Among the texts of the kabbalistic tradition, the Sefer Yetzirah, the «Book of Formation», holds a unique place. It is extremely short: in its briefest versions it can be read in a few minutes. Yet it has generated centuries of commentary and lies at the origin of concepts that every student of Kabbalah meets from the very first day, starting with the word sefirot itself.
A book without a certain author
Tradition attributes the Sefer Yetzirah to the patriarch Abraham. Modern scholars do not accept this attribution and have long debated its date of composition, with proposals ranging from the first centuries of the common era to the early Middle Ages. What is certain is that by the tenth century the text was already regarded as authoritative: among others, it was commented on by Saadia Gaon, one of the most important figures of medieval Judaism.
The book has come down to us in several recensions, a short one and a long one, with differences that are sometimes significant. Anyone reading it in translation should know that there is no single, definitive text.
The thirty-two wondrous paths
The text opens by stating that the Creator formed the world with thirty-two wondrous paths of wisdom, and specifies that these paths are the ten sefirot and the twenty-two letters. It is a vision in which the cosmos arises from two elements: numbers and the sounds of language.
The ten sefirot «belimah»
In the Sefer Yetzirah the sefirot do not yet have the names they will take on in later Kabbalah (Kether, Chokmah, Binah and so on). They are described instead as ten dimensions: the depths of beginning and end, of good and evil, of above and below, and of the four directions of space.
The text calls them sefirot belimah, an expression of debated meaning, often rendered as «sefirot of nothingness» or «sefirot without substance». The book warns to «restrain the mouth from speaking and the heart from thinking» about them: an invitation to contemplative caution that commentators have never forgotten.
The twenty-two letters
The letters are divided into three groups, which structure the whole book:
| Group | Letters | Correspondences in the cosmos |
|---|---|---|
| Three mothers | Aleph, Mem, Shin | air, water, fire |
| Seven doubles | Bet, Gimel, Dalet, Kaf, Pe, Resh, Tav | seven planets, seven days |
| Twelve simples | the remaining twelve | twelve signs, twelve months |
Each group is related to three planes: the universe (olam), time (shanah, the year) and the human being (nefesh, soul and body). So, for example, the three mothers correspond in the universe to air, water and fire, in the year to the temperate, cold and hot seasons, and in the body to the chest, the belly and the head.
The 231 gates
One of the most famous passages concerns the combinations of the letters. The text describes the letters arranged on a circle, like a wheel, and imagines connecting them in pairs: the result is 231 gates. The number is not arbitrary: it is exactly the number of different pairs that can be formed from twenty-two elements (22 × 21 divided by 2).
The same combinatorial spirit emerges when the book calls the letters «stones» and the words «houses»: two stones build two houses, three stones build six, four build twenty-four, and so on beyond what the mouth can say. It is, in poetic language, a description of permutations.
Why this text is so important
The Sefer Yetzirah left the tradition three lasting legacies:
- the term sefirot, which medieval Kabbalah would take up and fill with new meanings;
- the classification of the letters into mothers, doubles and simples, at the basis of the correspondences between letters, elements, planets and signs;
- the idea that language is creative: letters do not describe the world, they form it.
From this last idea derive both the meditative practices on the combination of letters and the legends of the golem, the clay figure brought to life through the letters and the Name, which popular tradition has often linked precisely to the study of this book.
How to read it today
Those approaching the Sefer Yetzirah for the first time find a dense, repetitive text, almost a formula to be recited. It helps to read it slowly, one chapter at a time, with the table of letters at hand. In the school of Studio Esoterico Cornelio it is approached as a text to meditate on rather than to explain: one chooses a letter, considers its three correspondences (cosmos, time, body) and observes how the same force manifests on different planes.
In short
- The Sefer Yetzirah is a short, ancient text of debated date, already commented on by Saadia Gaon in the tenth century.
- It speaks of thirty-two paths of wisdom: ten sefirot and twenty-two letters.
- The letters are divided into three mothers, seven doubles and twelve simples, related to cosmos, time and body.
- The 231 gates are all the possible pairs among the twenty-two letters.
- The book gave Kabbalah the term sefirot and the idea of language as a creative force.
