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Creating Bridges: Spirituality & Philosophy:
Kabbalah: "Letters from Heaven:"
Spiritual Guidance from the Hebrew Alphabet
Aleph
Silence of Aleph gives birth To sound
Uncontained energy Unifying all Through light and love
by Avigayil Landsman
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In my first article, I explained various ways to explore the mystical meanings of the Hebrew letters and I wrote a little bit about my divination deck, Letters from Heaven which applies these meanings to
our everyday lives. Today I will talk about aleph, the first letter of the Aleph-beit (Hebrew alphabet), using some of the methods I described in the last article and will give you ways of applying the wisdom of aleph to your life and in a Letters from Heaven reading.
The Golden Dawn system of Tarot pairs aleph with the Fool card. The Tarot is often called "The Fool's Journey" because the Fool represents the soul and the cards following the Fool represent various aspects of the soul's transformation in life. Similarly, the letters of the aleph-beit are aspects of aleph. Each letter can represent a spiritual practice. I believe that whether we involve ourselves in charity (tzedakkah) or pursuing peace (shalom) we feel the presence of aleph's ahava, love at its core. This is just one way to sense aleph in the rest of the letters.
Aleph is the primal energy of creation. Think of a dancer with top hat and cane. See him holding his hat up, pointing his cane downwards and kicking his leg out to form a diagonal. This is the pulsating, unbridled energy of aleph! We all posses the energy of aleph and when we allow it to imbue the actions we are meant to do, we are in the groove. When we try to control or repress this energy, we stifle our creative flow and wind up sick in body or mind. There is no stopping aleph. Aleph energy permeates all the other letters. Herein lies the power of Aleph, the spinning letter, unifier of all: good and bad; divine and corporeal; hidden and revealed. When your life is in the proverbial spin cycle, aleph invites you into the silence where the voice of the Divine is heard.
The aleph is formed by connecting the diagonal vav with two yuds which illustrates the point that unity is bringing together disparate entities. The mirrored yuds suggest two hands (yud is the first letter in the word yad, meaning hand). The hand of HaShem (a name used for God, literally "The Name") and the hand of humankind are reaching towards each other. HaShem reaches down to pull us up when we reach towards HaShem for guidance. When I taught a group of small Hebrew school children to make this point about the letter aleph, I said that although they were each unique individuals, they were united in the effort of learning in one group.
The sound of aleph is silence. The sound you hear before you speak is the sound of aleph. Aleph precedes the letter beit, the letter of creation, as in Bereishit, "in the beginning," because creation came from this strong, potent silence. The remaining letters of the aleph-beit are born of the silence of aleph. The next three letters: beit, gimmel, dalet, spell the Hebrew word for clothes, begged. The teaching we get from this is that the special spiritual energy of the letter aleph is clothed by the aleph-beit. All other letters are aspects of aleph.
There is much to be said of the power of silence. In music, the power of the melody often comes not from the sounded notes but the silence in between. During Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, it is not only the blast of the shofar that inspires awe in us but the silence before and after.
In the first verse in Genesis: 1:1"Bara Elohim et ha shamayim v'et ha'aretz," "In the beginning of creating, God created the heavens and the earth" indicates that God brought about Creation through the aleph-beit. The word "et", spelled aleph, tav, has no English equivalent. Grammatically, it is a word indicating something. So why is this seemingly extraneous non-word present in the first sentence of the Torah? Every word has a huge importance in revealing the meaning in the Torah. Et is spelled with the first and last letter of the aleph-beit. If you change the vowel in this word, it spells "ot", letter. If read with this word, the Torah would say that God created the letter; all the letters from aleph to tav were involved in this great work. Every word for every thing in creation can be formed by some combination of the twenty-two letters.
Aleph is the letter of firsts: the first letter of the aleph-beit as well as the word echad, one. Or, light unifies all creation since light shines equally on everything. Adam, the first man, Avraham, the first person to believe in one God begins with the letter aleph. The aleph is very important in the name Adam because without the aleph in his name, he would be reduced to dam, blood. If you add the letter hay to Adam, you get adamah, earth, the substance from which God created Adam. As we will read later, hay is also a holy letter. A student observed that although Adam has one holy letter added to blood, dam, adamah has two holy letters. Why? After thinking about it for a moment I answered that before man, there was earth and although God created man, God created the earth first and it is the earth that sustains all life, with the rivers acting as the lifeblood of the planet, just like a mother, ima, which also begins with aleph, sustains the life of her child through her living water, milk.
