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Creating Bridges: Spirituality & Philosophy:
Kabbalah: "Letters from Heaven:"
Spiritual Guidance from the Hebrew Alphabet
Ayin:
Insight
Numerical value: 70
Sound: silent
The inner eye
Kisses your soul
With its loud silence
Cutting through illusion
Revealing the hidden truth
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by Avigayil Landsman |
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Dedication
Sometimes first impressions are very misleading because our perceptions are clouded by our biases. The first time I saw J. Christopher "Hawk" White, I was immediately struck by his enthusiasm and openness for learning about something new-the inner meaning of the Hebrew letters. Because he wasn't Jewish and I was, I discounted him as a possible boyfriend and assumed he would not be interested in me either, for the same reason. I allowed our presumed religious traditions to keep us apart. And while the outside shells stood as an illusory barrier, my inner eye perceived the light shining from his soul that deeply warmed mine.
We conversed easily together in a profoundly meaningful and engaging way. I genuinely regretted that I let him leave the class I taught that night without finding out how to get in touch with him to continue our fascinating dialogue. The night I met him was my first teaching gig and Christopher's open and accepting presence inspired me to say things I didn't know were inside me. I felt relaxed and confident. My inner eye saw a deep spring but I was too shy to jump in.
I am so grateful that two years later our paths crossed again, giving me a second chance. This time we were both students in Rachel Pollack's Tarot class. As soon as I saw Christopher my heart leapt with excitement. His warm greeting prompted me to step out of my shy reserve. Over the course of the last few months, he has become my teacher, as well as a beloved companion. His presence in my life has encouraged my inner eye to open wider; he opens doors in my soul.
Recently, he reminded me that I taught that we can embody the letters and I believe he embodies the teachings of ayin. In honor of his brilliant insights, soaring imagination, generous love and genuine commitment to the journey to the sacred, I dedicate this column to him.
Three Worlds
The Sacred is hidden in the world and for those of us on a spiritual quest, it is our job to find it. Looking beneath the surface of mundane reality to find the sacred is ayin's message. In his book, The Aleph-Beit: Jewish Thought Revealed through the Hebrew Letters, Rabbi Ginsberg describes the three levels of experience: worlds, soul and divinity. In the level of worlds, we are in contact with the physical realm. The letters on this level are a hint of the sacred, but are yet unknown. We can describe the form of the letter, the numerical value of a letter, but more probing is necessary in order to understand what this means. On the level of souls, we enter the letter's inner meaning and gain wisdom from its essence. At the level of Divinity, we become part of the Divine realm itself, known in Hebrew as devaykut, cleaving.
Go in, go out: make up your mind already!
One of the exciting things about Torah interpretation is finding alternative meanings of words and reading a verse over again with a new word. In the story of Noah, God instructs Noah to build an ark, a teyva (not to be confused with the groovy sandals). There is a line that says, "Go into the teyva." Teyva also means word, so the alternative translation is that God tells Noah to go into the word. On the level of worlds, this verse instructs Noah to examine the word. But, what word? The word is a hint of the sacred and in order to understand it's implications; we must examine the word fully by learning about each letter in the word.
This column's purpose is to explore the essence, or message of the letters. The combined teachings come together in a sacred alchemy that can give wings to our souls.
Later in this story God instructs Noah to "go out of the teyva." Before going on, I want to set the stage a bit. Imagine that you are Noah, a good man considering that everyone around you is a no goodnik and you are told that since your neighbors are total losers, the world is going to be destroyed by water and if you want to save your butt, you'd better build an ark and bring pairs of all the animals of the world with you. So, not only are you going on an extended cruise, you're also going to be running an animal shelter!
Consider the life of the guy in charge of the elephants for the circus and you have a vague idea of what I'm talking about. Now, imagine that it starts to rain. Not that nice, gentle summer rain, but an all-out torrential downpour. Not only is it raining from the sky, but also all the waters under the ground are bursting at the seams like some kind of watery volcano! We are talking major flooding. This is your life: at first it's just your average, ordinary life and then everything you've kept hidden, all your unexpressed emotions burst open! You want to take cover, fast! Build yourself an ark, a shelter! And when you have finally released all those pent up emotions, your world is safe and you can proceed with your life unfettered, clear-minded and calm. At this point of deep inquiry and soul travel, we become one with the divine, having integrated the lesson of the word into our lives. Perhaps what the Torah is telling us is that the words-all of them, are vehicles of transcendence. Go out of the word, go out of your mind, go out of your self. When we fully engage with sacred texts, they become our rocket ships to Spirit.
