A special person in your life leaves you a note: The letter V. A little later you find an E, then an O and then an L.
Hmmm..….
You now have four random letters in which you can find very little significance. What could they mean? Is it possible there’s no significance?
Suddenly it hits you. The letters spell the word LOVE.
Once you get the right perspective, and put the letters into proper context, they coalesce into a beautiful word, an affectionate communication, a stream of warmth into your life.
You actually live this every day.
Kabbalistically speaking, letters are a metaphor for the events and objects of our lives. In a world where meaning is hidden, we often see life as a de-contextualized jumble that doesn’t make much sense. So, do we just shrug our shoulders and assume that there’s no meaning to be found? Or do we keep searching for the message?
Let’s look at your day:
Say you'll be spending an hour with a client, or doing housework.
In and of themselves, such hours come and go; they’re unremarkable in the scope of your life.
Metaphorically, these mundane hours are meaningless, random letters.
But now put them into context: You were created by G-d for an objective that is important; it’s unique to you, which is why G-d found it necessary to create you. This doesn’t mean that your respective raison d' être necessarily entails headline-grabbing accomplishments. It means that G-d wants you and me to lead purpose-driven lives, focused on our responsibilities to our Creator and to the world around us. And to G-d, that’s really important.
When we’re mindful of this objective, and see our tasks – like a client meeting or laundry – as part of the trajectory toward a meaningful life, we’re achieving our goal.
Your day is full of letters; you just need to put them in context.
This is a fundamental function of prayer. In the contemplation of prayer, we take life’s details and frame them, forming beautiful sentences out of important letters. In that sense, prayer is redemptive; it releases events from the trap of meaninglessness, elevating them so that they’re re-experienced as part of a cosmically meaningful journey through life.
It’s up to you. Free yourself.
Mendy Herson wrote...
The language of Kabbala tells us that G-d's Infinite Light filled all of reality, and then, to 'make space' for a creation (us) that wouldn't feel itself a part of the Divine, G-d 'withdrew', leaving an empty space in which the Divine created the universe. So there was withdrawal of the Infinite, EXCEPT that a 'residual etching' was left (reshimu in Hebrew) behind in that space.
This is a very profound topic which I tremble to try to present on a simple blog post, but one of the explanations of this 'Reshimu' is that it's similar to letters.
When a brilliant professor properly words to convey a deep idea, the student has intellectual clarity/understanding and there's a deep intellectual connection forged between professor and student. What if the professor says words but doesn't do the job of conveying the idea? The student may understand individual words, but not get the intellectual picture that the Professor sees.
In a way, that's what happened at Creation: G-d had been 'conveying' Infinity through His 'words'. And when G-d 'withdrew', which means that G-d was removing the capacity for us to [instinctively] understand what those words were actually conveying. IOW - G-d withdrew the Light (the clarity) and left the words. G-d left the Reshimu.
This is sometimes presented as G-d having also scrambled those 'un-illuminated' words. Leaving us with the residue of a Divine, Infinite Reality, and the challenge of reconstructing that Reality to access the beauty once again.