Hebrew Letter Bet - ב

The letter Bet is the first letter of the Torah. This is actually a misconception that the Kabbalah explains differently. In order to say a word/letter one must inhale prior to exhaling. The sound of the inhale is the sound of the Alef.

We in America are taught that the Alef has no sound. Actually, as we see above the Alef has the sound of the inhale.

Bet has two sounds. That of the Bet when it has a dagesh and the sound of the V when it does not have a dagesh. Whatever the sound the Bet has a gematria of 2 in the regular gematria system and also 2 in the small gematria and the ordinal systems.

Here is the Bet descriptions from the "Secrets of the Hebrew Alefbet by Daniela Abravanel.

The letter Beit

Perception of the Deceptive Plurality of Creation

God calls the Jews children of Israel in order to teach us that in our spiritual path we must learn to trust and assimilate simple faith, which is the highest of the divine powers.

While Abraham is associated with the energy of Alef, which brings union to plurality. Isaac, in contrast evokes the theme of Bayit – house. perception of the deceptive plurality of creation and the requirement to separate ourselves from this perception. When Abraham was about to sacrifice his son on Mount Moriah, Isaac had a clear perception of the deceptive aspect of the material world as opposed to eternity of the spirit. For this reason, although ultimately Isaac was not sacrificed he nevertheless chose to separate himself from the plurality of material world. It is told that he entirely lost his sight for this reason and lived in a state of silent contemplation.

The Bayit which is the house and the home is therefore the place where one withdraws from the chaos of the illusionary exterior world. The name of the letter Beit is spelled the same as the letter Bayit. The focal point of holiness on earth is God's house - the holy Temple. The microcosmic forms of this is the Bet Knesset which is the synagogue and the Bet Midrash which is the House of Study.

All of these places are where one gets back in touch with one's true self, the unity of one's own consciousness, and one's unity with the Shechinah. The inspiration we draw from these houses makes it possible for the house of to be transformed, too, into a miniature sanctuary.. This concept is expressed in the verse in which God commands the people of Israel to build him a sanctuary to dwell among them, not only within the tabernacle but in every human being, within his or her own soul. The image of the house as a place of refuge is found in Psalms chapter 90 verse 1 Lord you have been an abode for us for all generations. For Abraham the ideal place to receive revelation of the deity was the natural world and he not only built a house of worship once he reached Beer Sheva – The Well of 7; he also planted a tree, under which he meditated. For Isaac, however, a steady immersion in the natural world would have been a risk; he would have eventually succumbed to the pantheistic pagan worldview. Thus Isaac being a great Tzadik – a righteous and spiritual person, radiated his powerful light from inside his tent, drawing the outside world inward for himself. That is why he had no need to go outside and meddle with the outside world.

Still one of Isaac's important tasks was to begin to dig into the ground, reopening the Wells dug by his father that were stopped up by the Philistines. Water is the symbol of the Torah, and the word Beer--באר which means well can be divided into the 2 words בא which means comes, and אור ohr which means light. Thus Beer means “the light comes,” in other words the revelation of divinity must be extracted and dug up either from the physical world hiding it, as in the case of Abraham, or from the depths of the human soul, as in the case of Isaac, who chose introspection and isolation as a means of revealing the hidden light. As we teach Light means fulfillment.

The flow of divine emanation

Information about the essence of the Bet.

Bet is the number two, thus it introduces the concept of duality. Duality is not one and therefore it's not unified but it has the potential to become unified. The Bet is also the beginning of the word Bracha - ברכה meaning blessing, through which every food and drink is reconnected to its heavenly root, it is also used to link the material world of plurality to the spiritual world of unity.

As we have seen, Bet was chosen to begin the Torah with the word Bereishit meaning “in a beginning”. Bet is also the first letter of the word Beraicha (same letters as Bracha - different vowels). Beraicha is a word that means container. God's intention in giving the Torah was to bring blessing to the container for life. That container is the world. The obvious connection here is the one who blesses others broadens his or her own ability to draw down and contain the flow of divine emanation. Another word that begins with the Bet is Beria which means creation. By associating the creation of duality implied in the letter bet we can explain the diversity in the plurality found in the creation: it is meant to remind us that only God is one and absolute.

Bet is therefore the symbol of our world since every earthly thing has the quality of duality; absolute unity is only present in the deity. As the sages said everything created comes in pairs: the Torah, written and oral; the mitzvot, positive and negative; the intermediaries between man and God, Moses and Aaron; the world, heaven and earth; the luminaries, sun and moon; and man himself, was male and female.

