strong magical overtones" (pp. ix-x). The language of the text is ambiguous and highly obscure, managing to convey at once the sense both of God's manipulation of the forces of the aleph-bet to create the universe and of instructions for comparable manipulation by the practicing Kabbalist. This is due to the ambiguity in [unvocalized] written Hebrew between the third-person masculine singular past tense and the second-person masculine singular imperative: e.g., chet-kuf-kuf can be interpreted as either chakak = "He engraved," or ch'kak = "Engrave." (Kaplan, p. x) It is also ambiguous whether the instructions are designed to produce literal physical events, or whether the effects described are the perceptions brought about by deep meditation.
However, the Kabbalists pursued these exercises not merely for
their practical effects, but for the sake of the hidden knowledge
itself. Johnson relates: "In addition to... direct communion
with God through mystical states, the esoteric books from the first
century onwards poured forth a torrent of information about the
deity and Paradise.... if the key were found, secret knowledge
could be obtained" (p. 196). The knowledge base underlying the
meditative/magical exercises is the system of the ten Sefirot
("Divine Emanations"), which the Sefer Yetzirah
treats at some length. Chapter 1 is devoted almost exclusively
to the Sefirot, and Chapters 2, 3, and 4 relate the letters to that
structure. The theory explores both the `physical' realm --
explaining the methods and system of God's acts of creation -- and
the metaphysical -- drawing conclusions about the nature of Ultimate
Reality by elucidating structural correspondences between the
letters and the spiritual elements represented in the Sefirot. In
the next discussion, I will focus on this metaphysical dimension.
Language, besides being the vehicle of creation, is what
distinguishes human beings from all other animals. "Onkelos
translates `and man became a living soul' [in Bereishit] as `man
became a speaking spirit'" (Ginsburgh, p. 256). Man is the
only creation which falls into this category. Language preexisted
man, and it is the shared characteristic between God and man --
making us creatures "in God's image," allowing us to
approach being more like God. No rational thought can exist
unless language, and hence letters, exist first. Thus Kaplan
explains the transcendent nature of the meditative aleph-bet:
With reference to the Creation, Ginsburgh goes on to explain the
significance of delegating the naming of all created things
to Adam, the first man: he "was uniquely gifted with the insight
(wisdom) to recognize and call every being by its proper name....
Other than man, no created consciousness, even that of the angels
above, possessed the ability to call by name" (p. 6). Scherman
(1984) concurs:
However, this almost suggests that the naming preceded the
incarnation. Munk, on the other hand, quotes a tradition that Adam
(in his state of perfection) possessed the spiritual insight to
perceive the real and correct name by which to express the essence
of a thing. After Adam had named all the animals, God said to him,
"Now name yourself," and Adam said, "I should be called
Adam, because I was made from the earth (adamah)."
And God then said, "Now name Me," and Adam said,
"You are Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, because you are at once past
and present and future."
The Sefer Yetzirah (Note: all the Sefer Yetzirah
material in the next five paragraphs is based on Kaplan's 1990
translation and commentary.) divides the letters into three
categories: three Mothers, seven Doubles, and twelve Elementals.
The Mothers are the letters aleph, mem, and shin;
as will be further discussed below, they correspond to the sefirot of
Keter (Crown), Chachmah (Wisdom), and Binah (Understanding). The
Doubles are the letters which have two sounds, a hard sound (when
written with the dagesh) and a soft sound. These are: bet/vet,
kaf/khaf, peh/feh (universally distinguished); gimel/jimel,
dalet/thalet, tav/sav (distinguished in certain subcultures);
and resh -- whose "hard" pronunciation has been
completely lost. Its description appears in the Sefer Yetzirah
but does not correspond to any known pronounceable sound! The
Elementals are the remaining twelve letters, which display numerous
correspondences, among them the signs of the zodiac and the tribes
of Israel (Kaplan, pp. 102-112). Within the limited scope of this
paper, I will focus in detail only on the Mothers and their
significance in relation to the Sefirot.
The intermediate associations are the elements: Chachma
(undifferentiated, nonverbal, `passive' consciousness) is
associated with water; Binah (verbal, separate, `active'
consciousness), with fire. Keter, poised between them, belongs
to the air. Each of the Mother letters is independently
associated with one of these elements. The word for "water"
is mayim (mem-yud-mem); for "air,"
avir (aleph-vav-yud-resh); for "fire,"
esh (aleph-shin). Kaplan explicates this last
connection:
Mem, on the other hand, makes a humming noise which is not only
inherently calming (as opposed to the agitating hiss of shin) but
strongly associated in itself with deep meditation and the
achievement of Chachmah consciousness.
Kaplan goes on to discuss the dialectical nature of these three
in Hegelian terms: thesis (shin), antithesis (mem),
and synthesis (aleph). This gives rise to a vast multitude
of correlations, which I will merely mention here to give an idea
of their scope. Shin (fire) is energy, mem (water)
is matter, and aleph (air) is the space in which the two
forces interact. Shinis a hiss, mem is a hum, and
aleph is the silent consonant -- the empty pause that
separates the two when spoken. Ultimately, shin is the
(active) cause, mem is the (passive) effect, and aleph
is their union, the creative process as a whole.
