(Letters of God) אתיות של השם

ברוך אתה ה', אלקינו מלך העולם,

שהכל נהיה בדברו

 Blessed are you, lord our God, king of the universe,

that everything should be according to (in) his word.

All of the food blessings are about creation. ("...who creates the fruit of the ground/tree/vine." "...who creates the kinds of sustenance." "...who brings forth bread from the Earth.")  They use creation words like בורא (creates) and המוציא (brings forth).  Without an explicit creation word, this blessing seems, at face value, to not be about creation, but actually it is the most about creation because God created the world by speaking, so the whole world is according to his word, as the blessing says.

It seems strange to say that the world is according to his word (singular) because the world was created with more than one word.  So, what is his word?  What's in this word-singular?

There is an interpretation method that my hevruta taught me where you spell out each of the letters in a word phonetically. So, for example, ד (which is pronounced dalet) becomes דלית (dalet).  The letter ב is spelled out as בית.  A ר becomes ריש. And ו is ואו.*  And then you rearrange those letters to make up a new word, which can help you understand more about the original word.  (See picture to the right.)  Doing this with דברו (his word) yields אתיות של יי (letters of God), so שהכל נהיה בדברו becomes שהכל נהיה באתיות של יי.  The world is full of the words (and letters) that were used to create it.

RaeAn Design's Parshat B'reishit (1:1-6:8)

The picture I have in my head of the world is like micrography.  There was a picture in my parents' bedroom when I was growing up of a scene from מגילת אסתר (The Book of Ester) of מרדכי (Mordecai) outside the palace gates, saving the king's life, and the entire picture was made up of the letters of the מגילה (megilah/Book).  That's what the world looks like, full of and shaped by the letters that called it into existence.**


So, what is this blessing about?  How is it the most about creation of all the food blessings?  It is about life.  The water that is required for all living things, the living things (fish, birds, animals), the things living things have created (honey, eggs, milk), and what we have created (reshaped) in the world (e.g., orange juice out of oranges).  The blessings that start with בורא have a food "as is."  The blessing that starts with המוציא is about wheat which has been reshaped into bread.  It echoes of God's creation but is a stepped removed.  This blessing (שהכל) follows the progression.  It reminds us that God created the world (although you have to look deeper to see it), but it is also about the ongoing act of creation that goes on even now.

RaeAn Design's micrography of B'reishit/Genesis (1-32)

The blessing says the world is full of the letters God spoke.  He is the king of the world and created even the water that has been here since before life, and this life that has evolved, and this thing the life has made, and this thing that I reshaped/created in my own way. Even this, he created.  And you can tell because it is full of his letters, the blessing says.  Just as you can tell one person's handwriting from another's, God's word/letters are recognizable in the world. 

Finding those letters, understanding how they shape the world, and working backwards from our understanding of the world to learn more about the letters to inform our understanding of other things in the world is the purpose of this blog.  

* Spellings were taken from the spellings at the beginning of Miriam's tikkun (תיקון קוראים, published by מישמור in Bnei Brak and NYC in 1998, printed in Israel) which also goes into depth about the shapes of the letters and the various ways they are written by a סופר (scribe).  It seemed quite thorough, and much of what it said made sense, so while the spellings were strange, we went with them. 

**We have this tendency, being created in the image of God, to echo God's creative abilities.  I think this is why we have elements and DNA nucleotides all being named with single letters.  The way we name the things we have found that shape the world's properties and form who we are is with chains of single letters, combining and recombining like words that tell us about the world.