Here's lookin' at you, kid
The letters, like all aspects of Creation point to hidden truths. Our lives, our dreams, our activities are all language for the spiritual quest. The meaning of the word ayin is eye or spring. When we look with our spiritual eyes, springs of meanings bubble up from the depths of the earth. The form of the ayin consists of two little eyes connected by a pipeline. The rabbis say that the two eyes represent the eye of God who watches us and the eye of God's children who look for God. Ayin also means sheep in Aramaic. In this case, we understand that the Divine Shepherd tends after His flock and the sheep look to his Shepherd.
Ayin, with a slightly different pronunciation becomes ayn, meaning without, as in the term ayn sof-literally, without end. Ayn sof is the ultimate source of divinity that stands outside the Aytz Chayyim, the kabbalistic Tree of Life because it is beyond our conception of even the essence of God, beyond light. The ayn, or ayin indicates self-nullification, or death of the temporal self, or our self-consciousness that transforms into a new consciousness. In his book, Forests of the Night, Niles Elliot Goldstein likens this process to the necessary destruction of the seed that enters the earth's generativity that turns the rotted seed into a plant. In order for human thought to be turned into divine thought we must let go of the world of appearances, to transform the experience of the outer eye for that of the inner eye.
Other than the aleph, only ayin in its current usage (long ago it had a guttural sound) is silent. Ayin is also a word, meaning eye as we said earlier. The early form of the letter began as a pictogram of an oval with a dot in the middle. It evolved into a circle with a dot, an opened circle, a horseshoe shape and then instead of one, fluid line, two strokes were used, leaving a tail. The two-stroked letter most closely resembles the Modern Hebrew letter ayin. The message of ayin is to enter the silence and look inwardly--insight. The numerical value of ayin is seventy, which is seven times around the ten sephirot (divine essences). This gives us a sense of completion on a soul level, seven being the number of completion and ten being the number of all the sephirot. It is also the seven planetary spheres and the ten fingers on two hands.
Zayin's numerical value is seven and means weapon. This is the sword for cutting away illusions. Zayin is also the letter of time (z'man) and memory (zachor). Rabbi Ginsberg's three-world system also applies to the aleph-beit as a whole. The first ten digits are on the level of worlds, the next ten are on the level of souls and the last four letters are on the level of divinity. Therefore, zayin, whose numerical value is seven is on the level of worlds and ayin is on the level of souls. It is for this reason that seventy was given as the span of a man's life. In seventy years an aware person will have completely embodied the ten sephirot. A less ambitious seventy year old will at least have lots of memories after living such a long time!
An important word beginning with ayin is aytz, meaning tree. The ten sephirot make up the Tree of life. When the Torah is put back in the ark, we sing, "aytz chayyim hi..." It (the Torah) is a tree of life for those who hold fast to Her." Looking up at an ancient, enigmatic tree one day, the leaves became thousands of God's eyes looking down on me from Heaven. The branches all formed ayins! Unlike we mortals who run around and take in only a small fraction of what is before us, a tree doesn't move around at all. A tree takes in what's around her and brings it deeply into her roots. This is the place of great insight, in touch with all of your life's experiences, bringing the lessons of your life into your roots, your heart. Reb Nachman of Bratzlav, an eighteenth century Hassidic rabbi wrote about how good it is to go out everyday to pray in the following prayer:
Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field
There I will give You my love.
Master of the universe,
grant me the ability to be alone.
May it be my custom to go outdoors each day
among the trees and grass,
among all the growing things,
and there may I be alone and enter into prayer,
to talk with the One to whom I belong.
May I express there everything in my heart,
and may all the foliage of the field
(all grass, trees and plants)
may they all wake at my coming, to send the power
of their life into the words of my prayer,
so that my prayer and speech are made whole,
through the life and spirit of all living things
which are made as one by their transcendent sources.
May they all be gathered into my prayer,
so that my prayer and speech are made whole,
through the life and spirit of all living things
which are made as one by their transcendent sources.
May they all be gathered into my prayer,
and thus may I be worthy to open my heart fully,
in prayer, supplication and holy speech.
That I pour out the words of my heart
before Your Presence like water, O Lord,
And lift up my hands to You in worship,
on behalf of my soul and the souls of all children.
Translated by Rabbi Shamai Kanter
In parashat Chaye Sara, a chapter in Genesis, we find beloved Yitzhak, Isaac, out meditating in the field. This section of the Bible is the proof text that established the late afternoon prayer service for Jews. This also established a reverence for being out in nature, part of God's Creation. When you pick ayin, you are being told that it's time to get out of the city a little bit and enter the silence of the woods. Listen to the angels hovering over the grasses, encouraging each blade to grow.(Talmud)
Spelling it out
The central prayer of Judaism, the Shema, declares the divine Unity of all: "Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohaynu, Adonai Echad." "Hear, oh Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One." Ayin is the last letter of the word Shema, which means listen and dalet is the last letter of the last word, echad, one. These two letters are written much larger in the Torah scroll than the other letters in this verse. Together they spell ayd, which means witness. Witness for yourself the insights you have. Have the strength of your insights to witness the unity. And as beneficial as it is to be alone, the concept of witnessing demands community. Judaism has no monastic tradition: no convents, no monastery. We can witness, observe nature alone but we witness, or share in community.
