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Part 1: The Bible’s Structure
Let us begin with an overview of the Bible—God’s word to man.
The Bible contains three parts, each with several books. In all, there are 24 books in the Bible: 5 in the Torah, 8 in the second part, and 11 in the third.
The first part of the Bible is the Torah, which consists of the Five Books of Moses. The message of the Torah is the expression and revelation of God’s will to man, to differentiate between good and evil—what should be done and what should not be done. The word “Torah” itself derives from the root that means “to teach.” Meaning, that the Torah is the teaching of God’s will for man. The five books were written by Moses.
The second general part of the Bible are the Prophets—the Nevi’im. The first 4 books of the Prophets—Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings—are basically stories. They give a historical reading of the first generations of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel after Joshua enters and conquers the land. They are full of ups and downs. At times the Jewish people follow the way of God, or at times do not. The prophets come to rebuke the people, but their inner intention is a call. The prophets are thus the Divine call to return. God is constantly calling us: “Return back to Me! My arms are open to receive you, to kiss you, just return to Me.” That is basically the message of the Prophets.
The greatest individual of the Prophets is King David. He is the archetypal figure of a ba’al teshuvah—one who returns to God. From the beginning, he is a great, noble, and courageous figure. But he is not always upstanding, he falls from time to time. But he immediately acknowledges and confesses his fall and he truthfully and in humility returns to God. This is why God chooses him to be the eternal king of Israel. All the truly righteous kings reflect David’s personality and why the kingdom of Israel is called the House of David. The Messiah also descends from the House of David. In one place in the Talmud, the sages even say that the Messiah’s name will be David. David is the eternal expression of a ba’al teshuvah, which is the message of the Prophets in general.
Once again there were 4 historical books (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings) and then 4 prophetic books (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Minor Prophets). The greatest of the latter is Isaiah, whose soul derives from the highest level as explained in Kabbalah, and his book’s most well-known prophecies are those about the Messiah.
The third part of the Bible is the Writings which begins with Psalms written by David, and then Proverbs written by his son, Solomon. In Halachah, we learn that the Messiah must be a descendant of both David and Solomon. He must possess the power of prayer (David). Prayer expresses the heart of man. What is the service of the heart: that is prayer. The greatest example of this is David in the Book of Psalms. Then Proverbs is the book of wisdom, which teaches that even insights that we have in the Torah come from our devout prayer to God. First, we must pray and then God gives the insight.
The next book in the Writings is Job—the eternal debate between God and man. At the end of the book, God reveals Himself to man and Job is convinced that God is right and that everything is directed towards the eternal rectification of the world. Then we have the books of Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah. Finally, the 24th book of the Bible is Chronicles, which tells the history again of the world, but this time with a greater emphasis on David and his descendants.
It is good to try to condense the entire structure we have seen into simple words. We will say that the Torah is the “teaching”—God’s teaching. Torah literally means “teaching.” The Prophets are the “Call of God” to return to Him. The word for that in Hebrew is “Teshuvah.” The Writings, the third part begins with the Book of Psalms which we repeat daily, far more than we recite any other book of the Writings, and it is “Prayer.”
So, the three parts of the Bible can be described as: Teaching (תּוֹרָה), Teshuvah (תְּשׁוּבָה), and Prayer (תְּפִלָּה). The sum of these words in gematria is 1839, which means that their average value is 613, the exact number of the commandments in the Torah. In this way, we can see how both the Prophets and the Writings are contained within the Torah.
Part 2: Two Types of Divine Revelation
The Three Parts of the Soul and their Seat in the Body
The Torah is the mind of creation. Israel is the heart of creation. The nations of the earth are the liver of creation. In each of these three vital organs a level of the soul resides. The higher level of the soul resides in the mind, the middle level in the heart, and the lower level in the liver. In Hebrew, the names of these three levels of the soul, from above to below, are Neshamah, which itself means “soul”; Ru’ach, which literally means spirit; and Nefesh, which is the natural, or vital, or animate level of the soul, which resides in the liver.
The Torah says that the Nefesh, the lower level, is the blood. The liver is the seat of the blood. It clarifies and purifies the blood. It sends the blood to the heart. In the heart, the spirit enters the blood, which is the oxygen, and is then distributed to the entire body. But the brain, the mind, is what controls and leads all of the body, the vital organs, and all of the limbs of the body. Each one of these three general levels of mind, heart, and liver possesses three faculties.