The notion of revealing divinity in the world through the word Beracha is generally associated with Abraham who used to invite travelers to eat in his tent and teach them to bless God for the food served them, thereby teaching them to recognize God as master of the universe. A Beracha invites perception of the absolute; it forces the person reciting it to ponder the origin of what she or he is eating and the fact that God himself allows us to perform this act thus protecting our souls from the illusion of plurality in the material world.

(The midrash related to Abraham teaches that he would feed the wayfarer and speak of the One God. After eating he would request they Bless after the meal. If they declined he would say that they might reconsider since the owner of the food required this or they would need to be arrested and put in jail for theft. If that did not work in prompting them to bless after the meal He would present them with a bill of fare at an exorbitant amount - something like a million dollars equivalent.) The midrash indicated that no one rejected Blessing after eating in Abraham's home. Do you think it is coercion? Remember this was a desert that Abraham located his tent.

Since the principle of inter-inclusion affirms that every patriarch, like every Sefirah which is the singular of Sefirot contains all the others, Isaac is also closely linked to the concept of Beracha. Even Isaac knew that the way of blessing is a spiritual alternative to the way of exclusion and separation from material reality. As it is written in Genesis, when Isaac wanted to bless his son, he asked them to bring him some food. Isaac knew that he would broaden his own awareness of the greater in his infinite goodness through eating and through the thanks he would give afterwards the higher level of consciousness attained through eating and blessing for food enhance Isaac's own ability to bless his son.

Growing through one's children

Isaac was the first man born Jewish. Isaac was also the first man circumcised according to Jewish law on the eighth day. Children in the Bible are seen as the greatest blessing and it is perhaps for this reason that HaShem made almost all the Matriarchs to suffer, pray, and overcome sterility through God opening their wombs. In the Torah, the Jews are called B'nai Yisrael - children of Israel. The first precept given by the Torah to humanity is to be fruitful and multiply.

According to Rabbi Ginsburg, the double verb used to invite humans to procreate suggests that not only does God call on people to rediscover their ability to create life, but also to personally improve, by learning from their children. And the children are our greatest teachers. When I had no children and still doubted this idea, my teacher Esther Kitov told me, every child is a Sefer Torah. Now that I have children, I acknowledge this, and from each of them I learned Torah from a different point of view.

Essentially, the first lesson that we learn from children is simple faith. In other words belief in your God which grows into knowing God. Children know God, with the same total trust that children have in their parents. Indeed the Torah admonishes us, you shall be wholehearted with the Lord your God Deuteronomy 18:13.

In order to learn to act with wholehearted faith we must give new meaning to children and childhood. While we must acknowledge the true value of adult intellect at the same time we must understand that the innocence of children hide something much deeper than simple naïveté. Childhood is not just a period to go through in order to become adults, learning from parents and teachers; rather, the childhood years are very precious in their own right. Childhood is a period when children restore to adults the type of wisdom the adults have lost in the process of becoming adults. In fact, children can teach adults how to avoid becoming adulterated. For example, children can teach adults to ignore the way society conditions individuals to conform to its restrictions.

Children are divine creation in the purest sense. If we understand that the smile we find in the sleep of our little ones during their first months of life can inspire us to see the Angels they see when asleep. If we choose our children as teachers, we learn very important lessons of life, such as forgiveness, hope, and optimism. Observing them as they take their first steps, when they fall and get back up without fear, going from two years to joy in just a few seconds, can teach us lessons that will make our spiritual path less difficult and far more satisfactory. If we let ourselves be infected by their curiosity and enthusiasm for all that is new, we will learn to carry ourselves into the future with faith and optimism and without the worries that deprive us of physical and mental well-being.

Today, various schools of psychotherapy used the rediscovery of the inner child as a healing technique. Briefly, their point of view is as follows: just as a child knows how to distinguish between what he likes and does not like the human being seeking realization and freedom from suffering must also be able to abandon forced, self-destructive attitudes she or he will be able to obtain this freedom by rediscovering and contacting her or his inner child, the healthiest part of the personality.

If we would take the opportunity to start of dialogues with our children, we would live in a happier world, and would also approach the ideals of spirituality, freshness, and joy expressed in the verse of the Psalms: you are my son; I have gotten begotten you this day, some chapter 2 verse seven, words that of potential daily rebirth of the soul.

Additional Information about the Bet

The Torah begins with the letter Bet, as we know, and the numerical value is 2. Thus the Bet in the Torah teaches that there are two Torahs. One is Oral and one is Written. Or there are 2 Torahs - One is our Torah for this world after the golden Calf and one is the Torah that was given with the first set of Luchot (tablets). You decide which is correct or are they both correct?