This last designation I find most suggestive in light of the
grammatical functions of these three letters, as prefixes
to verbs (action words). Shin is "that" or
"which," a subordinating conjunction; attaches to a
conjugated verb, it connects that verb back to its subject,
defining the subject as "that which does something."
Mem attaches to a verb root to indicate a passive form:
asah (ayin-shin-hey), "to make," becomes ma'aseh
-- "that which is made." Aleph is the prefix
indicating the first-person singular future tense: thus, a'aseh
(aleph-ayin-shin-hey) means "I will do/I will make."
Surely this perfectly characterizes the union of "that which
does" and "that which is made" -- the creative process
as a whole.
Magical spells and pure theology aside, there is a significant
body of literature on the essential meanings contained in the
letters of the aleph-bet. The overall lessons of the
letters are frequently homiletical in nature: they are used to
illustrate general moral, theological, or other philosophical
principles.
There are several dimensions of meaning to be considered within
the individual letters. The first verse of Sefer Yetzirah
states, "U'bara et olamo b'shlosha sfarim: sefer v'sefar
v'sipur. / And He created His universe with three books: with
text and number and communication" (Kaplan's translation, p.
20). Thus, Kaplan interprets, there are three ways to examine the
letters. Sefer, text, is the written letter, the physical
shape. Sefar, number, is the numerical value of the letter.
And sipur, "telling" or communication, includes
both the name of the letter and the sound it represents. (For each
letter, certain of these avenues may be richer and more interesting
veins of information than the others. Also, individual letters
display varying degrees of unity in their thematic characteristics.
For example, aleph and bet have highly focused
thematic `personalities' across all the dimensions of meaning;
kaf and zayin show less consistency of interpretation
-- though by the same token might be considered all the more complex
and meaning-rich.)
Each Hebrew letter has a
numerical
value. The alphabetic characters
were used as the only numerical system before the advent of Arabic
numerals, and they are still used today to index, for instance,
chapters of sacred texts or days of the Hebrew months. Aleph
through tet are the numbers 1 to 9; yud through
tzadi are 10 through 90; and kuf, resh, shin, and
tav are 100 through 400.
The "sofit" characters, or final forms of the
letters kaf, mem, nun, peh, and tzadi, are usually
reckoned with the same numerical values as their regular forms.
However, they are also sometimes counted as the numbers 500
through 900. This correspondence brings the aleph-bet
full circle -- because the letter representing 1000,
"elef," is aleph.
Adding the numerical values of all the letters in a word (or
phrase) produces a sum known as that word's gematria. For
centuries, Jewish scholars have used these numerical totals to
draw general conclusions about the relationship between two
concepts based on the mathematical relationship of the gematria
of their respective names. This process in general is also known
as gematria. There seem to be two primary methods of
illustrating by gematria. One is to demonstrate the numerical
equivalence of two words, phrases, or concepts, indicating a
fundamental conceptual unity between them.
The second is to demonstrate that the sum of two words, phrases,
or concepts equals a third, expressing the fundamental relationship
between all three. For example:
The name of each letter generally has at least one literal meaning
as a Hebrew word: bet = "house"; vav =
"hook"; ayin = "eye"; peh =
"mouth". Additionally, each name is connected to a family
of several other Hebrew words by changing the vowels applied to its
root consonants. Thus, aleph becomes elef = one
thousand (as described above), or aluf = master, teacher
(Munk, 1983).
The shape of the printed letter is its physical manifestation,
its objective existence in the world. The shape can be interpreted
in terms of the structural components of the letter, or as a sort
of portrait of the thematic character of the letter (or both, where
applicable). Thus:
Besides Kaplan's three fields of interpretation, the sequence
of the letters within the aleph-bet is also significant.
Scherman (1983) points out that Torah teachers have for centuries
resisted the idea of rearranging the aleph-bet to make it
simpler for children to learn:
Like the other characteristic dimensions, this sequence
information yields homiletical content -- particularly in light
of the shape and name information contained in the particular
letters. Sometimes the lesson is in which way the letters face
in relation to each other.
Other times, it is the order of the letters within the
aleph-bet which informs other words with significance.
The word for "falsehood," sheker, uses the
letters of the alphabetical sequence kuf_resh_shin.
"The kuf and resh of sheker remain
in alphabetical order, giving a deceptive impression of order,
but the shin is moved ahead, to symbolize the distortion
of reality in the world of deception (Maharal)"
(Munk, p. 211).
Munk writes that the reversed alphabetical order has
special meaning in the tradition as well. "In the timeless
realm before creation, the letters existed in a state opposite
that of the aleph-bet. Then, they began with tav...
concluding with aleph" (p. 228). While the
aleph-to-tavorder is known as seder ha-yashar
("the straight order"), the tav-to-aleph order
is known as seder hehafuch, the reversed system. This
association with timeless perfection is put to use in the
Shabbat musaf service. Many prayers are composed of 22 lines in
aleph-to-tav acrostic sequence (e.g., Ashrei,
Aishet Chayil), but Shabbat musaf features one in reverse:
"Tikanta Shabbat ratzita
karbnoteiha, tzivita perusheiha 'im
sidurei n'sacheiha..." This evokes our
longing for the return to a state of perfection, the World to
Come of which our Shabbat is only a shadow.
