Excerpts from “Letters From God”
Pull up a chair…. Dive into some selections from different chapters and get a feel for “Letters from God.”
“Letters from God” has been called informative, inspiring, accessible and academic. You’ll find it entertaining and easy to read, written in an informal, colloquial style. Each section follows the next as an unfolding mystery story… What secrets of the universe does each letter hold?
I’m excited to share some excerpts from my upcoming book with you.
Introduction
The book opens with an Introduction exploring the letters of the Aleph Beit as the components that make up relationship… a relationship between God and His Creation.
“The Aleph Beit is unlike any other alphabet system.
Most languages use letters as visual representations of specific sounds, like English. Or they use designated symbols for specific concepts, like Egyptian hieroglyphs. They can also use hand shapes, body movements and facial expressions to convey ideas, like American Sign Language.
But the letters of the Aleph Beit are much more than this. In This World, where we perceive things from a limited four-dimensional (space and time) perspective, these letters appear as visual symbols on a page or as sounds hanging in the air, but in actuality, they are creations rooted in a dimension far beyond us... higher even than the angels.
The letters of the Aleph Beit are, in essence, the unique, archetypal energies through which God created our world.
God used these letters to speak our world into existence.
“Blessed is He who spoke, and the world came into being....”[1]
à “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”[2]
à “By the word of the Lord, the heavens were made, and by the breath of His mouth, all their host.”[3]
The articulated letters God spoke manifested into our finite universe as actual physical things. We see this clearly in the Hebrew language, where the root-words for “word,” “thing,” and “speech” all have the same root letters: ד-ב-ר. God’s spoken word became the thing itself.
The Aleph Beit is the spiritual core for the world we live in, and just as every physical thing (דבר davar) is built by specific atomic components, so too every word (דבר davar) is formed by specific Hebrew letters.
Atoms and Molecules—Letters and Words
[1] Daily morning prayer
[2] Bereishit 1:3
[3] Tehillim 33:6
Aleph
The meat and potatoes of the book are the letter chapters—one for each letter. Each chapter explores its letter based on the letter’s “Name,” its “Structure,” “its “Number,” and a section called “Looking Deeper,” which explores the ideas and concepts uncovered in the letter as they relate to other concepts in Torah, science and our own inner work.
In this third chapter, we dive into the actual letters, starting (of course), with the letter Aleph.
Here are some excerpts from the beginning of the Aleph chapter…
"Everything begins with Aleph—God’s first expression of Himself and His vision of Creation.
א אלף Aleph is about the Aluf HaOlam—Master of the World
Aleph—the first letter of the Aleph Beit—is about God—the Chief, Alufo shel Haolam. The essential two-letter root of א-ל-ף is א-ל, a generic term meaning “The Force... God.”[1] This root expands into the three-letter root of א-ל-ף )Aleph( and אלוף (Aluf)—meaning champion, lord, officer, chief.[2] Aluf, at its highest, refers to God—Master of the World—Aluf Haolam. Aleph represents our Creator and Lord. God is the first cause, the One and Only....
God’s title of א-ל-ו-ה-י-ם Elo-him starts with an Aleph....
God, as Elo-him wears the robe of the Judge and runs Creation with Divine justice. This reflects the great and powerful aspect of God who brings together as one all the energies and forces of the cosmos.[3] He rules the world through the laws of nature, the instinctive actions of His creations, and the didactic consequences of cause and effect. (The gematria of Elo-h-im is 86—which is numerically equivalent to hateva הטבע—"the nature” [as in, “the nature” of things]).
All God’s creations follow His rules (through instinct), except man. Man is different. Man was created in the image of God, and just as God has free will, so too does man. Man chooses between good and evil and right and wrong, and has the freedom to make mistakes, choose incorrectly, and do other than God’s will. Elokim legislates the consequences he’ll experience that will unfold from these poor choices, giving man the opportunity to learn, grow, and do better next time. Elokim rules through strict justice and natural law. These “natural” laws may disguise His hand, but it’s always God directing everything that happens....
Man as the Reflection of Elokim
Aleph is about our own Godliness, and it begins many words that embody this same divine quality of personal choice and mastery in people as well. Many words describing man, created in the image of God and master of his own personal world, begin with an Aleph:
· איש and אשה (ish man and isha woman)
· אנוש (enosh human being)
· אבא and אמא (Aba father and Ima mother)
· אדם (Adam the first man created)....
In addition, most personal pronouns start with Aleph:
· “I” (anochi אנכי or ani אני)
· “you” (ata אתה)
· “you-all” (the plural of you) (atem/n אתם/ן)
· “us” (anachnu אנחנו)
These pronouns reflect and honor the innate ability of each human being for self-mastery. When I address “you” and “us” with the Aleph, I am recognizing the Aleph—the prince—within you....
[1] Bereishit 31:29
[2] Rabbi Michael L Munk. 1997. The Wisdom in the Hebrew Alphabet 44
[3] Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. 2005. The Hirsch Chumash, Bereishit 1:1