“In the beginning…”

The letter yud recalls the initial moment where “something” precipitates out of “nothing”. From the vast expanse of surrounding consciousness there appears within the void a single, circumscribed point, a seed, which contains the potentiality of all that will unfold from it.

Imagine a dark void within a light filled expanse. Out of the boundary, emerges a letter yud, like a drop, precipitating into the empty space. Its upper tip stays attached to the surrounding light, while its body appears as a single point of light within a pitch black void.

The yud as a hieroglyph teaches two ideas. First, its upper tip is an umbilicus which roots the entire odyssey of history in the Infinite light that surrounds the void. Though our universe emanates from this infinite light its consciousness is infinitely greater than anything that we can grasp.

Second the small, seed-like shape of the letter teaches that all began as a single, undifferentiated spark of potential within the mind of G‑d. Yud corresponds to the faculty of wisdom. This is a specific term for that first flash of insight, the lightening bolt of intuition that, for an instant, illumines the brain. It is purely abstract and singular. Tat the stage of wisdom and yud, even the concept of multiplicity (or even duality) has not yet emerged.

This is the first and most subtle stage of the lights concealment within the ray. It enables finite reality, albeit on its most sublime level, to appear within a Being whose essential definition is Infinity. Thus begins the possibility of separation from G‑d. Nevertheless, creation, at this point, has no awareness of itself as an independent entity. Like Piaget’s model of human development, the “child” does not at first recognize itself as separate from its source of sustenance, the other’s breast.

This upper hei represents the second phase when the Divine mind elaborates, in a single and ecstatic vision, all the possibilities inherent within that original dense point of thought. The hei as hieroglyph depicts a coordinate plane surrounding a yud. It symbolizes this next phase wherein the concept is developed in breadth and depth, with all its implications and applications, constructing a visionary landscape which contributes an expanded context for this original seed idea.