Our purpose in these teachings is to address the significance and meaning of Torah. Therefore, we begin with this teaching which will ultimately explain the three levels, the three faculties of the mind, which in Hebrew are called Chochmah (wisdom), Binah (understanding), and Da’at (knowledge).
Two Levels of Prophecy
We explained above that the Torah in general (also referred to as the Bible) is divided into three general sections or parts. The Five books of Moses, which are called Torah (specifically), and the Nevi’im (the Prophets) and the Ketuvim (the Writings).
We explained that the archetypal soul, who is the one that received the Torah from God and gave us the Torah as the Word of God is Moses, the greatest of all prophets. So, the Torah is also a prophecy, it is just a much higher level of prophecy than that of the other true prophets—the prophets of Israel. The difference between the prophecy of Moses and the prophecy of all the other prophets is that Moses saw through a transparent pane, as it were; he saw the word of God speaking to him when the Torah was given at Sinai. This is what we commemorate with the holiday of Shavu’ot (also known as the Feast of Weeks)—the time of the Giving of the Torah.
It says that all the people, not just Moses, “saw the voices,” meaning that the two senses of sight and hearing united so that the people could literally see the words. The greatest of all the people who merited to see the word of God, was Moses who saw that God was speaking directly to himself. That is why Moses corresponds to both senses together, the sense of sight and the sense of deep hearing.
In Yiddish, the word that means “hearing the deep meaning of a spoken word” is derher. It is like the inner ear, the inner hearing, which then combines with sight acting like the power of sight to see the word. That is the nature of Moses’ prophecy. Again, Moses prophecy is unique, and this is stressed by the fact that only Moses begins his prophecy with the word “this” (זֶה), as though he is pointing directly at that which he is beholding at this very moment and saying, “this is the word of God.” That is the unique expression that begins Moses’ prophecy: “This is the word that God commanded.” All the other prophets that appear in the second section of the Bible, the Prophets, begin with the word “so” (כֹּה)—“so said God.” This word “so” indicates that the other prophets did not see the word through a transparent pane, like Moses, but their prophecy can be likened to seeing through a translucent pane. That is how they “saw” or experienced receiving God’s word.
Worlds, States of Consciousness, and the Divine Chariot
In the terminology of Kabbalah, seeing God’s word through a transparent pane requires the state of consciousness of the highest of the four Worlds, which is called the world of Emanation. At this level, consciousness is solely that of God and His Oneness. That is the level of Moses. His very consciousness is that of the world of Emanation, which, as we will explain, is above the secrets of the Divine Chariot—seen by the other major prophets: Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Zachariah—which resides in the three lower worlds of consciousness known as Creation, Formation, and Action.
In our previous teaching, we explained that the greatest of the other prophets—whose prophecies appear in the Bible’s second part, the Nevi’im (Prophets)—is Isaiah. Isaiah saw the Divine Chariot. What is the meaning of the expression, “Divine Chariot?” The chariot symbolizes a state of being that is totally nullified to the will of God. It performs solely the will of God in its thought, in its speech, in its action, in its deed. It is totally devoted to God and to perform and enact God's mission on earth, which is to spread the Divine light of the Torah and thereby to rectify God’s world as He desired in the Creation of the world. In the higher world of Emanation, the concept of chariot as so defined does not apply because, once more, to be a chariot is to be a created being, but a created being which is totally null to the will of the Creator, meaning that it performs solely the directive of the Creator and thereby it leads, as it were, the Creator himself to the manifestation or actualization of His purpose in creation. Just as a chariot leads the one who rides on the chariot to his end, to his mission.
Put another way, in the higher world of Emanation, the world of Moses, all is God and God is all. It is as though the end, the absolutely good end of the revelation of God in all, already exists. But in the lower worlds, this mission is still in the future and we have to work to attain the mission and our purpose in life—the purpose for which we were created. The highest level of consciousness possible in the three lower worlds is to become a chariot for God. It is said that the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were God’s chariot more than any other souls on earth. But Moses is even above their level of being a chariot.