Blech, furthermore, goes so far as to state that Hebrew
"has two alphabets.... The second requires the wisdom of
retrospect: it is the hidden message of the alphabet in reverse,
where tav = aleph, shin = bet, resh = gimel, and so
on" (p. 36). This perspective explains the device known
as at-bash (from aleph/tav
- bet/shin). This is a process of
transforming one word into another by transposing each of its
letters for their at-bash complements. Like gematria,
this formal relationship between two words signifies a key thematic
connection. One common example of its use: At-bash transforms
yud into mem, and hey into tzadi.
Therefore, the word mitzvah (mem-tzadi-vav-hey) is
a partial at-bash transformation of the Name of God.
The reason for composing prayers of 22 aleph-to-tav
lines is that the completed sequence communicates a profound depth
of completion.
The word for "letter" itself, ot, is spelled
aleph-vav-tav -- "the first and last letters of the
alphabet joined by the sign for 'and.' It could be a contraction
for AlphabeT, or it could mean, ideogrammatically, 'first-and-last,'
i.e., 'everything'" (Rosenberg, p. 185). However, in this world,
nothing we possess is in a true state of total wholeness -- not even
the aleph-bet. According to Kushner, the 13th-century text
Sefer Ha-Temunah teaches that our present Hebrew alphabet is
missing one letter, which will be revealed in the future, and that
"every defect in our present universe is mysteriously connected
with this unimaginable consonant" (p. 13). Kushner goes on to
point out that the tefillin shel rosh bears a shin on
each side: the regular three-tongued shin on the right side,
but on the left side, a shin with four tongues. "Some
suspect that this may be the missing letter whose name and
pronunciation must wait for another universe" (p. 14).
The total number of permutations of the 22 letters of the
aleph-bet is 22 x 21 x 20 x 19 ... x 3 x 2 x 1, written
as 22! ("22 factorial"). It calculates out to 1.12 x
1021 -- about one sextillion. Amazingly enough, as
Kaplan informs us, "this is very close to the total number
of stars in the observable universe. This universe contains
around a hundred billion (1011) galaxies, each one
with approximately ten billion (1010) stars. Thus,
from the permutations of the alphabet, a name can be formed
for every star in the universe. This is in accordance with the
teaching that every star has an individual name" (p. 193).
Metaphysical Potency
Ordinary thought is verbal, and hence, consists of words.
These words consist of letters. These are not physical letters, but
mental, conceptual letters. These conceptual letters, however, are
built out of `Voice, Breath, Speech'. Hence, in meditating on these
concepts, one is actually contemplating the very roots of thought.
(p. 90)
Adam's first demonstration of greatness came when God
asked him to give names to all the creatures of the new universe....
the spiritual forces expressed by those letters, in the formula
signified by those unique arrangements of letters and vowels, were
translated by God into the nerve, sinew, skin, size, shape and
strength of a sturdy ox or a soaring eagle." (p. xvi)
Image reproduced from projectmind.org. Click for larger view.Fire is represented by the letter Shin. Shin is the
dominant letter in the word Esh, meaning fire. It is joined with
the Alef, representing air, because a fire cannot exist without
air. The three heads of the Shin also suggest the flames of the
fire. The hissing sound of this letter, furthermore, is like the
hiss of a flame. The three heads of the Shin are separated,
suggesting the general concept of separation [associated with
Binah]. (p. 147)
Dimensions of Meaning in the Letters
Sefar: Number Symbolism/Gematria
Sipur: Sound, Name and Pronunciation
Sefer: Shape
the Divine power to bear two opposites simultaneously; in
the words of Rabbi Shlomo ibn Aderet, 'the paradox of paradoxes.'
Here 'the exaltation of G-d' and his 'closeness' to man unite with
the 'lowliness of man' and his 'distance' from God." (p. 24)
Furthermore, the component strokes of yud, vavand yud
add up to a gematria of 10 + 6 + 10 = 26. The letters of
the Tetragrammaton have the same total: yud (10) + hey
(5) + vav (6) + hey (5) = 26. This, too, makes
aleph a symbol of God's unity.
Order
Given the fact that the Aleph-Beis predated
Creation and is the 'protoplasm' of the universe, the letters
and the order are important... the Aleph-Beis was not
manufactured by man, so it may not be manipulated by man. (p. 21)
In the popular idiom, something that is expressed or
analyzed in its entirety is said to be covered [me'alef v'ad
tav], from aleph to tav. Since the very order
of the letters represents profound halachic and philosophic
concepts, ... the use of an alphabetic sequence to praise God, or
describe a person or concept, denotes totality and perfection."
(Munk, p. 34)
Conclusion
"He counts the number of the stars, He gives them each a name."
-- Psalms 147:4
Bibliography
Links: Other Aleph-Bet Resources Online
Copyright ©1995 by Erica Schultz Yakovetz.
All rights reserved.
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