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

To retranslate the word belimah in Job as “restraint” is particularly appropriate since theverses that follow all have to do with putting limits upon the elements of nature.“He binds up the waters in his thick clouds; and the cloud is not torn under them.He closes in the face of his throne, and spreads his cloud upon it. He hassurrounded the waters with bounds, at the boundary between light and darkness.”(Job 26:8-10)Consequently, a better way to translate the second verse of the Sefer Yetzirah may be,“Ten sefirot of restraint and 22 foundation letters: three mothers, seven doublesand twelve plain.” (Sefer Yetzirah 1:2)If we now look at the gematria of belimah, we find some patterns that are very interesting.On the one hand, the numerical value of bet-lamed-yud-mem-hey is 87, and this is thenumerical value of the word ulhavdil (vav-lamed-hey-bet-dalet-yud-lamed) that is foundin Genesis 1:18 and which means “and to divide.”Thus, just as putting restraints uponthe extents of different portions of nature is an essential part of the creative process, soalso is the division of oneness into various components. Furthermore, a puzzle that theancient rabbis pondered was that at the end of the second day of creation God did not say,“It is good,” as he does at the conclusion of the other days. One of the reasons given bythe rabbis in Genesis Rabbah IV:6 was that even though these divisions were necessaryfor the creation of a stable and orderly world, they still represented a schism, a9