Prophecy and Divine Inspiration
Moses’ prophecy is a transparent prophecy, and the other prophets experience a translucent prophecy. What they have in common, meaning that what is shared by the prophecy of Moses, which is the Torah (the Five Books of Moses) and the prophecies appearing in the second part of the Bible, the Prophets, is that in both the prophecy is a light which descends from above. God is giving the prophecy. He is placing His word to the mouth of the prophet to convey to us, through a light, a revelation that descends from above.
The essential difference between these first two parts of the Bible—the prophecy of Moses and the prophecy of the Prophets—and the third part, the Writings, is that the Writings are Divine inspiration that God places in the heart of man. We are inspired by God to express ourselves from below up (as in prayer to God). Another way of explaining this difference is that prophecy that descends directly from above is known as “Direct Light” or in Hebrew, Or Yashar. Thus, the first and the second parts of the Bible constitute two different levels of Or Yashar, of direct light, light that descends from above to below. But the third part of the Bible, which is the Writings, is described as “Returning Light” (or reflected light), which in Hebrew is Or Chozer. Or Chozer is when God gives us Divine inspiration, meaning that it reveals the Divine spark in the heart of Israel, the heart of all mankind. We are taught that all mankind can achieve a level of Divine inspiration, and the beginning of Divine inspiration is the ability, the arousal from below, to turn to God in prayer.
The verb to turn (to God in prayer) is very important because before we turn to God, our backs, as it were, are to God. In our initial state, we face (we are conscious of) the material reality of the world, and our back (unconsciousness) is to the Creator. But that is not the ideal state, of course. The ideal state is that we turn to face the Creator (in our conscious mind and heart), and the creation itself is to our back (when turning to God we 'forget' the physical reality that seems to deny His Presence). We know that creation exists because God desires that it exists, at least in our state of consciousness, but our face is turned to God. That is already the beginning of Divine inspiration, and the first expression of that Divine inspiration is that we pray to God. This is the consciousness of King David, whose essence is found in Psalms, the first book of the Writings, which are his prayers to God.
The second manifestation of Divine inspiration is found in his son, King Solomon. From the inspiration that is given to man in his heart—in the spark of Divinity that resides in his heart—man receives insight, a sense of truth—of the difference between truth and falsehood. King Solomon’s inspired wisdom, which is written in the form of parables taught by a father to his son, appears in the second book of the Writings, the Book of Proverbs. Proverbs is the book that follows Psalms. Solomon addresses us like a dedicated and devoted father coming to teach his son the wisdom that God has inspired and granted him. This is the second manifestation of Divine inspiration, which as explained, is a light that returns or reflects from below to above.
To summarize what we have seen: the three parts of the Bible (Torah, Prophets, and Writings) constitute two levels of descending light (Torah and the Prophets), which is then reflected as one level of ascending, or returning light, from us to God; two levels from God to us, and one level from us to God.
Returning Light Ascends Higher than the Origin of Direct Light
But we are taught something most profound about the returning light, the level that ascends from below. The returning light represents the arousal of our soul to address and to understand as much as we can of the Divine providence of God, and to teach it to our children from generation to generation. This returning light returns so high that in a certain sense, it even reaches a climax, an epitome, which is higher than the origin of the descending light. This is an amazing insight. It means that the returning light returns to the very deepest essence of God Himself, both when we address Him in prayer and when we receive insights from Him and teach them to our children.
This is our second teaching to better understand the significance and importance of the Writings in the Bible. The Writings are actually the Divine words that we 'read' in ourselves, they are what is inscribed in our own hearts.
Recall that we began by stating that the mind of reality is the Torah itself with its three parts: Torah, Prophets, and Writings. Our next teaching, God willing, will be devoted to explaining more about what the three faculties of the mind are and how they correspond to the three parts of the Bible. For now, let us reiterate that the mind is the Torah, the heart is Israel, and the liver symbolizes the nations of the world. The liver is the seat of the blood. It represents the natural and habitual behavior of the entire body. It is the largest vital organ in the body, much bigger than the heart or the mind itself, which reflects how the nations of the earth are the biggest element in creation, quantitatively. The word liver etymologically derives from the word “live,” or “life,” which is also related to “love.” It also means “fat,” meaning that it is big; it also expands, representing expansion. As we said before, it is not just the seat of the blood. It holds the power to purify the blood, to take out all the toxins from the blood, and then to send the blood to the heart, to Israel, which then distributes the blood to all of the organs of the body, all directed by the Torah, which is the mind of creation.
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