The first fulfillment of the letter Bet is Bet Yood Tav בית. Its gematria is 412. The normative gematgria is 34. The perfect gematria is made by adding the two gematriot together. 412 + 34 = 446. The gematria of HaEmet is 446. HaEmet translates as "The Truth". Since Kabbalah teaches that truth is relative to the person and situation except for the Truth of the Creator. We see the relationship between a House that is the vessel to reveal the Creator. Now you have another reason why the Torah starts with a bet. It is creating the house to reveal the Light of the Creator.

The Tanach is also the Creators Truth as evidenced by Tehillim 119:160 which has a phrase Rosh Dabarech Emet. The translation is "Your first utterance is truth."

There are also 2 different kosher manners to write the Bet. One way is with three Vav's which would make the gematria 18 and connecting to life. This is connected to the idea of a women being the house of her husband and the wife creating the life of the marriage. The Pirkei Avot teaches in 5:25 that 18 is the recommended age to get married and setting up a new home. The other kosher manner of the writing of the Bet is by using a Dalet and Vav. This gematria is then 10 representing the Sefirot. This is teaching us the reality that the Torah speaks only of the Sefirot.

By starting with a Bet the Torah hints to the second Sefirah which is Chochmah or wisdom. In Proverbs 24:3 King Solomon relates to the idea that "with wisdom a house is built. This is also taught in the Tikunie Zohar.

THE TWENTY TWO GATES TO THE GARDEN by Stephen M Rossman

The Letter Beit The Sunbow

The sun rose early and stretched its rays across the sky. With its first stretch came deep red. With its next stretch came orange, and finally a golden glow sparkled everywhere.

Sometimes when the sun awakens, it is happy to have the world all to itself. There are other times, however, when it does not want to spend this precious time alone. So as it yawns and stretches, it really is reaching through the windows and into the bedrooms of special children warming them ever so gently until they twitch their noses, blink their eyes, and returned to the waking world for the start of another day.

Today, the Princess would be the sun's chosen playmate. So, it asked the wind for the favor of knocking softly on the silver shutters covering the windows and opening them wide with two good blows. Since the room was a longtime friend of the sun, it obliged and blew the princess's shutters aside. Now the sun could stretch its rays through the glass window panes and search for its sleeping friend.

Most mornings, the Princess was the last person in the palace to awaken. This morning would be different.

As the sun's rays gently caressed her face with the warmth of its love, the Princess twitched her nose, blinked her eyes, and returned to the waking world. That was the world she would inhabit all day long until she would sleep again.

It took several moments for the Princess to focus clearly and see the things of the waking world. While asleep her eyes had adjusted to the kind of vision she needed in the dream world. What did she notice first in the waking world? A shaft of radiant light that bathed her bed.

Then she remembered several other such mornings and warmings when then the sun had come to play. As she recalled those time, she was filled by a rush of joy and well-being that warmed her throughout her soul as the sun's rays had warmed her skin. It began in her heart and every beat, now coming faster and faster, that went through her chest, down her legs, up her arms, and into her head. She tingled with the warming bliss the sun's presence had brought her this morning.

Can you imagine what she loved most about the sun's visit? It was the chance to lie back upon her ample fluffy puffy pillows and gaze into the beam that shone through the window.

Quickly she became entranced by the dancing particles that floated in on that stage of light. They whirled and swirled and spun like tiny ballerinas. Some seemed to dance alone. Others orbited their partners to the beat of a symphony only the Princess and the Sunbeam could hear.

Then the program to ballerinas faded and passed away, only to be followed by the arrays of sparkling colors that glistened before her eyes. There were glittering bursts of violet and pulsating sparks of pure white. If rainbows formed in the heavens after a storm, then the Princess was witnessing the formation of a sunbow shining through her bedroom window. Sunbows only come at the beginning and ending of the most magical of days. To see one is to know that you are truly blessed.

In fact, it is said that the healing power of a sunbow lasts forever and can be summoned even after many years have passed simply by recalling a time when one came to visit, no matter how long ago it was.

And true to its blessing, the sunbow brought the Princess a marvelous magical day.

Can you describe How this story relates to the Letter Bet?

Now it is time for you to answer the question "What is the essence or essences of the letter Beit in a few words"?

Blessing and House - Bracha and Beit

Is your house a Blessing? or does it keep you from making Aliya which means to elevate yourself? In essence are you a tourist to this world or do you plan to stay?

I hope you enjoyed this class which is a vessel to build your home with Blessings.