P'SHAT cc70
by Hebrewletters SL
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$500
Dimensions
7.000 x 5.000 inches
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Title
P'SHAT cc70
Artist
Hebrewletters SL
Medium
Painting - Watercolor On Watercolor Paper
Description
FOUR WORLD PARADIGM OF LEARNING
P’SHAT is from the Hebrew, meaning PLAIN MEANING (Alcalay, R. The Complete Hebrew English Dictionary.Jerusalem: Massada. 2131).
From the teachings of Mitchell Chefitz, author The Seventh Telling, The Thiry-third Hour, The Curse of Blessings, White Fire and Blood Covenant:
Kabbalah - There is a technique of learning Torah through the ‘Four World paradigm’ that brings one into the very presence of God. Consider this. If the Torah emanates from God, if it is the word of God, then it may be possible to follow that word back to its source. The road map is the word itself. PaRaDiSe. P-R-D-S. P’shat, Remez, Drash, Sod. Studying Torah in such a fashion leads to paradise. Some say that studying the Torah in this fashion IS paradise. (Chefitz, Mitchell. 2001. The Seventh Telling. New York: St. Martins Press. 175).
PaRaDiSe
P = P’shat, simple Narrative Action
R = Remez, hint Metaphor Formation
D = Drash, interpretation Allegory Creation
S = Sod, secret Spiritual Emanation
(Chefitz, Mitchell. 2001. The Seventh Telling. New York: St. Martins Press. 175).
The Red Sea story in the World of Action, Asiya. P’shat.
The children of Israel have been enslaved for centuries. Moses comes along and tells Pharaoh to let the people go. Pharaoh refuses. There are ten plagues. Moses and the children of Israel head for the sea. Pharaoh’s armies chase after them. They are pinned against the sea. A pillar of cloud separates the two camps by day, a pillar of fire by night. An east wind blows all night. Maybe it’s a low tide. The Israelites are traveling light. They get through the sea. The Egyptians are following in chariots. The wheels get bogged down. The wind stops blowing. The sea rises. The Egyptians are drowned. The children of Israel emerge safely on the other side (Chefitz, Mitchell. 2001. The Seventh Telling. New York: St. Martins Press. 176).
The Red Sea story in the World of Formation, Yetzirah. Remez.
The children of Israel are trapped in the tightest of places. The Hebrew for Egypt, mitzrayim, means a very tight place. Taskmasters are set over them. Moses comes before Pharaoh and takes a stick and inserts it into the river Nile. Blood issues forth. There is a first plague, and at the end of each month another, so that the tenth plague brings nine months to full term. The waters of the Red Sea break. The children come forth out of the tight place. And the taskmasters, who had held the children captive within the tight place all that time, come forth after them, and perish. So the birth of the children of Israel, and the crossing of the Red Sea in the World of Formation. We use a metaphor of childbirth. It’s as if we had insemination, pregnancy, labor, breaking of the waters, emergence of the new born, the death of the placenta (Chefitz, Mitchell. 2001. The Seventh Telling. New York: St. Martins Press. 176).
Red Sea in terms of the World of Creation, Beriya. Drash.
There is no creation without an issuing forth. The very creation described in the first chapter of Genesis is an issuing forth. God says, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. God separates the light from the darkness. God creates the waters, and separates the waters so that the dry land appears. This is the process of creation in Genesis. And here in the book of Exodus? The creation of the people of Israel is described in the same terms. Light and darkness, the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud. The sea, the splitting of the sea, the appearance of dry land. The children of Israel are created in the exodus out of Egypt. There is no creation without an exodus.
As with an artist, as long as you are working on a painting, or sculpting a piece of stone, it is attached to you. It is not a creation until it goes into exile from you, until it is separated from you. When it stands apart from you, it is a creation. When it is attached to you, it is only a part of you.
So the children of Israel are separated from Egypt and become a people. The world is separated from God and becomes a creation. So we have the framework for beginning to understand the passage through the World of Creation (Chefitz, Mitchell. 2001. The Seventh Telling. New York: St. Martins Press. 177).
The Red Sea story in the World of Emanation, Atzilut, Sod.
If the first reading of the Red Sea told us what was happening, and the second what it feels like, and the third the model of creation to learn from it, wouldn’t it be nice if the fourth reading would bring us into the presence of the Creator itself?
In the fourth reading you become the story. So it is here. In our fourth reading we become the text of the Torah. We examine the text. We search it for clues, for a pathway through the worlds to the very presence of the Creator. And this is what the rabbis found.
