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Torah(s)

“26 generations after creation, the primordial Torah was given to the Jewish people as the Written Torah and the hidden wisdom of God becomes revealed. […] Prior to Sinai, it would have been possible to discover God’s wisdom [Torah] in the architecture of the universe but it still remained hidden." (David Ariel, Kabbalah, the Mystic Quest in Judaism)

The Torah is hypostatized as an organic entity, a living aspect of God. It is primordial wisdom, undifferentiated unity, the one great name of God. According to the Zohar, God and the Torah are one, for he and his Name are one. This is the primordial Torah or Torah Kedumah.

The Torah is the blueprint for creation, which existed in God’s mind before creation and contains the building blocks of creation. The undifferentiated unity is differentiated into the 22 Hebrew letters, which combine into names/words. The one Name differentiates into names, the one Word divides into words. These words and names are the “ideas” conceived in the mind of God prior to creation. These words are then uttered, thereby forming creation. Torah is Wisdom who "pervades and penetrates all things," and is thus immanent everywhere (Wisdom 7:24). According to legend, Adam, Noah and Abraham had the oral teachings of the Kabbalah to unlock the secrets of the Torah hidden in the architecture of the universe.

The Torah is a concrete written text made up of historical narratives and commandments. At the time of revelation, the Torah descended and manifested itself as (1) the written Torah, i.e. the irreplaceable five books of Moses, which has been meticulously copied by scribes through the generations and (2) the oral Torah, which was verbalized and memorized in an unbroken chain of transmission (and eventually written down in the Talmud). According to legend, God dictated the Torah to Moses in the day. It was during the night that God explained it to Moses. These explanations constitute the Oral Torah.
Concerning the written Torah, there are four types of biblical exegesis in rabbinic Judaism: the plain meaning of the text; the allegoric meaning; the midrashic meaning (i.e. “searching out” or developing the meaning of the text); and the mystical or secret meaning. Kabbalists are particularly interested in the Torah as meta-text in which even the smallest graphical representation (e.g. the apex of the letter yod) conceals an aspect of the divinity. Indeed, the Torah is like a code in which each letter and word has its own significance, spiritual energy and numerical equivalent. One Kabbalistic interpretation is that the Torah constitutes one long name of God.
Shimon ben Lakish taught that the Torah preceded the world by 2,000 years and was written in black fire upon white fire. The white spaces in the text are currently unreadable. However, when the Messianic era comes, God will unveil the white Torah. When we question the anomalies or violence in the text, we are occupying the white spaces where full understanding is absent.

Aleph Bet

Reality is textual and comprises 22 Hebrew letters. The letters are made up of other letters and the letters are also made up of others, and so on. When God appeared to Moses in the burning bush, Moses saw twenty-two fiery letters, which formed the mystical image of God.

Letter		Name	Meaning	Sound	Value
א		Aleph	an ox	A, Silent, glottal stop, hiatus. It is always silent at the end of a word	1
ב בּ	Without dagesh, it is ‘v’. With dagesh, it is ‘b’.	Vet, Bet	a house	V, B	2
ג	With a dagesh, it is pronounced ‘j’	Gimel	camel	G,Gh	3
ד		Dalet	a door	D,Dh	4
ה		Heh	a window	H	5
ו	Some say Vav, some say Waw. It often marks the location of a U or O.	Vav	a nail, hook	O,U,V	6
ז		Zayin	a sword	Z	7
ח		Chet	fence	Ch	8
ט		Tet	a serpent	T	9
י	Often marks location of vowels. When it is the first letter in a word, it is pronounced ‘y’. Otherwise, it is ‘ee’	Yod	a fist	I,Y, (v)	10
כ כּ ך	A dagesh makes it sound like a hard K. Without, it is more like Ch.	Khaf, Kaf	an open hand	K,Kh	20
ל		Lamed	a whip	L	30
מ ם		Mem	water	M	40
נ ן		Nun	a fish	N	50
ס		Samekh	a prop	S	60
ע	Transliterated as an apostrophe	Ayin	eye	Silent, or guttural sound or Ahh	70
פ פּ ף	Without dagesh, it is a ‘ph’ sound. With dagesh it is a hard ‘p’. When at the end of word, it is pronounced like ‘pay'	Pe, Fe	a mouth	Ph, p, pay	80
צ ץ		Tzaddi	a fish hook	Tz	90
ק		Qof	Back of head	Q	100
ר		Resh	head	R	200
שׂ, שׁ	With a dot on the left, it is ‘sin’; on the right it is ‘shin’.	Sin, Shin	Fire, tooth	S,Sh	300
ת תּ	Can produce a hard ‘t’ sound with or without dagesh, although without dagesh it is usually ‘th’. In trad Ashkenazi, Tav is an ‘s’ without the dagesh, and ‘t’ with the dagesh	Tav	cross	T,Th	400

There are four things to remember about each letter:

(1) the meaning of the letter e.g. Aleph means a champion or something elevated. Bet is a house. Gimel is a camel. Dalet is a door etc

(2) the shape of the letter (its graphic appearance). The shape of the letter is composed of other letters. And what it looks like is important.

