 One of the things that our sages teach in the Midrash is that one of the important reasons that we were worthy of being redeemed from Egypt, who were slaves in Egypt for 210 years, and one of the factors that was responsible for us being worthy of leaving Egypt was that we stayed connected to our language. It was important that we stayed connected as Jews to the Hebrew language. Now Hebrew is called Ashon HaKodesh, the Holy Tongue or the Holy Language. The word Holy means separate or different or elevated. And this seminar is going to explore Hebrew's unique nature and hopefully encourage you to further explore its vast richness. Now there's a world of difference between studying our Bible, the Torah, in the original language and studying it in translation. Here's a very, very simple example to get us started for tonight. Our first slide is passage in the book of Leviticus, Vayikra chapter 19 verse two, where it says, kadoshim tihiyu ki kadosh ani. You shall be holy as I am holy. God is speaking, so you Jewish people shall be holy as I, God, am holy. It seems pretty straightforward. And that's all you would get out of this verse if you're reading this in English or any other language. But in Hebrew something very beautiful happens in this verse. One of the things we're going to see tonight is that some of the vowel sounds in Hebrew can be expressed in different ways. One of the ways the vowel can be expressed is called malei, malei for the word full. And that's because the vowel sound has the letter vav, it's the straight vertical line going up and down. And if there is a dot on top of that vav, that makes the o sound, like kadoshim tihiyu, ki kadosh ani, as I am holy. We're going to see later tonight that the same thing happens with the o sound. You can have the o sound with a straight vertical line, the vav, and a little dot on the side of it. And that makes the o sound. That's malei, full. But when the vowel is expressed without the vav, it's called chaser, it's lacking, it's missing. So again, when the vowel is complete, it's called malei, it has the vertical vav, and when the vowel sound is expressed, the o or the u, without the vertical vav, that's called chaser, it's missing or lacking. So here we see something fascinating, that when the verse speaks about kadoshim tihiyu, that you, people, should be holy, it spells kadosh without the vav, it's chaser. When it speaks about God's holiness, it says, ki kadosh ani, because I am holy, there it's written malei, it's full, it has the vav. And the reason is very obvious, because our holiness, whatever we're able to achieve, will never measure up to God's holiness. So the Hebrew here, just the form of the letters, expresses this very important idea, that there's a difference between the holiness that we are able to achieve, and God's essential holiness. Now the estimates are that there are between approximately 3,000 and 7,000 living languages in the world today. That's not including all the dialects, which would take the number much higher. All of the words in these languages, French, Russian, English, German, the words in these languages are arbitrary, they're conventional. So for example, we are sitting on chairs, we call it a chair that we're sitting on. And over there we have a table, I'm standing by a sort of a table. And the reality is that had these words been switched, and we were calling this a chair, and you're going to be sitting on a table, it wouldn't really make much of a difference. It just happens to be the conventional word that we use. It's very arbitrary. There's no connection between what you're sitting on and the word chair, C-H-A-I-R. There's absolutely no intrinsic connection. And the letters of these alphabets also are totally conventional. There's no real meaning to the letters in English. There's no meaning to the letter R. There's no meaning to the letter G. These are simply symbols that represent the sounds that we make when we speak these languages. Now one language that is not entirely arbitrary is the language that we use in chemistry. The word that we use for H2O is water. Water is arbitrary. Water is conventional. But H2O is not arbitrary, because there's a very real connection between H2O and water. Because the symbols H2O paint a picture of a water molecule. A water molecule is comprised of two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom. So H2O is different than water. The word water does not have any real connection to water. It's just an arbitrary term that we use. H2O paints a picture, and therefore there is a real correspondence. And this chemical language is very precise, because you would want to take a drink of H2O. No one is going to want to have a glass of H2O2, which is hydrogen peroxide. You would get very sick at least. Hebrew on the other hand is unique because the words in Hebrew are not arbitrary. The words have to be the words that they are. The words that we use in Hebrew for the things they describe have to be those words. In addition, the letters themselves each have profound meaning. Now the bold claim that's made for Hebrew, this is a mind-blowing claim, is that if you really understand reality, if you really understand, for example, what a cat is, or you really understand, for example, what a mother is, you really know reality, and you know the meanings of the Hebrew letters. If you really knew on the deepest level what each letter of the Hebrew alphabet was, you would be able to write the Hebrew lexicon. That's all you would need to know is understand reality and understand the Hebrew letters, and you could sit down and write the Hebrew lexicon. You could go out into the world and you would know what the word for son has to be. You would know what the word for a house has to be, what the word for a child has to be. Now that's a very, very bold and dramatic claim. We looked before at this chemical symbol for water H2O. Now you see on the side of that the Hebrew word for water, which is mayim. Now normally when this letter mem, which you see at the first and third letter here, when it appears at the end of a word, it has a special end form, which I'm not going to use tonight that often because it makes it easier for us. So the word mayim is water. And if you look at it carefully, you should notice that there's something interesting about the structure of this Hebrew word mayim and the chemical symbol for water H2O, meaning a water molecule are two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom. And mayim are two mems and a yud. The structure is basically the same. Now is that a coincidence? Is that correspondence a coincidence or is there more to it? A few years ago I purchased a book called coincidences in the Bible and in biblical Hebrew written by Professor Chaim Shor. It's a book of 288 pages. And I want to share with you a condensation of what he writes in the preface to his book. He says this book is about coincidences in