Tehom: the Deep That Holds the Essence

וְהַבּוֹר רֵק אֵין בּוֹ מָיִם

The pit was empty; there was no water in it. Bereishit 37:24

תְּהוֹם, the primordial deep, appears only a handful of times in the Five Books. At the creation of the world. At the flood. It appears again in the blessings given to Yosef.

Blessed with the deep, twice

Yaakov blesses him with בִּרְכֹת תְּהוֹם רֹבֶצֶת תָּחַת, blessings of the deep crouching beneath (Bereishit 49:25). Moshe blesses him with וּמִתְּהוֹם רֹבֶצֶת תָּחַת, and with the deep that crouches beneath (Devarim 33:13). No other person in the Torah receives that blessing at all, and Yosef receives it from his father and again from the greatest prophet who ever lived.

Read what is packed into one verse over his head.

וְאֵת שַׁדַּי וִיבָרְכֶךָּ, בִּרְכֹת שָׁמַיִם מֵעָל, בִּרְכֹת תְּהוֹם רֹבֶצֶת תָּחַת, בִּרְכֹת שָׁדַיִם וָרָחַם

By Shaddai who blesses you: blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep crouching beneath, blessings of breast and womb. Bereishit 49:25

שַׁדַּי is the Name of the boundary, the One who said dai, enough. שָׁמַיִם, heaven, carries the same gematria as oil. תְּהוֹם is the deep he was thrown into. שָׁדַיִם is the breast, the flow without limit. רָחַם is the womb, built on the resh-chet of mercy and spirit and scent.

Heaven above and the deep below, the bounded Name and the nursing flow, the womb that shares its letters with the nose. The man blessed with all of it at once is the man who went down into a pit, and the Name presiding is the one who set the limit that let the deep hold him without dissolving him.

Face to face, and deep to deep

Moshe gets the highest description the Torah gives anyone.

וְלֹא קָם נָבִיא עוֹד בְּיִשְׂרָאֵל כְּמֹשֶׁה אֲשֶׁר יְדָעוֹ ה’ פָּנִים אֶל פָּנִים

No prophet rose again in Israel like Moshe, whom God knew face to face. Devarim 34:10

Face to face is surface contact. Revelation, light, two presences meeting where there is something to see. The Psalmist describes a different kind of knowing.

תְּהוֹם אֶל תְּהוֹם קוֹרֵא

Deep calls to deep. Tehillim 42:8

Yosef knows God deep to deep, in the place that was there before faces existed and before light was spoken. Moshe stands at the border and sees. Yosef goes down into the abyss and navigates it.

The same four letters, reordered

תְּהוֹם is tav, hey, vav, mem. Rearrange those four and you have מָהוּת, mahut, essence.

The void and the essence of a thing are one letter-set read two ways. Which is the Torah’s structural claim about what the deep actually contains: the irreducible core of a thing, the part that cannot be destroyed, held in the one place it can be extracted from.

Yosef’s essence was not put in the pit to be destroyed. It was put there because that is the only place the full extraction could happen. The Arizal has the deepest rectifications occurring in the deepest descents (Shaar HaGilgulim, Hakdamah 38), which makes the mechanism of redemption something worked from inside the pit rather than applied to it from above.

Every tzaddik who goes down goes down because what waits at the bottom can only be fetched by someone able to survive the tehom.

Which is why the series is named for it

קוֹל תְּהוֹם, Kol Tehom, the call of the deep, and the second half of the Psalmist’s verse names the channel it travels through: לְקוֹל צִנּוֹרֶיךָ, at the voice of Your channels. A tzinor is a conduit, and the same word puts David into Zion through the water shaft (Shmuel II 5:8).

Volume One is free to read, in English and in Hebrew.

Keep reading

• Yosef  the redeemer who inherited on a technicality
• Tzion  the stronghold David took through the tzinor, and the place the world was made from
• Tohu  not emptiness, a place already settled

The map shows how all of it connects.