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Creating Bridges: Spirituality & Philosophy:
Kabbalah: "Letters from Heaven:"
Spiritual Guidance from the Hebrew Alphabet
Hey: The Power
of Being
Song to Hey
The power of Your being
Is the Experience (havayah)
Here I am! (Hineyni)
For all that You were, (haya)
Are and will be (hoveh, yi-hiye)
I am
too
by Avigayil Landsman
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Dedication
I have never experienced the saying, "the eyes are the windows of the soul" more strongly than when my precious cat died. I could see that as her tumor grew the power of her being was slowly draining out of her. I knew that I would one day have to make the heart-rending decision to put her to sleep. When the time came, I kept my face close to hers as the vet shaved her little arm and gave her the injection to end her life. One moment she was there and then, she was gone. Her eyes remained opened, but it was clear that her soul was gone. Those sapphire eyes had lost their lively glow; the divine spark was gone. I dedicate this month's column to my angel with fur, Caterina, who graced my family with love and light through the power of her being.
The Divine "High Five"
Last month, we examined dalet whose numerical value is four. Metaphysically, four is the number of physical existence, but there is a fifth element which exists on a different plane from the ordinary world, that of Spirit. Hey's numerical value is five. Our five senses make us aware of the world. The energy of dalet indicates where we are in the world; the energy of hey allows us to experience the world. The five fingers on each hand allow us to reach out and touch it. The hand is the "tool" of our actions and how our spirituality takes form.
The familiar talisman, the hamsa, recognized throughout the Middle East comes from the Hebrew word chamaysh, meaning five. When you look at two hands in a "high five" the image you will see of the combined hands is two thumbs curved outwards and the difference of finger height is leveled, creating a symmetrical design; the hamsa is a divine high five! This image evokes "God's mighty hand" that we read about over and over again in the Torah in reference to the exodus from Egypt. This mighty hand redeemed the Hebrews from slavery to Pharaoh in order to become servants of a higher power.
It is interesting that the word for both work and worship are the same in Hebrew: avodah. Part of a Jew's spiritual work is to follow the mitzvot, Hebrew for good deeds. Mitzvot whether done in service to God or to people connects us to the best in ourselves. The image of the hamsa reminds us that our actions are fueled by a higher power. When we reach out to another, we touch the Infinite.
Evidence of God's presence is revealed through our mitzvot. Further mystical "proof" can be made through using the atbash cipher. The atbash cipher is a mystical code where each letter of a word is replaced by the letter from the other half of the aleph-beit. An example would be to replace aleph, the first letter with tav, the last letter of the aleph-beit. The word, "atbash" itself illustrates how this system works. Aleph and tav are the first and twenty-second letters of the aleph-beit and beit and shin are the second and twenty-first letters of the aleph-beit. The first letter of mitzvah is mem, so it is replaced with yud; the tzadi is replaced with hay and then we leave the remaining letters alone because they are vav and hey. Put them together and you've got: yud-hey-vav-hey. We learn from this that God's essence, the upper yud and hey are planted within our well-intentioned actions-mitzvot.
Homiletically speaking…
As I mentioned earlier, the energy of the letter hey is the power of being and has the numerical value of five. Look closely at hey and you will see that it is constructed with a dalet and an inverted yud (letter of divine spark) to the left. Care must be made when making the hey to leave enough room between the inverted yud and the horizontal line so it will not be confused with the letter chet (you'll read about chet in three months). There needs to be enough room between the vertical and horizontal lines for an eye to be inscribed because God is looking at us through the window of hey.
The hey in the Torah or in the holy name serves as a reminder that God is looking at us. Also, hey reminds us to look for the Infinite in each other's eyes. Look deeply into your friend's eyes and you'll see the divine spark. Notice how you feel when someone really looks deeply into your eyes when he says something. I find a huge difference between a casual hello and a heartfelt connection when my friend looks deeply into my eyes. There's hello and hello, you know? The space also reminds us to breathe out when we pronounce the letter. Hey. Hinayni! Here I am! I am breathing in breath divine and breathing out with exaltation and praise-Halleylujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah, Praised God! That which is earthbound rises up to You, Ya! Ya is the aspect of divine expansiveness. As Robert Esformes said, "I bow with humility and the Divine enters." The lesson we learn from combining the dalet (physicality) with the yud (the divine spark) is to make our lives holy, sanctifying everything we do. Hey reminds us we experience the power of our being when we invite God into every moment of our lives.