the Bible and in the biblical Hebrew language. The coincidences addressed are those that I have become acquainted with from my long standing familiarity with written Jewish sources or coincidences that I have detected by personal observation over the many years since these coincidences first intrigued my curiosity. I am a tenured professor in an engineering department at an Israeli university. For quite a few years now I have observed peculiar coincidences in the Bible and in biblical Hebrew that were indeed troubling. As these amazing coincidences grew in number over time a growing sense of uneasiness left me sleepless at night. The sheer number of these coincidences had reached a critical mess where not making the coincidences public would compromise my personal ethical values. What I found incomprehensible after reading this book was that after 288 pages of remarkable coincidences he seems not to realize that these are probably not mere coincidences. You know you can flip a coin five times in a row and get five heads. That would be possible. But if someone was to flip a coin 500 times in a row and get 500 heads in a row you would come to conclude that this is not a regular coin. You'd probably come to realize this must be a two-headed coin. So if I were to show you over the course of four weeks a few dozen coincidences you might begin to think maybe these are not just coincidences maybe there's something going on here. And if we were to study this topic for years as professor Schor did we would discover not dozens of incredible quote unquote coincidences we would discover thousands and thousands. And there comes a point Malcolm Gladwell will talk about the tipping point. There comes a point where a person just has to say this can't be coincidence anymore. It's not possible. Now I wanted to begin tonight by pointing out a number of other examples other than Mayim right the Hebrew word for water corresponding to H2O. I wanted to share a few other examples where there's a consistent relationship between Hebrew and the world of reality. This word is the word Muznaim. Muznaim it appears I think about 15 or 16 times in our Bible Isaiah chapter 40 verse 15 is one of them and the word Muznaim means scale or a balance. Now one of the things that we have come to know scientifically is that the center of balance in your body is in your ears. If you look at the red letters here in this word Muznaim you see the word Ozen which is the Hebrew word for ear. Ozenim the last letters means ears. Now this is a biblical word going back thousands of years where scientists thousands of years ago aware of the connection between our sense of balance and our hearing and our ears. I don't think so and yet Hebrew picks up this connection. The word Herion is the word in Hebrew for pregnancy. You find it again about 15 times in the Bible. One of the examples is the book of Ruth chapter four verse 13 and there's something fascinating about this word. I have on the lower part of the slide the word broken out into its individual letters and next to each letter I share with you the numerical value of each letter. In Hebrew there are 22 letters in the alphabet. The first 10 letters Aleph through Yud are the letters one through 10. The next nine letters Khuf through Kuf are 2200 and then the last three letters Reish and Tuf are 200 300 and 400. Those are the numerical equivalents of the letters in the Hebrew alphabet. So if we take the letters in this word Herion, Hey is five, Reish is 200, Yud is 10, Vov is six. That's the final nun which is 50 for a grand total of 271. The Talmud in tractate Neda 38b says what is the connection between this word Herion and pregnancy? It says because typically a pregnancy will be 271 days. Is that a coincidence that the Hebrew word for pregnancy just happens to be 271 or is there more going on? When I was teaching third graders a long time ago one of my students said well if you look at the first two letters here in the word Herion it's the word Har which means mountain and he offered the idea that a woman that's very pregnant or belly looks like a bit of a mountain. That was his idea. In the book of Genesis chapter 2 verses 19 to 20 before Eve was created God brings all the animals to Adam for him to name. Adam is told that he is going to name all the animals and the Torah says whatever the man called each living creature that is its name. The sages teach that Adam was on a very high spiritual level. They say that he was able to see from one end of the universe to the next to the other end. He understood reality and he was therefore able to name the animals. He knew what every animal had to be called. Whatever he named the animal the Bible says that's what it was and so he didn't name the animals arbitrarily. This is the word kelev for dog and we understand that kelev is really a conflation of two words. Call, lathe, all heart because we know that the dog is the most loyal creature. It's man's best friend. It's loving. It's the exact opposite of a cat which does not engage too often. So there's a correspondence between the word kelev for dog and what a dog is. A dog is by nature very loyal and loving. This is the word on top Adam. Adam is the Hebrew word for human being. Adam we call in the Bible, Adam. Now what makes the human being unique of all the creatures in the universe? So aside from our intelligence and our ability to express ourselves through speech, biologists and zoologists explain that what makes the human being unique is our opposable thumb. Very important so you can study Talmud, opposable thumb. Now if you take the letters in this word Adam and you then take the next letter in the Hebrew alphabet for each letter. So after aleph comes bet, after doled comes hey, after mem comes nun, you get the word bohain. Bohain believe it or not is the Hebrew word for thumb. We see this for example many times in the Bible, Exodus chapter 29 verse 20. There's many things that the priests would do with their thumbs. So there's a connection between the word Adam and who we are as human beings because Adam has a connection to this idea of our thumb. It's a little bit similar to what you saw in the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey. If you remember back in that film the computer that was on board the ship was called Hal and they explained that it was called Hal because those are the letters that come before IBM is HAL. So this is sort of similar that the letters after Adam are bohain. Now here are three words that express that speak about our clothing, what we wear. Beged, levush, and meel. Let's look at each of these words. The word Beged is related to the word boged, a rebel, a begidah in Hebrew is a rebellion. Now what is the connection between garment and a rebel, rebellion? But we know what the connection is. Adam and Eve were commanded not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. They immediately do that. They open their