Sefer Yetzirah, the Cube of Space, and the Emergence of ... - Maqom

Thus, we may conclude that the ten constraining sefirot also provide a balance betweenmercy and justice, or, to express it another way, between expansion (growth) andcontraction (regulation).The next verse of Sefer Yetzirah that we’ll look at explicitly states that the world wascreated with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet.“Twenty-two Foundation letters: He engraved them, He carved them, Hepermuted them, He weighed them, He transformed them, and with them, Hedepicted all that was formed and all that would be formed.” (Sefer Yetzirah 2:2)The statement that the world was created with the twenty-two letters does not have to betaken as some sort of ancient Jewish fairy tale. Instead, there is indeed a kernel of truthto it. For example, this verse says, on the one hand, that reality is formed fromirreducible component parts, and this is not unlike saying that the universe is composedof protons, electrons, and neutrons, or that a counting number such as 6 may be written asthe product of the irreducible primes 2 and 3. Furthermore, we may also interpret thisverse on a more personal, psychological level. Mentally, we might say that our world isindeed created from words, and as we pointed out previously, the Herbew devar meansboth word and thing. It is through words and their interactions with one another that wecreate our particular worldview and the unique reality that each of us sees. Furthermore,the constituent parts of these words are nothing more than the letters of the alphabet.Thus, if words create our description of reality and if letters create words, then it is no11