The inverted yud indicates that another level exists beyond the two-dimensional surface of the parchment on which it is written. (the Torah scroll that is read in synagogue is written on parchment). The dalet describes two dimensions and the yud indicates that there is another dimension beyond the parchment. The horizontal line indicates thoughts; the vertical line, words and the inverted yud indicates action. Through our words and actions, we make our thoughts known to others. The third line is separate because action has a more separate existence from thought and speech. (Robert Harrilick, The Inner Meaning of the Hebrew Letters, page 78)
The letter hey is a holy letter. Hey is a window through which we perceive God. This holy letter serves as a particle. Before Creation, there were no distinctions. All was chaotic and void. Distinctions had to be made! The waters were separated, light was created, land emerged from the depths of the water, and animals and vegetation were created; then humanity. The first human had the job of naming things. God created the world through words ("Let there be…") and Adam named them to further distinguish them, to give them identity. The letter hay put in front of a word distinguishes the object from others. The cat, the porch, etc. Not just any cat, the cat over there. Hey is added to a name to indicate that this person has moved closer to God. Avram became Avraham. Avraham was the first person to believe in one God. The hey in his name was the window through which he glimpsed the Eternal. God needed Avram as much as Avram needed God, however. More on that later.
The window of God
Rashi, an 11th C French Torah commentator, wrote that the form of hey teaches us that we may fall through the bottom but that God keeps the window open for our return We can't come back the way we left because we need help in overcoming the "evil inclination" (greed rather than for the refinement of one's soul). Therefore, he is aided with an additional opening. Dalet is a door that we enter with our body; hey is the window that we enter with our eyes. Think of how enthralling the sunrise is from one's window, how our windows open up the limiting enclosure inside our homes. Metaphorically, our home is our body, the window our eyes. This is the essence of hey.
The Holy Name
Hey appears twice in the four letter name of God (yud-hey-vav-hey). Although Hebrew is written on the horizontal, the holy name is written vertically when used in meditation. If you consider the holy name anthropomorphically, the yud is the head, the upper hey is the shoulders and arms, the vav is the spine and the lower hey is the hip and legs. In this way, we understand that we are made in the divine image. You can do a meditation of visualizing each letter for the corresponding body part. Imagine the Infinite Source of Creation flowing through the letters into your body, bringing healing to every cell. The upper hey and lower hey represent the upper and lower waters of creation, respectively. The upper waters of inspiration (first- "upper" hey) are infused with the Infinite Source of Creation(yud). This energy is connected through the pipeline of the vav to the lower waters of our creativity (lower hey). This analogy illustrates how we are in partnership with the supernal being.
The lower waters, the lower hey reflect the upper waters of the upper hey. The lower hey completes the Holy name. We complete our relationship with God by bringing God's light into physical form through action. The horizontal line of hey represents thought; the vertical represents words and the inverted yud represents action. Creation is inspiration made physical. How we decide to shape our actions either sanctifies the Holy Name or desecrates it. The lower hey is the receptive force; we are the containers or vessels for the supernal light. This schema defines our authentic selves. We often wonder if we are doing something for the "right" reasons. The guideline for me is to sense that my actions come from an authentically loving place. What is authentic love? This is hard to define. For me, authentic love is given free of judgment, manipulation and expectation.
Hey teaches us to go beyond ourselves. When we extend our hand to another, when we look deeply into the soul of our brothers and sisters, we touch the Infinite. In Charlie Roth's words, "love is all give." This is the true nature of the sephira of chesed-overflowing love. It is overflowing, not overwhelming; love experienced as overwhelming indicates a manipulative edge. This is finite. Do you ever wonder what a person is wanting in return for the favor he or she is doing for you? Are you helping someone out with the hope that you will get something in return? This is the difference between Infinite and finite.