eyes and they realize that they are naked. And as a result of that they begin to wear clothing. They make for themselves fig leaves, God makes for them skins, but human beings start to wear clothing after that incident. So our clothing, a begid, expresses the idea that we wear our clothing as a result of the rebellion that we had against God in the Garden of Eden. Also the word levush, another word for garment is connected to the Hebrew word busha. Busha means embarrassed, humiliated. Because that's what happened after we understood that we were naked, we were embarrassed and humiliated, so we wear our clothing in order to overcome this busha, this embarrassment. Another word in Hebrew for clothing, meel, it's less common, it means a cloak. Meel is related to the word nila, which means to misappropriate something. So again, all the words that we have in Hebrew for garments, for clothing, somehow connect us back to the story in the Torah in which clothing got launched. The word on top is the word yad, which is the Hebrew word for hand. Now what is the connection between hand and the word yad? It's a fascinating one. If you count the joints on your hand, you'll notice that each of the four fingers has three joints, sometimes they're called digits, and your thumb has two. So four times three is 12 and two is 14. The Hebrew word yad is composed of two letters, yud, which is 10, doled, which is four. So yad has a numerical value of 14, which are the number of digits in the hand, joints, digits that were used interchangeably. The next word is koach. The word koach means strength in Hebrew. Now why is that? Well koach is koach, 20, and khet, 8 for 28. You'll notice that 28 is double 14. So using both your hands, right? One hand you don't have all your strength, but when you do something with both your hands, it reminds me of a hamburger commercial, but it's not a kosher hamburger, so we'll skip it for tonight. It takes two hands to handle the whopper. So when you have to use all your strength, it's both hands, it's not 14, it's 28, and koach is 28. The last word is yadid. Yadid in Hebrew is a friend, a close friend. Why is that? Because the good friends go yad by yad. They walk together hand in hand. The word yad appearing twice, they go together. Now as a firstborn, this word describes myself. Bechor. Bechor is the word for a firstborn, and it's comprised of the letters baiz, khuf, reish. What is the connection between these three letters and a firstborn? So in the Torah in the book of Deuteronomy chapter 21 verse 17, we learn that the firstborn has a double inheritance. The firstborn receives twice the amount the other children will receive. These three letters, baiz, baiz is number two, khuf is 20, reish is 200. So this word Bechor is two, two, two. It's expressing two-ness, the idea of double. So there's a connection between Bechor and the idea of the firstborn inheriting double. The first word in this trilogy is nishama. The word nishama means soul. How do we receive our soul? So we remember in the beginning of the book of Genesis chapter 2 verse 7, that God created the human being from the dust of the earth, and then God blew the breath of life into Adam's nostrils. And that breath of life is the spiritual part of who we are. It's our soul. So interestingly, the next word down is nishima. Nishima is the word for breath. There is a connection between our nishama, our soul, and our breath. As a matter of fact, the last chapter in the book of Psalms, chapter 150, ends with the verse, kol hanishama tahalel ya. Let every soul praise God, and our sages in the midrash say, don't read this as nishama, read this as nishima. Let every breath praise God, meaning thank God for every breath that we take. There's a connection between breath and soul. The last word down is shmone. Shmone is a number eight. Eight is a fascinating number in Jewish numerology. Because seven in Hebrew, the number seven corresponds to the completion of the physical natural world. Seven days of the week, seven colors of the rainbow, seven notes in the musical scale, at least the western musical scale. But we see throughout the Bible seven is always a number indicating the completion of something in our physical realm. Eight is beyond the physical. Eight goes to the metaphysical, to the transcendent. And so for example, a child is circumcised on the eighth day. Seven days in which the child has become a fully formed physical child. And on the eighth day now he's elevated through the circumcision. The Bible speaks about the instrument that we're going to play in the times of the Messiah is called a shminit, an eight-stringed harp. Eight is always speaking about the realm beyond our physical realm. And interestingly, when you take the number eight and you turn it on its side, it's the symbol for infinity. So there's again this nature of the soul being infinite, connected to our breath, connected to the number eight. And one last example of the connection between Hebrew words and reality is the word olam. Olam is the word in Hebrew for world. Olam is world. Why is the world called olam? Because it is connected to the word ne'elam, which means hidden or concealed. So why is the world called olam? Because the creator is concealed, hidden in the world. We don't see God. God is not visible. So the creator of this world is concealed, is hidden. And that's why the world itself is referred to as olam. Now, one of the most awesome aspects to Hebrew is that our mystical literature teaches that the world was created with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. That's how God created the world. In Genesis chapter one, what do we see? We see God speaking the world into existence. God said, let there be light. And there was light. God said, let the earth sprout grass. And things are created through God's speech. In our morning prayers, we say, Baruch Shammar v'Hayah olam, blessed is he who spoke and the world came into being. Now, when a magician materializes something out of nothing, throughout the world, the magician will say, Abra Kadabra, which is very closely related to the Aramaic. An Aramaic is a cognate of Hebrew, Abra Kidabra. Abra, I will create Kidabra as I speak. So the magician will say, Abra Kadabra, and Puft is going to be a rabbit, which wasn't there before. And so that's how God created the world through speech, through speaking. And he didn't speak German or Japanese. The language of creation was Hebrew. Now, what does it mean that God said, let there be light? What does that mean? We shouldn't imagine that God is some huge being that has vocal cords the size of the Empire State Building, and this tremendous sound came out. When it speaks about God speaking, what it means is the following. As we've said, the letters of the Hebrew alphabet contain profound spiritual significance. When God says the word light in Hebrew or when God utters that word or what it means is that God is