“In the 14th chapter of Exodus, verses 19, 20 and 21 each have seventy-two letters. Seventy-two letters is an especially long verse. To have three such verses together is out of the ordinary. Not only that,the three verses are the most numinous, God-active verses in the entire story. They describe how the angel of God illuminates the night to make a barrier between the camps of the Egyptians and the Israelites, and then, the very splitting of the sea.
In these three seventy-two letter verses the rabbis find the seventy-two letter name of God. If you have done your math, you know that seventy-two is four times eighteen, eighteen being the numerical value of the word for life in Hebrew. Life, if you like, extended through the four worlds. In the deepest Kabbalah, these three verses become a meditation, a doorway to the World of Emanation. Sod (Chefitz, Mitchell. 2001. The Seventh Telling. New York: St. Martins Press. 177).
The Hebrew Letters featured in this painting are Pey Shin Tet. Taken together, and reading from right to left, they spell P’SHAT
Each of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet has a special meaning and a story to tell. Here a few brief ones about the letters on this painting.
Pey is the 17th letter of the Hebrew alphabet, has a numerical value of 80, makes a sound either like the P in Peace or the F in Food, means MOUTH and is constructed of a Caf with a Yud situated at the top and rotated inward.
If one looks carefully at the Pey one can see that there is a Beit, which makes up the empty space within it. The Beit is the first letter of the word Bereshit, IN A BEGINNING, which is the first word of Torah. God opened up God’s MOUTH and out came the Beit, BEGINNING, CREATION.
Pey is one of 5 letters: [Caf Mem Nun Pey Tsade] that have 2 forms - the regular [bent] form used in the beginning and middle of a word and the FINAL FORM,- SOFIT, used as the last letter of a word (Shabbat 4a).
I [PEY] signify redemption and deliverance (Zohar 1984. Tr. Harry Sperling et al. New York: Soncino. 1:2b).
The bent Pey and the straight Pey [intimate] an open mouth Pey], a closed mouth (Shabbat 104a).
The medial (bent) Pey is almost closed. ‘A time to keep silence, and a time to speak’ (Ecclesiastes 3:7) (Shabbat 104a).
[The writing of the letters] must be ‘kethibah tammah’ [perfect writing]; thus one must not write the… Tet as a Pey or the Pey as a Tet Shabbat 103b).
Meditating in the Beit, which is inside the Pey, is like being in the vortex of creation. “God opened up God’s MOUTH [Pey] and out came the Beit,” BEGINNING, CREATION. I feel in meditation that I am in the primordial mix. It is a feeling of being one with everything and one with a nothingness at the same time. Ain Sof. There is power here.
SHIN is the 21st letter of the Hebrew alphabet, has a numerical value of 300, SHIN TOOTH, YEAR, REPEAT, TEACH. Shin makes the sound SHHHHHH when the DOT is on the right, and SSSS when the DOT is on the left.
There are differing opinions about which components make up the Shin. Kushner states that the Vav makes up the right arm, the Zayin the left, and Yud the middle. In Haralick’s opinion, the Yud is on the right, the Zayin on the left and the Yud in the middle. It is the view of Ginsburgh that the Shin is composed of 3 Vavs, each with a little Yud on its top. So, to make this letter your own, it will be necessary to take it into meditation and come to your own conclusion (Kushner, Lawrence. 1990. The Book of Letters.. Woodstock: Jewish Lights. 72; Haralick, Robert. 1995. The Inner Meaning of the Hebrew Letters.. Northvale: Jason Aronson. 299; Ginsburgh, Yitzchak. 1990. The Hebrew Letters. Jerusalem: Gai Einai. 313).
Shin is one of 7 letters which may be adorned with TAGIN, or little crowns, in the Torah, Tefillin or Mezzuzah scroll. These are called the SHAYNAYZ GAYTZ letters [Shin, Ayin, Tet, Nun, Zayin, Gimmel, and Tsade] Each one of these letters contains a Zayin. A TAG is composed of 3 strokes which themselves look like little Zayins.
There is a wonderful story in Talmud, which describes Moses ascending to Heaven to find God occupied in affixing TAGGIN to the letters of Torah:
Rab Judah said in the name of Rab, When Moses ascended on high he found the Holy One, blessed be He, engaged in affixing coronets to the letters. [These are the Taggin, i.e., three small strokes written on top of the letters ‘Shatnayz Gaytz’ in the form of a crown (Menachoth 29b).