An example of a truly loving and generous person in the Torah is Avraham. When he opened the window to God through his loving actions God added the letter hey to Avram and his name became Avraham. He answered with the fullness of his being. Answering God's call indicated that God was all he heard, all he answered to. The midrash states that Avraham's tent was opened on all four sides so that guests coming from any direction would know that they were welcomed. The completion of God's name through our authentically loving action is the sanctification of the Holy name. The expression, "shem shemayim", "for the sake of heaven" means that we are acting on behalf of this sanctification. In this way, everything we do, whether it be attending a religious service, making love or doing the laundry becomes a sanctification of the Holy Name.
To be or not to be, what an Experience!
When God first speaks to Moses, telling him to demand that Pharaoh set the Hebrew slaves free, Moses asks, "Who should I say sent me?" God answers(in a hoarse, Brooklyn accent), "Tell 'em Murray sentcha!" No, actually, God says, "I am becoming what I am becoming," Yihiye, she yihiye. The tetragrammaton's letters can be rearranged to spell several words of being: "is", "was", "will be" as well as "experience." What was, what is and what will be ultimately boils down to experiencing what was, is and will be. We often label experiences as good or bad, but when we are really connected, without blame or expectation we simply experience the EXPERIENCE (aka the ever-present NOW).
Now we can fully comprehend the depth of meaning of inserting the hey into Avram. And, by the way, talk about an experience, Avraham's wife, Sarai became Sarah. She had a baby at the age of ninety! Now, that's what I call an experience! You have to watch out what you're doing, inserting those heys into old women!
God, the First Comedian
Yes, you read it here first! God was the first comedian. The reason for creating humor is varied. One reason for creating humor is to help us through tough times. When my life throws me a few curve balls, I either try to make a joke or say, "There's got to be a joke in this somewhere. I can't find it right now, but at some point, I know I will look back and find the humor in this." Take for instance, the Dark Ages. Lots of people dying of the Plague, dead people lining the streets. Not so funny, right? But, a few centuries later, Monty Python made the movie, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and lots of people laughed. And for all the reverence we have for the serious content of the Torah there are parts of the Torah that are funny. Let me tell you, there's plenty of things God created that didn't make it into the Torah. Like the platypus. Now, there's cause for a chuckle. I mean, what was God thinking!
Perhaps the platypus was created before there was light, so God didn't see what God was doing. Some Torah scholars believe that, but my own personal theory is that Creation was such serious business that God had to come up with something a little interesting. In non-politically correct language, read: weird, funny-looking, someone only your mother could love, miskeit. This was before the creation of human beings, so there wasn't even the thought of Milton Berle, Jimmy Durante or Groucho Marx. (My apologies to any platypuses reading this column. I used to write about the moose, but after being sued by the Civil Liberties Union (you didn't know there's a special moose division, did you? I found out, the hard way), I got wise). My theory is thus: hey is the first letter in the onomatopoeia, ha! The vav in the tetragrammaton connects two things, in this case, hey, which stands for "ha". So, mathematically speaking, ha plus ha equals ha-ha and since God is also known as the Infinite, we can extend this formula to ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Ha-HA!
Laughter was created because of all the experiences that we can have, the fullness of our being is experienced in humor. Humor transmutes pain through combining it with the awareness of the ridiculous and absurd. It is in my opinion, that humor is the most powerful way to learn. How much of your calculus do you remember in proportion to the jokes your fellow students told in class? Do you know that you cannot contract illness while laughing, and you cannot die while laughing? Do you know what the High Priest did when he entered the Holy of Holies of the ancient Temple of Jerusalem once a year? He laughed.
Hey in a reading
When hey comes up in a reading, consider your actions; are they done "shem shemayim," "for the sake of heaven"? Are you connecting with the Infinite in yourself and with others? Are you, like AvraHam, ready to say, "Hinayni," "here I am" with all of your being? Hey is also reminding you that laughter is holy; so when you say "hinayni," don't get all dour on the Cosmic Comedian! Ha-ha-ha-ha!
Get the picture?
The image for hey shows a hamsa, symbol of our partnership with the Holy One. We see a fertility goddess inside the hamsa with lush greenery growing around her, reminding us that our creativity expresses the power of our being. Yud-hey-vav-hey is written on the middle finger, the radiating red letters shower energy around the goddess, enlivening her, the visual metaphor of being all "fired up." The brilliant flames around the hamsa show the dynamic power of the divine creative force.
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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
www.jewish-wisdom
-and-art.4t.com |
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