projecting his will through the spiritual energy of these three letters that make up the word or. So it's not a physical speech as we speak among ourselves. God's speech is essentially the projection of his will, but that is captured and expressed to us as his speech. Creation is essentially an expression of God's will. The letters of the Hebrew alphabet are the spiritual building blocks of reality. Everything in existence came through the different combinations and permutations of the Hebrew letters that all express the will of God. Now, this is the first verse in the Torah. Genesis chapter one, verse one, Bereishit Barah Elohim et Hashemayim ve et Haaretz. Bereishit in the beginning, Barah Elohim God created et Hashemayim, the heavens, ve et Haaretz, and the earth. Now, there's a peculiar word in Hebrew which comes up thousands of times in the Bible. It's the word that you see in red there, et. Et is not a word that can be translated. Et is a grammatical convention. It appears before the direct object of a sentence. So in the beginning, the subject of this verse is God. The verb is created, God created. And what's the direct object? God created the heavens and the earth. But this word et does not have a translation. And the truth is, you could have easily written this sentence in Hebrew with eliminating these two words and just say Bereishit Barah Elohim. In the beginning, God created Hashemayim, the heavens, the Haaretz, and the earth. So the Holy Maggot of Mezrich, who was the major disciple of the Baal Shem Tov, said that you see something very, very powerful in this verse. You see that the first thing that God created was et. In the beginning, God created et, the first letter, and the last letter. The first thing created was the alphabet. And through the alphabet, God then created everything else in existence. The Sefer Yitzirah, which is one of the oldest capitalistic texts, it's attributed to Abraham, writes that if you count the name of God in the creation story, the name of God in creation story is the name Elohim, that name appears 32 times in the creation story. And the Sefer Yitzirah writes that these 32 times correspond to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet that are projected through the prism of the Ten Svirot. The Ten Svirot are the paradigms through which God interacts with our world. And we have the 22 letters, again, as part of this dynamic of the 32 times that God's name appears in the creation story. Now, the word Tava, the first word here, is the word in Hebrew for a letter, a letter. Now, if you take the first three letters here of Tava, and you read it backwards, you get Beis Yud Toth, which is Bayet. So within the word Tava for letter, you have the word Bayet because the letters are the building blocks that were used to construct this world. The next word down is Oat. Oat is also a word and used in Hebrew for a letter. And the word Oat means a symbol or a sign. So why are the letters called an Oat, a symbol or a sign? Again, because every letter is symbolic of something. It represents something. It stands for something. It stands for very profound spiritual concepts. And finally, last word here is Davaar. Davaar is the word in Hebrew for word. So the way you say word in Hebrew is Davaar. But Davaar means something else in Hebrew. It means a thing. The same word means word and thing. Coincidence? No. Because there's an equivalence between words and things. The word is the thing. The thing came into existence because of God's word that was projected. Things came into existence through the words that express God's will. But we have to appreciate that God creating the world out of nothing is different than the way we make things. If a carpenter builds a table, the table will continue to exist even if the carpenter dies. But our world only exists as a projection of God's will. If after creating the world, God was to remove his will for an instant, the world would simply cease to exist. So even today, as we're sitting here today, God's word that expresses his will to maintain the universe is still present. As it says in the book of Psalms, chapter 119, verse 89. Forever, oh God, your word stands firm in the heavens. Forever, God, your word stands firm in the heavens. Because if it were not to be present, if God's word were not still being projected, reality would cease to exist. Now in this seminar, we're going to examine the meaning of the letters in the Hebrew alphabet. We're not going to get to all 22 of them. Tonight we're going to spend some time on the first letter, which is the letter alif. But in order to get to the alif, I want to briefly look at two other letters. The first letter here is pe. What is the meaning of the letter pe? Well, it's very close to the Hebrew word for pe, which means mouth. So there is something about this letter pe, pe and a mouth. You'll see that it has an opening. It has actually a mouth, interestingly enough. If you actually see the letter pe, you may not be able to see it here so well. But the pe written in a Torah scroll, the blank negative space in the middle of the letter always spells out, always forms a letter bet, the second letter in the alphabet. This is not stylized exactly the way a Torah scroll pe would be stylized. But the word pe is mouth. The letter pe has a mouth. It has an opening. And so the letter pe is all about entrance, opening, something that connects the inside to the outside. That's the meaning of this letter pe, at least superficial presentation. A mouth, for example, the pe is a mouth. A mouth speaks and allows for a person to reveal their inner thoughts to the outside. Again, the pay is the interface. It's where things are able to connect the inside to the outside. For example, we have the Hebrew word penim. Penim is the Hebrew word for inside. It's closely related to the word panim. Panim means face. So what is the connection between panim, face, and panim inside? It's because the panim, the face tells you what's going on inside. If you want to know how a person's feeling, you don't look at their elbow or at their foot. You look at their face. The eyes are the window to the world, to the soul. A person's face expresses what's going on inside of them. The panim is the interface between the inside and the outside. Then we have the letter reish. Letter reish connected or related to the Hebrew word rosh, which means head. For example, we have the Jewish holiday, the new year, called rosh Hashanah, which doesn't mean so much head of the year. It means beginning of the year. It's the rosh Hashanah. It's the beginning of the year. But as the head and the beginning of the year, it also has the connotation of the source of the year. It's the headquarters of the year, meaning that whatever takes place during the year, it's going to have its source, its root in the first day of the year. In the same way that the child that's going to emerge ultimately, it comes