(3) every letter has a numerical value

(4) the first time a letter appears in the Torah where that letter begins a root of the word, that word will teach me the meaning of the word

Hebrew language is very similar to chemical language. Every letter is like an atom.

Some examples...

1. Human being – Adam – אדם. When God created man he took an aleph, a dalet and a mem

Aleph is equal to one; Aleph is made up of two letters, two yods and a vav = 26. That is the same numerical value as YHWH. Aleph always has something to do with the elevated, the One. Aleph has no sound (you can’t pronounce it). If you spell Aleph backwards, it spells Pela, meaning “it’s a wonder.” i.e. something we can’t understand.

Moreover, Adam is made up of A- and –dam. A is the aleph (the image of God) and –dam means blood. Man is both spiritual and physical. As a masculine noun, adam means "man" as an individual and "mankind.” The noun adam is also the masculine form of the word adamah which means "ground" or "earth." It is related to the words adom (red), admoni (ruddy) and dam (blood).

2. The Hebrew word for “I” is Ani (אני). If the letters are rearranged, they spell the word Ain (אין), which means nothingness or the nullification of ego.

3. The name of God, YHWH...

Y – Yod – God engraved the letter Yod and that is where creation began. Yod = 10; Yod is made up of the vav (6) and the dalet (4). The vav (6) refers to the concealed world (the six dimensions of hyperspace). The dalet (4) refers to the revealed world (the three dimensions of space and one of time). There are ten sephirot. The Yod is like a seed that contains everything. Y is the “strong force”. Synthesis – mental attribute of wisdom

H - Heh – This is the breaking out of the dimensions in Y. H is the “weak force.” - Mental attribute is Binah or understanding

The above two (YH) are “higher”, esoteric. The two primary forces needed to create the world

The next two (WH) are “lower,” exoteric.

W is Vav. A hook that connects things together; draws down energy (like magnetic force of attraction).

The final H is broken off, is in exile. H represents kingdom/earth/gravity. We need to reunify the H with the rest of God’s name. By doing so we unify the four forces of Y, H, W, H. Teshuva will bring the H back from exile. The name of God, then, is a signification of a final event.

A legend quoted in Tree of Souls: the mythology of Judaism by Howard Schwartz

The primordial Torah was written with black fire on white fire. It was fire mixed with fire, cut from fire, given from fire. God peered into the fiery letters of that Torah and created the world. At last the time came for the Torah to be given to Moses at Mount Sinai. From the top of the mountain, Moses peered into the heavens, and there he had a vision in which he saw the letters burning in black fire on white. The first letters to take form were those of God’s Name, YHVH. Then the rest of the alphabet emerged. The letters danced, joining into hundreds of permutations of the names of God. Then the letters formed themselves into one long Name. This Name was none other than the letters of the Torah, for the entire Torah is a single, holy, mystical Name. There Moses read the Torah for the first time, and as he read each word, he heard the voice of God speaking it. Later Moses wrote everything down, exactly as he had heard it, and that is how the primordial Torah was transmitted to Israel.

Another legend quoted in Tree of Souls: the mythology of Judaism by Howard Schwartz:

Prior to the creation of the world, there were no animals, therefore there were no skins of parchment on which to write the Torah. How, then, was the Torah written? On the arm of God, with black fire on white fire. And God took the Torah and placed it before Him and gazed at it, and read it from beginning to end. And as He read those words, they came to pass.

Torah was the “first of his ancient works”

The primordial Torah was one of the seven things created before the creation of the world. Rabbi Akiva took the first word of Genesis not in the sense of "In the beginning," but in that of "By means of the beginning," and he taught that "beginning" designates Torah, since it is written of wisdom: "The Lord made me the beginning of His way." (Prov. 8:22)

“I was appointed before the world, before the start, before the earth's beginnings. When I was brought forth, there were no ocean depths, no springs brimming with water. I was brought forth before the hills, before the mountains had settled in place; he had not yet made the earth, the fields, or even the earth's first grains of dust. When he established the heavens, I was there. When he drew the horizon's circle on the deep, when he set the skies above in place, when the fountains of the deep poured forth, when he prescribed boundaries for the sea, so that its water would not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, I was with him as someone he could trust. For me, every day was pure delight, as I played in his presence all the time, playing everywhere on his earth, and delighting to be with humankind.” (Proverbs 8:22-31)