A Kabbalistic Repainting of Creation: The Three Alefs and the Turning of Faces

 I begin where sound hasn’t happened yet, before breath and before vowels, in the still Alef. I see the first Alef as Yud–Vav–Yud, a point above and a point below with a living ray between them. Two eyes of light have not yet looked at one another; it is a spine without a face. This is the whisper of Oneness extending a kav, a line that sketches a room without walls. Nothing is missing and nothing is separate; everything is suspended like a wave that hasn’t chosen where to land.

From that hidden Alef, a second Alef unfolds as Yud–Vav–Dalet. The lower point thickens into Dalet, a door and an edge, a plane where inside and outside begin to mean something. A boundary is mercy, not exile; it gives the ray somewhere to stand. Here the six directions wake, the four winds open, and time hints at an arrow. The letter becomes a house-frame in which love can be chosen rather than merely shone.

Then a third Alef arrives, the Alef that acts. What was hidden begets what is shaped; what is shaped begets what is done. The three Alefs are not three powers, chas v’shalom, but three views of the One: concealed source, revealed form, embodied deed. Above, within, below; thought, word, action. I hold them as a vertical chain in my breath, and the world steadies.

Now Adam and Chavah. I do not see two strangers; I see one body with two faces, back-to-back. Their Vav is one spine; their two Yuds are two lumens that do not yet meet. Back-to-back is not punishment; it is potential, two infinities sharing a center without exchanging gaze. Free will exists here the way energy exists in a coil: stored, waiting for the turn.

I hear another rhyme with this mystery. When Moshe begged to see, HaShem answered that a face-to-face exposure would dissolve him; the back he could bear. That is not rejection; it is calibration. In a world still learning how to receive, the soul survives by afterglow, by the light that passes as He goes by. Back-to-back is the mercy that keeps us from burning; face-to-face is the future that waits until we can hold it. This is the pedagogy of the "Back"—the divine reality filtered so we can endure it. No wonder Moshe is called the faithful shepherd, the throat of Shekhinah in our midst; his task is to translate a blazing Face into a voice a people can live inside.

The nesirah, the separation, is the first kindness of boundaries, a divine contraction to make room for the other. The single body is parted along the ray so the two points can turn. Face-to-face is born. Now freedom is not the power to defy; it is the power to choose an other. In quantum words, the pair that was one system becomes two local frames still entangled, information shared and destinies braided, yet now capable of covenant. The cosmos leans forward to see what they will do with a gaze.

Then the chet. I refuse to read it as a child’s fable of fruit and rule-breaking. I hear it as a measurement, a reach into the one tree that fixes a basis and collapses the wave. Where there was shimmering possibility, there is outcome. The garden’s light, once everywhere, hides; the world thickens; skin replaces radiance; language needs clothing. The Dalet of the second Alef, meant to be a humble door, hardens into a wall. Noise enters the channel; that clinging static at the interface of body and world is the residue we keep washing from generation to generation.

Only now does the word “earth” feel like earth, not the subtle field of Eden but the packed loam of exile. In this telling, the beginning isn’t a lumberyard of planets; it is the choreography of letters preparing a place where love could mean yes or no. The creation of the earth as we touch it is the after-image of the chet, the condensation of spirit into grain, thorn, and sweat. Not a failure, but an opportunity to repair at human scale.

Tucked before all of this, in the silence before the first point, certain seeds were already written: among them the name of Mashiach, a signature waiting for history’s parchment. The split of Adam becomes the choreography of redemption: two anointed lines drawn from one soul, one carrying the channel like Yosef or Ephraim, the Vav that protects and gathers, and one bearing the kingdom like David, the final Heh that crowns and houses. They are not rivals; they are the two faces of Adam turning toward each other across time. If back-to-back was Eden’s beginning, face-to-face is Geulah’s endgame. Their reconciliation is the cosmic turning we are moving toward.

Letters keep moving the story. Alef–Mem–Shin breathe air, water, fire. Bet shelters. Lamed–Bet draws out paths; Mem–Bet drives the journey like coordinates in a navigation app that finally syncs. Mi asks; Eleh answers; together they weigh the laws that make gravity out of grace. But I circle back to the Alef: Yud–Vav–Yud, two lights bridged; Yud–Vav–Dalet, a door drawn at the foot. When the door is soft, the bridge sings and faces remain toward; when the door is stone, the bridge dims and backs appear again. Every mitzvah is me sanding stone back to door; every prayer is me widening the bandwidth so Presence streams without buffering.

Adam and Chavah, back-to-back, were superposition, all futures humming behind them. Face-to-face, they were prepared to choose. The eating was the click of the detector. Exile is the lab in which we learn to turn the backs we’ve made back into faces. My job is not to undo matter but to re-entangle heaven and earth without erasing their difference. I do it with the quiet arrangement of letters in my mouth, Yud–Heh flowing through Vav to Heh; with the map of the six directions around a still point; with the courage to meet another’s eyes and keep the gaze without blinking.