out of that moment of conception and everything flows from that. And that's why if you have a rocket ship that is even one millionth of a degree off course, so you may not notice that the first hundred miles, but when it gets into outer space, it's going to be very far from where it's supposed to go. And so the same thing on rosh Hashanah, that's our headquarters for the rest of the year. And if we get rosh Hashanah right, then the rest of the year is going to follow suit. So we have these two letters, pay and rash. What are these two letters expressed when they're together? It expresses the idea of an inner source being revealed to the outside and the appearance of a new beginning, a new reality. And it can often refer to the breaking up of an internal unity. These two letters, when they're taken together as a pair, express the idea of an inner source that's being revealed to the outside and the appearance of a new beginning, a new reality, and the breaking up and of internal unity. What we're going to do now is look at every single word in Hebrew that has these two letters as the foundation. And Hebrew words have a three letter root. So we're going to take a third letter and add it to the pay and the rash and see how each of these words flows from the foundational root of pay and rash. So the first example is pay rash alif, pera. You see this in Genesis chapter 16 verse 12 where it says about Ishmael that he will be a pera adham. The word pera means wild, out of control, untamed, not together, not put together. Meaning when something is unified, when it's together, then the person is, you call that person, boy, they're really together. They have their stuff together. But when someone is out of control, they're not together, they're a wild person. The next example is pay rash dalad. Pay rash dalad means to separate connected things that were together as a unity. It means taking something whole and dismantling it. That's what pay rash dalad is about. Pay rash hay, the third example, means to multiply, to reproduce as in Genesis 128, pru or vu. Be fruitful and multiply. And by reproduction what happens, children reveal the hidden characteristics of their parents who are the source. The next three examples, pay rash zion. We see this word in the book of Esther. You'll see it in chapter nine, verse 19. It speaks about unwalled cities, the areya prazin. So unwalled cities are not contained. A wall would contain a city. Unwalled cities are not contained. They're like the wild man. So they're able to keep on spreading. And the inhabitants of an unwalled city are exposed to the outside. So that's the idea of pay rash zion, an unwalled city. Pay rash chet is the word to flower or to blossom. Meaning it's one thing that opens to many different parts. The bud, which was covered, uncovers itself to the outside and begins a new existence. That's pay rash chet. Pay rash tet is prat. Prat. What is the word prat in Hebrew? It means apart. It's interesting that here the Hebrew and the English are basically the same. Prat in Hebrew, part in English. And what a prat is, it's when you break something down into its details. A prat is also a detail. And what happens is when you break something into its details, you expose a new understanding. The next example is pay rash chet. Liefroch means to smash or to break something solid into small pieces. The next example, pay rash mem, means to unravel a garment or to unbraid or unravel someone's hair. Again, when their hair was braided, there was a unity. When you unbraid it, you're basically separating, you're breaking into that unity. Same thing with a garment. The pay and the rash, there's the unity that's being basically disrupted. Pay rash samach means to slice a piece of bread. We say prusot lechem, pieces of slices of bread. So there was once a whole loaf, right? That was the rosh part, the unity. But then you have the pay part, the mouth part, which breaks into it and slices that piece of bread. The next example is pay rash ayin, which means to uncover. We see this in Numbers, chapter 5 verse 18, where the hair of the sota, the woman suspected of adultery, her hair is uncovered. And so her hair was covered and now it reveals her hair to the outside, her hair which had once been covered is now revealed. Pay rash ayin. Pay rash tzadi, the next example, means to break open or smash something with force. Pay rash kuf, lyfrok, means to dismantle something that was complete. Or the word perek is a chapter, meaning it's a portion of the whole. You have a book which is a whole entity and a perek is a chapter of the book, a part of that book. Final two examples, pay rash rash is actually very interesting because you'll see here that the rash is doubled up. And when you double up the letter, it intensifies the action. And you'll see this consistent throughout Hebrew. So pay rash rash means not just breaking something into, let's say, slices of bread. We say pireim lechem, are not slices, pireim are crumbs, tiny crumbs. It's where the bread has been basically crumbled into tiny, tiny pieces. Pireim in Hebrew are crumbs. And the final example is pay rash shin, which could mean to separate, lyfrosh, we say, and Talmud says, altifrosh men at sibor. Do not separate yourself from the community. And also the word piresha is also could be a chapter of a whole book is a piresha. So these are all examples consistently where if you have the root of two letters, it becomes the core of the three-letter root words. And it carries through consistently throughout Hebrew. And again, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of examples of where this happens in the Hebrew language. What we want to do now is explore in greater detail the meaning of the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, which is alif. Before we get to the alif, I want to explain how do we determine the meaning of letters? What is the methodology that we use to know? Where does it come from? The meaning of letters. So basically, we have the following methods that are used. Number one, we are going to look at the name of each letter. The name of the letter itself will be extremely significant. Then we're going to look at the sound of the letters. Most of the letters make a sound. For example, the letter tuff makes a tuff. The letter bet makes a b. Then there's a numerical value of each letter. I explained before that each letter has a numerical value. The first ten letters in the alphabet are the numbers 1 through 10. The next nine letters are 2200. The next three letters are 200 to 400. That numerical value is going to be significant. Then the shape of the letter is going to be significant. And the reason is that whereas some Hebrew letters stand alone, most Hebrew letters are actually compounded. Built by compounding other letters in the Hebrew alphabet. Most letters in the Hebrew alphabet are compound. Then we have something called the code of first letters, or