Wake UP!
"Oori! Oori!" "Awake! Awake!" is from "L'cha Dodi," a sixteenth century kabbalistic poem written to welcome the Sabbath. In these words I hear the advice to become aware of God's presence in every moment. Consider how we perceive photography. What we make of a photograph requires a more focused awareness than a passive view of day to day living. Photos are generally taken for the purpose of making a statement, but what we see and what the photographer wants us to see can be very different.
This idea reminds me of a story about twins who were given equal opportunities, yet one was very happy while the other was very angry and down. The mother, desperate to bring harmony between them, sought the advice of a psychologist. She applied his advice for the twins' birthdays. For the pessimistic twin, a room of toys was given. All he could say was, "All these toys are going to break. What will I do with so many? And, anyway, I bet my brother has more and they are better". The happy twin was put in a room with a single box. When he opened the box, he found nothing but manure. He jumped up and down with glee, saying, "Oh, you can't fool me, where there's shit, there's bound to be a pony!" So, the way we go to war with our ego is to question our perceptions. If we feel unloved, we need to tell ourselves we are loved and find concrete examples of it. It's all in the stories we tell ourselves.
So it is with Torah and life. You can read Torah every week every year of your life and still miss so much! The Torah resonates in accordance with our current struggles, so we find new concepts with each encounter. The seemingly new understanding is like the tree I drove by for twenty years and only noticed recently. Ach! We need to learn to see with the eyes of a child. A child looks at everything and is so wowed. I just marvel when I see kids. They look at me with such intensity while their momma barely notices me. I admit I feel more at ease to go eye to eye with a baby. This is the message of ayin.
The Image
Beneath the quiet stillness of the tree
flow life-giving waters.
The painting shows a tree with leaf/eyes and also a cut-away of the tree, revealing the lifeblood traveling inside the tree. This is truly the only living part of the tree. Ayin's lesson is to dig under the surface of our mundane reality and sense where we are, who we are and what force is pulling us. The limbs go here and there, to the right, to the left, but always up-- towards HaShem. The word for tree is aytz, beginning with ayin. The ayin derives from a symbol for eye, very much like the leaves of this tree. If you look at trees carefully, you will see that the way the branches are attached to the tree form ayin!
On an even deeper level, this tree tells us that the ultimate religious tradition has its roots in nature.
Ayin in a reading
Look beneath the surface of your experience and you will discern the truth.
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Avigayil Landsman,
Torah Scholar, Calligrapher, Lecturer, Teacher & Creator of the "Letters From Heaven" Deck
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Avigayil has been a serious student of Torah for the last ten years and has written many d'vrai Torah(Torah lectures). She is the creator of Letters from Heaven, a Jewish divination system that incorporates the mystical meanings of the Hebrew letters, her chiddushim (new insights into Torah) and their application to the challenges of daily life. Her LFH readings offer seekers of all persuasions spiritual direction in finding one's authentic voice.
Avigayil is a multi-media artist who is best-known for the beaded breastplate that adorns the Woodstock Jewish Congregation's Torah. She creates personalized ketubot, beeswax Shabbat candles, shiviti plaques and other judaica as well as secular art in Sculpey, paint, and shadow boxes that combine disparate objects such as feathers, beads and wood.
Her Judaica (beeswax Shabbat and havdallah candles, havdallah spice boxes, shiviti plaques) and calligraphy cards are available for purchase at the Woodstock Jewish Congregation's judaica shop, Miriam's Well and her home. She also does private commissions.
Avigayil has taught enrichment classes in calligraphy for the Woodstock Jewish Congregation's Hebrew school. She prepares children and adults for becoming Bat/bar-mitzvah with humor and deep wisdom that come from her own unique way of living through the lessons of Torah. She has also given workshops and lectures on the spiritual meaning of the Hebrew letters and Letters from Heaven at Omega and Mount St. Alphonsus.
"Avigayil Landsman's interpretations of the Hebrew letters are original, witty, steeped in scholarship, and above all a genuine opening to our own spiritual wisdom." Rachel Pollack, creator of Shining Tribe Tarot Deck
www.rachelpollack.com
Avigayil is available for art commissions and LFH readings in person or on the phone. She may be contacted by e-mail at:
Avigayil1@earthlink.net
Website:
www.jewish-wisdom
-and-art.4t.com
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