Chapter 21: His Word Never Leaves Him

Chapter 20 showed that the whole world is nothing but G‑d’s word, and that a single word is as nothing next to the speaker’s power of speech, his thought and his very self. That leaves a question. Granted, the word is tiny next to G‑d. But taken by itself, isn’t it something? Before creation there was no divine speech; now there is. Isn’t that a change?

Chapter 21 answers by showing that G‑d’s speech differs from ours, not only because His is not physical, but in its very nature. A person’s word, while it is still within him, has no standing of its own. Once spoken, it leaves him and takes on a life of its own: others hear it and repeat it, and it reaches places he can never call it back from. With G‑d this cannot happen. A word can leave its speaker only if there is somewhere outside him for it to go, and there is no place empty of Him.

If G‑d’s word never leaves Him, why call it speech at all? It sounds more like thought, which stays inside the thinker.

Human speech does two things. It reveals what was hidden in the speaker’s mind, and it separates from him. In a person the two always come together: to share a thought with someone, it has to leave you. With G‑d only the first applies. Before creation, the light and life that would make worlds was hidden in Him. Creation is its coming out into the open, revealed to the creatures, who, from their own point of view at least, stand outside Him. That revealing is what we call His speech: “Let there be light” and the rest of the ten utterances.

The same word is used for the Torah, Prophets and Writings, even though they were not revealed in order to create anything. “G‑d spoke to the prophets” means that something of Him was revealed to them, not that a word left Him and travelled.

In a person there is a stage where words are fully one with him. Before a desire rises to the mind to be put into words, the words it will one day become are already in the heart, but only as potential. There they have no existence of their own. You do not love in English or in French; the feeling is beyond language, and the words that will express it are swallowed up in it. Only when a person thinks and speaks do the words take on a life of their own.

With G‑d, that first stage never ends. His word stays one with Him after it has created the worlds, just as before. So for Him nothing has changed. This answers the question we began with: there is no such thing as G‑d’s word “by itself”, apart from Him, because it never leaves Him.

The change is real only for the creatures, and for them it is the greatest change there is, from not existing to existing. For that, the light must come down step by step, from cause to effect, through many contractions. An undimmed light would leave them swallowed up in their own life-force, unable to exist as creatures at all.

The contractions lower the light to a level the creatures can bear. They hide its full strength, its inner “face”. And because it is hidden, something else follows: to the creatures, G‑d’s word looks like human speech, something that came out from Him and now stands on its own. That is what lets us feel like real, separate beings.

Even someone who knows that the world has a Creator, and that it cannot exist for a moment without His word, still pictures that word as something sent out from Him, apart from the Speaker. Most of us go further still and do not feel ourselves to be a word at all, only independent beings. All of this is the hiding. The separation is in the creature’s perception, not in what is actually so.

A veil hides only from someone outside it. The contractions come from G‑d and are themselves G‑dly, so they cannot hide anything from Him, just as a person cannot hide from himself. They are like the snail’s shell, which is not a coat it put on but part of its own body. Havayah, G‑d’s four-letter Name, stands for G‑d as He is beyond the world and reveals; Elokim for His power to hide and clothe Himself in nature. “Havayah is Elokim”: the power that conceals is itself G‑dly, one with the Name that reveals.

Picture someone who has grasped a deep idea and must explain it to young pupils who cannot yet take it in. He gives them a parable. For the pupils the parable is a veil: it gives them a taste, and the idea itself stays hidden inside it. For the one who told it there is no veil at all. When he looks at the parable he sees the whole idea in it. So too, the contractions hide G‑d from us, never from Him.

That is why, before Him, all is “as nothing”. Note the word “as”. The text does not say that the world does not exist; we see it, and it is real. It says that before Him it counts as nothing, a word that never left its Speaker. Chapter 20 taught that G‑d is One alone after creation just as before. Chapter 21 shows why.