The central prayer of Judaism declares this divine unity: "Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohaynu, Adonai Echad." "Listen Israel, the Eternal your God, the Eternal is One." It is a call to all Jews, Yisrael, literally, "God wrestlers" that all paths lead to a union, echad. Yisrael is the name of the state in the Middle East; the name used to identify all Jews worldwide and is also the name that God gave to Jacob after his night of wrestling. Yaakov, Jacob literally means "Heel", referring to holding on to his brother, Essau's heel when they were born, perhaps to suggest that Yaakov was going to grab Essau's birthright. This quality of grabbing onto his brother is a metaphor of Jacob's inclination to be self-centered. Eventually, this selfishness was challenged by God (most sources say he wrestled with an angel)-- he wrestled with his yetzar hara, his ego and became Yisrael, "God wrestler." I believe that all people who do the inner work are Israel, God wrestlers.
Avraham Avinu, Abraham our father is so named because his was the journey of faith in the Ultimate Wonder; he ventured out of his father's land (which represents, according to the Hassidic masters) the ego, the known, established way of life into new territory. He was willing to step into the unknown, the void. The not knowing was, in fact, the impetus for him to go forth. A name of a parasha(section) in the Torah, Lech Lecha, "Go forth!" literally means, "go to yourself:" go into your inner truth to find your authentic voice where you can live fully. Avraham was able to communicate with the stars ("you will be as numerous as the stars in the sky" (Genesis 15:5) that held the light of all of his children who were yet to be: light without form. His actions were based on faith. Avraham took his first step into the unknown adventure with the promise from the Infinite. And it is in his faithful steps we fear and yet must dare to go, knowing that the souls of our unborn heirs also live in the light of the stars.
Avraham stepping out, filled with the wonder of the stars is my Biblical interpretation of the Fool card in Tarot. The Fool is given no number. The Fool card is given the zero, a circle. The letter aleph's shape suggests spokes of an eternally spinning wheel, the wheel of life: from heaven to earth, from generation to generation, from spirit to formation. Like the color white, it contains all yet is nothing in itself.
In my first article, one of the methods I mentioned of exploring the mystical meanings of the letters was gematria. Gematria gives each letter a numerical value. One then adds up the numerical value of a word and compares another word with the same gematria to find a deeper meaning of the word. Aleph, as I have mentioned, has the numerical value of one; however, I use gematria in another way by adding up the numerical values of each of the letters that forms another letter. Aleph is one letter that is made up of other letters. Other letters that are made up of one or more letters include: hay, lamed, mem, tzadi, pay and shin. Aleph is made up of vav, which has a value of six and two yuds, which each have a value of ten. The gematria of these three letters is twenty-six, the same gematria as the tetragrammaton(the unpronounceable name of God, spelled yud, hay, vav, hay) which designates aleph as a holy letter, befitting not only the first letter but also the first letter of many names for the divine: elohim, adonai, el.
The form of aleph suggests the saying, as above, so below. The diagonal vav connects the upper realm of heaven with the lower realm of earth; the spiritual with the material. The yud on the bottom left is a mirror image of the yud on the top right. The energy generated from those opposing forces creates the unbounded energy of aleph. This refers to the belief that when we do a mitzvah here on earth an angel is born in heaven.
Another lesson from aleph is paradox, another kind of mirroring. Often, we identify pleasant and unpleasant life experience in a polarized way. When things are going well, we sense that God has blessed us. Then disaster strikes and we say, "where is God now that I really need Him?" We perceive that God has left us. It's really that we have forgotten or lost our connection with God. God is both revealed and hidden simultaneously. In order for the world to be created, God needed to pull back, yet everything in creation is imbued with God. "God is both hands of the aleph, hiding from the universe in order to create it and hiding within the universe in order to sustain it."(The Path of Blessing, Marcia Prager, p111)
Ani, meaning "I" begins with the letter aleph. Ani is one person. If you rearrange the letters of ani-- aleph, nun, yud you get the word ayn, which means nothing. Ayn sof, a name for God literally means without end. There is nothing beyond the One supernal force of the Universe. The plural of ani is anashim, people. There are many I's that make up the "we" of people. We, the People, a united group declaring independence! We, who live on this precious earth, arezt which also begins with aleph. The message of aleph is written on the back of all US quarters: e plurabis unum: "From the many we are one."
