The Sefer

There's a cute, and false, urban legend that Eskimos have over twenty words for snow.
While, as it happens, many of the words describe other forms of precipitation (for which
we, too, have other words), the idea behind the legend is still useful: the more familiar we
are with something, the closer we get to it, and the finer the distinctions we are able to
perceive. What's more, if we suppose a hypothetical Inuit who really does have twenty
words for snow, the experience she has of "snow" is actually quite different from ours.
She perceives changes in kind where we only note gradations of intensity. She
experiences several phenomena where we might only experience one or two.
Language shapes our experience of reality. Imagine an emotional life without concepts
such as despair, elation, and ambivalence similar to, but notably different from mere
sadness, joy, and uncertainty. As our emotional vocabulary grows to include, say,
ennui, schadenfreude, "processing" so too does our attentiveness to the detail of our
emotional lives. This, indeed, is one of the fruits of theosophical Kabbalah: that its
intricate emotional and intellectual symbolism provides a rich texture for introspection.
The Sefer Yetzirah, the ancient Book of Formation which provides the foundation-text for
prophetic Kabbalah, takes this idea to an ontological extreme. For the Sefer Yetzirah,
language is the very stuff of creation, and grammar the way in which it is formed. As I
wrote on the last page, a rose by any other name would not be a rose because the
essence of rose is R-O-S-E. (Of course, the Sefer Yetzirah works with Hebrew, but you
get the idea.)
In a way, all the Sefer Yetzirah is doing is reading the book of Genesis very closely.
Usually, when we read the creation account at the beginning of the Torah, we take it
somewhat for granted. God says "Let there be light," and there's light. The Sefer Yetzirah,
however, hones in on the "says." It observes that God's "speaking" is the way in which
God creates. We are not completely sure, but many scholars believe the magic word
"Abracadabra" derives from the Aramaic Avrah KaDabra, meaning "I create as I speak."
If this etymology is correct, Abracadabra really is a magic word; it is a performative
speech act, just like the ten utterances of creation in the Genesis account.
Finally, for the Sefer Yetzirah, all of the letters and the ten sefirot probably not having
the same meanings as in later theosophical Kabbalah, but rather meaning something
closer to numbers have properties that correspond to elements, aspects of the universe,
astrological signs, parts of the body, times and seasons. For example,
He made the letter Bet king over wisdom, bound a crown to it, permuted one with
another, and with them He formed Saturn in the universe, the Sabbath in the year,
and the mouth in the Soul, male and female.
(Sefer Yetzirah 4:5, Aryeh Kaplan trans.)
The Sefer Yetzirah is a map of all of creation or better yet, a chart. There are no
coincidences, but rather correspondences. Aleph, mem, and shin the three "mother
letters" correspond to "breath, water, and fire," which together with Earth, out of
which Genesis says human beings (human: adam, earth: adamah) are created, form life.
The seven Hebrew letters which have different sounds depending on context parallel the

six ribs plus the heart.

We could spend many hours probing the mysteries of this ancient book not least, who
wrote it and when; we know it dates back to the third century C.E., making it one of the
oldest books of its type in the world; then again, we're not really even sure what type of
book it is. Hopefully, pages will be added to this site in the future which will do exactly
that. For our purposes, though, the Sefer Yetzirah is most important as a foundation text.
It shows that language creates, and that God works by permuting letters one with another.
Implicitly, so can we.
In the prophetic Kabbalah, the permuting of letters according to the Sefer Yetzirah and
other texts is one of the core meditative practices.
How did He permute them? Two stones build two houses, three stones build six
houses,
four stones build 24 houses, five stones build 120 houses, six stones build 720
houses,
seven stones build 5040 houses. From there on go out and calculate that which the
mouth cannot speak and the ear cannot hear.
(Sefer Yetzirah 4:4, Aryeh Kaplan trans.)
What is this text talking about? It looks opaque at first, but take a moment to see if you
can puzzle it out. Mathematicians will see it instantly: it's the calculation of permutations,
just like in ordinary math, with factorials. 2 factorial (2!) = 2 x 1 = 2. 3! = 3 x 2 x 1 = 6.
4! = 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 24. And so on. If you have three letters, let's use A, M, and S (really it
should be Sh, for the shin sound, but I'll keep it simple for here), they can form six
permutations: AMS, ASM, MAS, MSA, SAM, and SMA. So, with the seemingly small
set of twenty two letters, you get a very large number of permutations: 1.12400073
1021 of them in fact. ("The mouth cannot speak and the ear cannot hear.")
I sometimes analogize the letters, in this form of Kabbalah, to the elements of the
periodic table another very small set of core elements from which the entire universe
is created by combination and permutation. That is exactly how they function in the
Kabbalah, except for the fact that language, unlike hydrogen and carbon, can be observed
directly, manipulated, and used in fascinating meditation practices to boggle the mind and
open ourselves up to our deepest Selves.