the code of first words. One of the great Hasidic masters, Ruf Sadaqa Cohen of Lublin, passed away in the year 1900, taught that if you want to understand anything in the Torah, for example, find the first time it appears. If you want to understand what is a kiss. What is a kiss all about? Find the first kiss in the Torah. That'll be the headquarters. Similarly, if you want to understand the meaning of any letter in the Hebrew alphabet, find the first time that letter appears at the beginning of a word. And that's going to be the code of first words. And then we have miscellaneous techniques which may not be applied to every single letter. We'll see we have several of those tonight for the letter alif. So let's begin analyzing our first letter. Here's the letter alif. So what is the name of the letter alif? What does alif mean? So there are two primary meanings behind the letter alif, the word alif. Number one, in Hebrew aluf, in Hebrew, means a leader, a general, a commander, a champion. That's the meaning of alif, a leader, a general, a commander, a champion. Then the word alif, like in the word le alif, means to teach. For example, in the book of Eov, the book of Job, chapter 33, verse 33, le alef hakhachma, to teach wisdom. It's interesting if you go to Israel and you're trying to learn Hebrew, where do you go to learn Hebrew? It's called an ul pan. That is related to the letter alif, right? Le alef is to teach. Ul pan is where you learn. Then we have the sound of the letter alif. Now again, most Hebrew letters will make a sound like a buh or tuh. The letter alif is silent. It doesn't have a sound. What is the number of alif? That's easy. It's the first letter in the alphabet. Its numerical value is one. The shape of the alif, this is interesting. The alif is comprised of two letters. It has in the diagonal the letter vuv, which is normally going to be vertical. We saw that before. The letter vuv is the number six. And it has on top and on bottom the letter yud, which is a tenth letter. And that's the number 10. So the letter alif is comprised of a yud, a yud and a vuv. 10, 10 and 6, which is 26. Why is 26 significant? Because God's essential name in the Torah is the tetragrammaton, which is a contraction of the Hebrew words haya hove yeh. He was, he is, he will be. And that four letter name of God, the yud, the hey, the vuv and the hey, if you add up those letters, yud is 10, hey is 5, vuv is 6, hey is 5. The letters in God's special name equal 26. So the shape of the letter alif actually is connected to that special name of God, the yud, k, vuv, k. Then we have the code of first letters. Here, here is the first three words in the book of Genesis, the first three words in the Torah. Bereishit barah, that's on alif. The third word, Elohim, has the alif at the beginning of the word. So the code of first words tells us that the letter alif is connected to Elohim, God. Now for a few miscellaneous things. This is how you spell the letter alif. If you wanted to take the letter alif and spell it out, it's alif, lamid, pay. Alif is again one. Lamid is the letter for 30. Pay is the letter for 80. 80 and 30 and one is 111. One, one, one. If you're playing, you know, in Las Vegas, you didn't get three lemons in a row, you got three ones in a row. So there's a connection between alif and oneness. Because if you spell out alif, that's all you get are ones. The truth is that we have many different names of God. And interestingly, many of those names that we use for God begin with the letter alif. Now we saw before Elohim, which is the code of first words. There's also a short form of Elohim, which is El, just the letters alif, lamid. El is a short form of Elohim, also a term used for God. Now after Moses was told by God to tell the Jewish people that he's been sent by God to redeem them from Egypt, right? That's a mission. He's given his mission. Moses challenges God. God says to Moses, you're going to go down to the Jewish people and tell them that God has sent me to take you out of Egypt. And Moses was nervous about something. Moses says to God, what if they ask me? Now, you know, a normal question might be, what if they asked me how are you going to do it? I mean, how are you going to get us out of here? But Moses says to God, what if they asked me your name? What am I going to say? Which is a pretty strange question. The truth is that in the Bible, names capture the essence of who someone is. So when they want to know God's name, not interested in hearing his name is Bob or Fred, what they want to know is who is God? Moses is saying, look, God, they're going to ask me, who are you? Who are you? What's his name? Who is God? So God says to Moses in Exodus chapter 3, verse 14, he says to Moses, you want to know my name to tell them? It's A, I share A. The first three words on the page here on this slide. I will be what I will be often wrongly translated as I am what I am. That was what Popeye said. Popeye said, I am what I am. But what God says is, I will be what I will be. Now, how is that answering Moses? What God is basically saying is this, tell the Jewish people, if they want to know who I am, tell them, you'll see who I am. You'll experience me on the stage of history. God is saying to the Jewish people, you want to know me? I will be what I will be. You will get to experience me and that's how you will get to know me. Interestingly, these three letters in the name that God tells Moses to use are alif, alif, alif. Again, alif, alif, alif, AAA. Another word that we use in Hebrew for God is adonai, sometimes adoni. We don't pronounce, as I mentioned before, God's special essential name, the tetragrammaton, the utikavovk, we don't pronounce it. When we read it, we read it as adonai. Adonai, my master. And so again, this is a word for God that begins with alif. Echad, we speak about God as the one. Again, begins with an alif. We sometimes refer to God as adir. We just finished Passover and one of the songs at the end of the Seder is adir, who? Adir meaning mighty or glorious. God is mighty or glorious. And there are many other examples. I don't even have them on your slides here. Another term used for God is abir. For example, God is referred to as Abir Yaakov, the mighty one of the power of Jacob. Genesis chapter 49, verse 24, abir. Ain't Sof, Kabbalists speak about God as the eternal infinite. The Ain't Sof, totally unknowable and infinite. Again, begins with an alif. And our prayers refer to God as Avinu Malkaynu, our father, our king, Avinu, our father in heaven, Avinu Shabbat Shemaim. So we have many, many examples of where the names that we use for God begin with the letter alif. So that's one of the miscellaneous ideas. And finally, I'm not sure you'll be able to see this easily. These are the first few verses in the book of Genesis. And something fastening takes place when you look at these verses. There are, as I mentioned, different names of God. I