Sepher Yitzirah divides the Hebrew Letters into 3 categories: 3 mothers : Aleph Mem Shin; 7 doubles: Beit Gimel Dalet Caf Pey Resh Tav; and 12 elementals: Hey Vav Zayin Chet Tet Yud Lamed Nun Samech Ayin Tsade Kuf. According to the text, God created the world by means of these letters. The Shin is one of the mothers, that group from which emanated AIR (from Aleph), WATER (from Mem) and FIRE (from Shin). The 3 mothers in the universe are AIR, WATER and FIRE...HEAVEN was created from FIRE, EARTH was created from WATER, and AIR from SPIRIT (WIND) balanced between them. Aleph and Shin spell AISH – FIRE. Aleph represents AIR and Shin, FIRE. FIRE cannot exist without AIR (Sepher Yitzirah. TR. Aryeh Kaplan. York Beach: Samuel Weiser. 5, 95, 145, 147, 159, 197).
The Hebrew letters of the word for ‘husband’ are Aleph, Yud and Shin, and for ‘wife’ Aleph, Shin and Hey. The Yud and Hey form the Divine Name; but if omitted, only Aleph and Shin are left which form the word ESH, ‘fire’ (Sotah 17a).
A NIGGUN is a holy TUNE. Meditative chanting is softly singing a NIGGUN over and over again. In this case one could chant the word SHALOM.
But sometimes the Shin takes me for a ride. The middle yud bends over to make a seat and I steer with the left and right Yuds. The Shin loves to race the jet skis in the ocean. Especially since we always win.
TET is the 9th letter of the alphabet, has a numerical value of 9, makes a sound like the T in Truth and is the shape of the TET is like a bowl. The left side of the bowl resembles a ZAYIN. The TET is frequently associated with the word TOV meaning GOOD.
I first became enamoured with the Tet when I read the following story The Bahir, a first century kabbalistic text. It states that there are 613 letters in the passage of the Ten Commandments. This section contains all of the 22 Hebrew letters except for the Tet. The text reaches the conclusion that the Tet is excluded because it is the belly and goes on to state that the “Tet is not included among Sephirot, a sad situation(Kaplan, Aryeh. 1979. Tr. The Bahir. York Beach: Samuel Weiser. 47).
I was happy to see that according to Ginsburg, the TET is “a vessel containing the blessing of peace.” He appears to arrive at this conclusion by associating TET as the 9th letter, with the 9th Sephirah, Yesod, meaning foundation, Zohar 3:115b correlated PEACE with Yesod. This interpretation fits with my experience in meditation. (Ginsburgh, Rabbi Yitzchak. 1992. (Ginsburgh, Rabbi Yitzchak. 1992. The Hebrew Letters. Jerusalem: Gal Einai.. 141).
There is a terrific story in Talmud [Taanit 21a] of a man who was nicknamed ISH GAM ZU - literally MAN OF ALSO THIS. ISH GAM ZU thought everything that happened in life was GAM ZU LETOVAH - ALSO THIS IS FOR GOOD Tov. He never wavered from this viewpoint, even when he became blind and lost the use of his arms and legs. I stood next to the Kever of Ish Gam zu in Tsfat which is located in the middle of a residential neighborhood. It seemed appropriate for this good man to be in the midst of the living.
[Zayyin Heth Tet Yud Kaf Lamed: [this sequence teaches,] and if thou doest thus, the Holy One, blessed be He, will sustain[ Zan] thee, be gracious Hen] unto thee, show goodness [Metiv] to thee, give thee a heritage Yerushah], and bind a crown Keter] on thee in the world to come (Shabbat 104a).
[The writing of the letters] must be ‘kethibah tammah’ [perfect writing]; thus one must not write the… Tet as a Pey or the Pey as a Tet Shabbat 103b).
The TET is one of 7 letters Gimel is one of 7 letters which may be adorned with TAGIN, or little crowns, in the Torah, Tefillin or Mezzuzah scroll. These are called the SHAYNAYZ GAYTZ letters [Shin, Ayin, Tet, Nun, Zayin, Gimmel, and Tsade] Each one of these letters contains a Zayin. A TAG is composed of 3 strokes which themselves look like little Zayin s.
There is a wonderful story in Talmud, which describes Moses ascending to Heaven to find God occupied in affixing TAGGIN to the letters of Torah:
Rab Judah said in the name of Rab, When Moses ascended on high he found the Holy One, blessed be He, engaged in affixing coronets to the letters. [These are the Taggin, i.e., three small strokes written on top of the letters Shatnayz Gaytz in the form of a crown (Menachoth 29b).
The Tet is a wonderful letter in which to meditate. You can sit in it and the letter will curl itself around you. It is soft and flexible. And if, while in the Tet, you hold the Yud, in your hands against your abdomen, it adds yet another dimension.
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January 10th, 2021
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