The word for light, or begins with aleph. Light shines on everything equally; it unifies. We also contain an inner light that is covered by the many masks we wear. These masks were created as psychological armor to protect our vulnerability. As children, our zone of safety was made smaller each time we were hurt. We lived in fear of being called names, of being hit, etc. As we grew up, we had another layer of hurt put on us when we were told that we weren't allowed to be afraid. The truth is, that even as "responsible adults" we often feel afraid, but are more afraid to reveal our deep-seated fear than the fear itself. So, instead of saying how afraid we are, we posture ourselves as bigger than we are. Some hoard material wealth as an outward sign of strength; some may judge others for not being as smart, capable, etc. as they are. These are all masks. We may keep company with someone we aren't happy with because we are too afraid of being alone. But what is this loneliness we are so afraid of? It's not as much about being isolated, with no company, than it is to be out of touch with that wonderful light that lies buried within us. When we are connected with this radiant, inner light, our highest, creative self, we find a serenity and love that obliterates loneliness. This light exists in everyone, but our masks sadly hide it. We spend a lifetime peeling off our many masks to find that light.
Just as aleph speaks of creation mirroring divinity, I discovered that dodi, the word for friend or beloved is a mirror of the Holy name. The Holy name is spelled yud hay vav hay and dodi is spelled dalet, vav, dalet yud which is a reversal of the Holy name except for the dalet and hay. Dalet and hay's numerical value are four and five respectively, four representing physicality and five being the number of experience. In Talmud, it is written that when two friends study Torah together that the Shekinah, or indwelling presence of God visits them. It is our beloved friend who brings us closer to knowing divinity, so it is fitting for dodi and the Holy name to be mirror images of each other. The month of Elul which precedes the Jewish new year is an acronym of the line from Song of Songs, "Ani l'dodi v'dodi li," "I am for my beloved and my beloved is for me" also suggesting reciprocity.
If you pick the aleph card in a reading, you might see that it ushers in a time of new projects, of going for it with gusto. The new project is significant in terms of it being potentially long term as the spelling of aleph with different vowels is also elef which means 1000's and often used in conjunction with generations. It could also indicate that there's a lot of energy behind it. Ari, the Lion, which begins with aleph, represents unbounded energy. The lion is the spiritual essence of all wild animals. Think of wild animals; is there anything more unbounded on this earth? Lions are golden as well, which is the light of holiness. I once had a vision of the lion with the letter aleph superimposed over its head, the top yud being his ear, the top of the diagonal vav the other ear, the bottom part of the vav his snout and the lower yud his neck.
I recently had a wonderful aleph experience. Every morning for the past seven years, I have made myself a spirulina shake in my blender that consisted of: apple juice, flax seeds, spirulina and a banana. I put all the ingredients into the blender before turning it on and as the blender spun, the spirulina mixed in, but some of it clumped up around the edges of the container. One morning I decided to look into the mixing beverage and aim the powdered greens directly into the center to avoid losing any of the precious powder. I saw that the center of the mixture was empty; the twirling four blades looked like a dancing aleph. "There's an aleph in my blender!" I exclaimed. When I poured the powder into the center, it instantly mixed into the drink with no remaining clumps around the edges of the container. This is what it is to live with strong kavanna, I thought. When our mind is freed of distracting thoughts and we are fully present and aware of God, we are fully "mixed into" a unifying harmony with no messy residue! There is no "you" and "me", there is only the ONE.
May we be blessed with the unbounded, loving energy of aleph, bringing the disparate aspects of each other and ourselves in unity to see the light of the Divine!
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Avigayil Landsman,
Torah Scholar, Caligrapher, 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:
jewishwisdomandart@
hotmail.com |
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