want to just share four of them with you now. One is a short form of the Yud-Heh Vav-Heh, a short form of the tetragrammaton, which is Yah, Yud-Heh, our rastrophrarian friends like that name of God. So that's one name of God. And Yud-Heh is 10 and 5, 15. Yud and the Hey is 15. Then we have the tetragrammaton, Yud-Heh Vav-Heh, which is 26. Then we saw before I mentioned the name L, short form of Elohim. L is 31. Elohim is the name of God using the creation story, and Elohim adds up to 86. Now something incredible happens when you look at the first verses in the Bible. If you begin with the first letter in the Bible, the first letter in Bereshit, and you count 15 letters, 15 again is the numerical value of God's name, Yud-Heh, Yah. You count 15 letters, you're going to end up on a aleph. It should be blued there somewhere. You'll see it, I think at the very end of the first line. That aleph, and the word et, is the 15th letter. If you continue counting till the 26th letter, which is again 26, is the numerical value of Yud-Heh Vav-Heh, you're going to get the aleph in the word Haaretz in the second line. If you continue counting till the number 31, which is the numerical value of L, you're going to get the aleph in the Haaretz on the third line. And if you keep on counting all the way down to the last line, the aleph in Elohim is the 86th letter in the Bible. So again, taking these different names of God, the number of God for 15, for 26, for 31, for 86, beginning with the first letter in the Torah, counting that number of letters, you will hit an aleph each and every time. So at the end of this whole discussion, what is the meaning of the letter aleph? So you know, we say if it looks like a duck, and it cracks like a duck, and it walks like a duck, you know what it is? So let's review. The name of the letter aleph indicates commander, chief, a ruler, a teacher. The sound is silent, unpronounceable. The number is one, numero uno. The shape is 26, which is the number of God's ineffable name, the Yodkay vavkay. The code of first words, the first word in the Bible that begins with the letter aleph is the word for God Elohim. And then we saw a number of miscellaneous ideas that the letter aleph itself when you spell it out is 111, 111, that the first letter, the initials of many of the terms we use for God begins with the letter aleph. And finally, if you take these names of God, and you begin counting that number from the beginning of the Bible, you'll hit the letter aleph. So it should be very clear to all of you that the letter aleph reflects only one concept. And that's the concept of godliness and divinity. Now, is this information useful to us? I mean, what do we get out of knowing this? The truth is it can be very helpful. When studying the Bible, you will encounter numerous anomalies in the Bible. You will notice that some letters are written large, some letters are written small, meaning they're unconventionally large or small. Sometimes letters might be missing from a word. Words are spelt without a letter there, and it should be there. So here's two examples. This is a passage in a verse in the book of Leviticus chapter 11 verse 43. You shall not make yourselves abominable with any creeping creature that creeps, creeping, crawling things we're not supposed to eat. And you shall not defile yourselves with them, that you should become unclean through them. You shall not defile yourselves with them, that you should become unclean through them. Now, you shall not become defiled through them. The first word that you see written with the red, ti tamu, has as its root the Hebrew word tamay. Tamay means impure, contaminated, defiled. And if you do eat these things and defile yourselves, what will happen? You will become contaminated through them, beneath matem bam. You'll become impure through them. So this word, the second time it appears, it's missing a letter. What letter is missing? The letter aleph is missing. So what's the significance of the fact that this letter is spelt legially incorrectly? It's spelt without the aleph. The answer is very simple. If you know what aleph stands for, aleph stands for divinity, godliness. When you defile yourself through eating things that are prohibited, you get disconnected from God. God goes missing. From your life, He will not be there. That's why the letter does not appear. Another example, in the book of Numbers chapter 15 verse 24, it speaks about, this is only part of the verse, it speaks about the communal sin offering for idolatry. That when people, a community violates the prohibition against idolatry, they have to bring several sacrifices. One of them is a seer-izim, a goat. And it says it's a seer-izim lechatat for a sin offering. Now that's how it spells it in the text. On the bottom I have how it should be spelled. Chatat should be spelled with an aleph. The word chait is spelled chait, chet, chet, aleph, chait. But in the verse it's written without the aleph, the same reason. When you worship idols, you again are disconnecting yourself from God. One more example of what knowing this about the letter aleph can be helpful for. We learned earlier tonight that the word for man in Hebrew is adam. Now the human being, as we mentioned, is of dual nature. Physical, created from the dust of the earth, and spiritual as a result of God breathing the breath of life into him. Now when you look at this word adam, you'll see that it has an aleph, which is the godly spiritual part of the human being. And then it has the dam, dam is blood, which is the physical part of the human being. So the word for adam itself, it shows, it actually, the word basically shows you that the human being is a combination of the physical and the spiritual. It's interesting, by the way, that the word for dam, blood, is doled, the number for four, and mem, the number for 40. So there's some connection between blood and forness. What is the connection between blood and for chait, forness, because there are four types of blood in the human beings. Now the Talmud teaches, in tractate Neda, 31b, that there are three partners in the creation of every human being. There's God, there's the father, and there's the mother. In Hebrew, the word for father is av, that's the second line, first word, av, aleph bet. Aleph is the word, is the letter for one, bet is the letter for two. So the father, the letters in father are three, aleph and bet, one and two is three. And then the word for mother is aim, aleph and mem, aleph is one, mem is 40. So the number for aim is 41. So mother is 41, father is three, total of 44. So you see that the physical part of the human being, that was the dam, 44, ties into the father and the mother. So you have the aleph, the godly part of the human being, and then you have the dam, the physical part, which again comes from the father and the mother. Why is the human being called Adam? So one reason is because we come from the