Building Blocks of Creation   

“Bereishis bara Elokim es…”

Ask any elementary school student. They’ll readily translate this pasuk for you, they’ll even sing it in a cute chant. But the layers of meaning behind these opening words of the Torah fill volumes. I recall that in 12th grade, we spent the entire first semester on the first pasuk in the Torah. And while we thought we had delved so extensively into its depths, we’d only scratched the surface.

The Maggid of Mezritch in Ohr Torah explains:

“Bereishis” was also a creation. It is known among the kabbalistic seforim that the Hebrew letters were created first, and that Hashem then created the worlds using the letters. This is the meaning of “Bereishis bara Elokim es… — in the beginning, Hashem created “es” — Alef to Tav.

Before the world existed, Hashem set up the alef-beis — the building blocks of the universe. Like the chemical elements that make up the physical world, each letter of the Hebrew alphabet represents another dimension of reality. And each combination of characters — each word or name by which something was called — resulted in a different material that was actualized in creation (Sefer Yetzirah). In creation, the object was not given a name; the name formed the object.