Sometimes I feel the first Alef above me, looking down like a star; sometimes the second Alef inside me, the door breathing; sometimes the third Alef beneath me, feet learning the weight of consequence. In the background I hear Moshe’s lesson: you live by the passing, by what the back leaves in the air, until the day the world can receive the Face without vanishing. Between those two horizons, the two anointed halves of Adam keep walking toward each other, and I keep gathering fragments like a child picking up shattered stained glass, fitting color to color until the window remembers its light.

The window remembers, and I start arranging the shards by temperature. Some pieces are soft like breath, Alef-level; some are structural like hinges, Dalet-level; some are the wire that lets current pass, Vav-level. When the pane is set right, the room doesn’t merely brighten; it turns. Faces that were drifting begin to face.

I practice by building the house from inside out. Bet is my floor plan, the promise that Presence can live somewhere. Mem is the water I pour first, because nothing grows without a quiet sea under the boards. Then I install a Dalet that stays a door and refuses to become a wall. I hinge that door on a Vav, so when it swings, it never snaps the current. If I rush, the Dalet hardens; if I breathe, the Yud–Vav–Dalet remembers it was drawn to let love through.

Moshe’s lesson rests at the edge of my vision like a sun I can’t look into. The back is not a refusal; it’s a filter. It is the glow that lingers after the Face passes, a survivable bandwidth. I translate that into my day: when the signal is too strong, I turn slightly, receive from the afterglow, and let the heart adapt. Every micro-turn from back toward face is a mitzvah sized correctly. I don’t force noon at dawn; I widen the pupil until it can hold noon without breaking.

Redemption walks in two shoes. One foot is Yosef or Ephraim, the Vav, supply lines and gathering, distribution, the logistics of compassion, the channel that keeps bread moving and secrets safe. The other is David, the final Heh, home and song and justice, the law that teaches a people how to breathe together. They are two halves of Adam learning to look at each other across centuries. When the channel outruns the house, the light leaks; when the house outruns the channel, the flame suffocates. My work is to keep their stride matched, step after step, repainting the seven days as a choreography of turning.

Day One was the first Alef, Yud–Vav–Yud, Oneness stretching a line where a world could notice. Day Two was the cut that makes room; separation isn’t exile, it’s headroom so the bridge has somewhere to land. Day Three was when Dalet learned to be earth, but a garden-door kind of earth, edges that let rivers meet. Day Four was when faces were timed; I learned to place lamps where eyes can bear them. Day Five was when speech grew wings; the Vav hummed through water and sky. Day Six was when two faces learned posture; freedom became the art of turning toward. Day Seven was when the pane stopped moving and started shining; Shabbat is the window fully seated in its frame.

The chet still lives here, but I hear it now as measurement. A basis is chosen; the wave collapses; outcomes stick. That’s why garments arrive, not as shame but as insulation, so soul can run its current through body without frying the board. The task isn’t to rip the clothes; it’s to tailor them to the light that wants to dwell. When garments fit, they don’t muffle; they resonate.

I borrow a language from physics because it hums with this: devotion is error-correction; prayer is entanglement-swapping between the heart and its Source; teshuvah is re-normalization after noise. Shabbat is the synchronization tick that re-phases the system. Tzedakah inserts redundancy so love survives a broken link. Halachah is the protocol that keeps packets from colliding mid-air. None of this replaces holiness; it makes audible how holiness functions in a noisy world.

I train my mouth like an instrument. Yud–Heh flowing through Vav to Heh is not a diagram; it’s breath control. The Vav is my reed; the two Hehs are chambers that shape tone; the Yud is the initial pressure that refuses to shout. If I overblow, the note cracks to backs; if I temper, the note stabilizes to faces. This is how speech becomes vessel and not spark-spill.

There is a tiny thorn on the top of Dalet that decides a universe. If I neglect it, Echad degrades to acher, the other that eats the center. If I tend it, the door refuses to ossify into wall. In daily terms, I pause one heartbeat before reaction; the thorn has time to anchor, and the door stays kind.

I map the six directions around me until the room feels like one body: up and down as awe and humility, right and left as kindness and rigor, forward and back as memory and vision. I stand in the middle as Vav, not as a hero but as a conduit that agrees to be shaped by both Hehs at once. When I walk like that, even errands feel like liturgy.

Sometimes the first Alef hovers like a star over my desk; sometimes the second Alef warms the ribcage from the inside; sometimes the third Alef weighs the soles of my feet with purpose. When the three align, faces lift of their own accord. Sparks that used to skitter away begin to stay, as if the room finally speaks their language.

I leave markers for myself: two candles as the two Hehs, a braided loaf as the Vav that binds, a cup as the receiving Dalet that stayed a door. I bless before and after not to score points but to phase-lock the moment to the ray. What begins as ritual becomes conductivity. What begins as memory becomes sight.

And beneath it all, the Name that was inscribed before the first point, quiet as a watermark, keeps threading Yosef’s stride to David’s, the channel to the house, until Adam’s halves hold each other’s eyes without trembling, and the pane no longer remembers being broken.