Adamah. Adam comes from the earth, that's how we were formed, from the dust of the earth. The morale from Prague explains that the earth is pure potential, and that's what the human being is. The human being is pure potential. Every other creature that was created by God was created fully formed. A cat is a cat as a cat. A cat does not grow in its catness as it gets older. Elephant doesn't grow in its elephant kite as it gets older. Animals, all creatures were fully formed, and that's why after everything that was created, the Torah says God saw that it was good, meaning God saw that it was exactly the way it was supposed to be. After the human being was created, the Torah never says God saw that it was good. Why? Because each one of us is simply like the Adamah, like the earth, pure potential. If you have a tract of land, so if you take care of it and you clean it up and you cultivate it and you plow and you seed and you water and you take care of it, you can have a beautiful field. And if you don't take care of that field properly, you'll have nothing. It'll be deserted, garbage. The human being is the same way. So it depends, what we will become depends on what we make of ourselves. That's one reason we're called Adam, Adam, because we come from the Adamah. But also this word, Adamah, can be read as Edameh. We see this word in Isaiah chapter 14 verse 14. Edameh means I can resemble, I can be like. In Isaiah it says Edameh le el yom, I can be like the most high. Interestingly, if we take God's special name, the yud hay vav hay, and on the bottom here, I've spelled it out. This is called in Hebrew, meelui, when you take the letters and you spell out the letters. So it's yud, spelled yud vav dalad, hay, spelled hay alif, vav, spelled vav alif vav, and hay, spelled hay alif. If you add up all those letters, the numerical value, which I'll give you the numbers now, it's 10 and six and four, and then five and one, and then six one and six, and five and one for a total of 45. God's name spelled out in meelui is 45. Adam was alif dalad mem. The dom part was 44. But if you include the alif, it's 45. So the human being can resemble God. We're able to resemble God. And that's why our name is 45, because God's name is also 45. We are able to, as God said, like I am holy, you shall be holy. And it's one of the major messages of the Bible, is God commands us that we should seek to become more godly in our lives. Let's conclude tonight by looking at something that's quite amazing. There's a teaching in our tradition that every verse in the Bible corresponds to a year in history. For example, verse number 1200 in the Bible corresponds to the year in the Hebrew calendar, year number 1200. Right now we're in the Hebrew year 5,779, 5779. So every verse in the Bible corresponds to a year in history. On the slide, you have the book of Deuteronomy chapter 30 verse 3, chapter 30 verse 3. And this is a year, this is both verse number and year number 5,708. This is verse number 5,708. By the way, to find out the number of the verse, you don't have to actually count 5,708 verses. If you get a Hebrew Bible, the Hebrew Bibles have the number of verses at the end of each book and the number of verses at the end of each Torah portion. So you can very quickly add up when you get to approximately 5,500 or 5,700, then you just count by hand from there. So this is verse number 5,708, which is equal to the year 5,708. And what does it say? Then the Lord your God will turn your captivity and have compassion upon you and he will return and gather you from all the peoples where the Lord your God has scattered you. If 5,779, that's this year, 5779 is the year 2019, then the year 5,708 will be the English year 1948. This verse in the Bible is the 5,708th verse in the Bible, corresponding to the year 1948, when this is exactly what happened, that God began to return his people to their land after we had been scattered throughout the entire world. And the truth is that there are numerous mind-blowing illusions in the Torah to the year 1948. We'll conclude tonight with one last example. This is from the book of Leviticus chapter 25 verse 13 and it describes the Jubilee year. In this year of the Jubilee, each man will return to his ancestral heritage. Now that was one of the ideas of the Jubilee, that if people over the course of time, if families had to sell their ancestral land, either because they were in debt or for some other reason, after 50 years the land reverted to its original owners. Now our sages noticed two strange things about this verse. Number one, why does it say in this year of the Jubilee, people will return to their land. What it could have said, what it should have said is, in the year of the Jubilee, people return to their land. What do you mean in this year of the Jubilee, people return to their land? That's one problem. The second problem is that you see the word with the red tashuvu, it is spelled chaser. The first time you have the u sound, it has the shin with the three diagonal dots underneath it, but normally the u sound is not chaser, it's not missing, it is malei. It is full, it has the vav, the vertical vav, the last letter in that, those red letters, and that is the u sound. When the vav has a dot on the side of it, that's the u sound. So a second anomaly here is, why does the word tashuvu spelled chaser, it's missing the vav. Normally the word shuv is spelled with a vav. Those are the two strange things about this verse. The answer is mind blowing. The verse seems to be alluding to the idea that there's a special year of the Jubilee in which people return to their land. In this year of the Jubilee, people return to their land. The word tashuvu in Hebrew is taf, shin, base, vav. 400, 302, and 6 for 708. Now the truth is that Hebrew years do not have a letter for the number 1000. For example, everyone today, if you write a check, you're going to write May 05, 02, 2019. You'll write 19. No one's going to think that it's 18, 19 anymore, or 19, 19. We know that it's 2019. The thousandth place, the millennium is understood. So in Hebrew, the letters taf, shin, base, vav, 708, that could be referring to the year 708, but it could equally be referring to the year 1708, 2708, 3708, 4708, or 5708. Now the truth is that there are indications that this is speaking about the year 5708. I'm not going to have time to go into all the indications tonight, but let's read it as the year 5708. Now the verse makes sense. Bishnat Hayovel HaZot in this year of the Jubilee, in which year? In this year, tashuvu, 5708, 1948, we will return to our ancestral possession. But I pointed out that the word tashuvu is written chaser. It's written missing or lacking. It's missing that vav. The vav in Hebrew is the number six. So when we came back in 1948, we came back, we were chaser vav. We were missing six million of our brothers and sisters. And this verse paints a picture of what happens in 1948.