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There is a Hasidic teaching that out of all of the ten commandments, God spoke only the first letter of the first one, the letter alef of Anokhi (The Rebbe of Rumanov as cited by Naftali Tzvi Horowitz of Ropshitz, Zera Kodesh, p. 40). When God revealed God’s essence in this pinnacle moment, God chose to bring into this broken world this singIe letter to heal us and strengthen us.   What is its power?  

Connection Between Heaven And Earth

The rabbis understand the alef to be made up of three letters, a yud on the top on one side and another yud on the bottom on the other side with a slanted vav line running between them, connecting them.  Seen this way, the alef represents the connection between heaven and earth, like the ladder in Yaakov’s dream.   What God revealed at Har Sinai was the possibility of precisely such a connection, such a vav line, a corridor, a pathway for human beings to reach God.  

Maybe you can see yourself as the little yud on the bottom of the alef.  Sometimes we feel that we are alone and untethered.  The alef is a reminder that there actually is a lifeline – that vav line coming down to meet us. Sometimes that line may feel inaccessible or closed off to us, but it is always there, waiting for us, offering us a way to connect to the yud above.  You can imagine that vav pathway as your breath creating a long stream, a current of connection between you and the divine force that is beyond you, tying you into that source of life and eternity and peace. You are tethered.   The alef has made visible the invisible but unbreakable string that ties you to your source.   .

Comfort

You are not alone in your distress, in your pain, in whatever troubles you.  There is this Other that is always with you, and this company provides you with some relief.  Anokhi, anokhi hu menakhemkhem (Isaiah 51:12) – It is I, it is I, it is Anokhi who is your comforter.   The power of this Anokhi, even in the worst of our unresolved trouble and grief, is that it provides a tremendous comfort, not to be alone. Anokhi is the power of saying to someone in distress – I am, I am here – it is the power of God saying to us at every moment – I am, I exist, I am present, here in my full capacity as an Anokhi, an I creature, my full Self. 

Our Own Mirrored Anokhi

As this divine Anokhi runs through us, God teaches us, too, how to be an Anokhi, how to be an “I am,” how to be ourselves in our most powerful divine essence, how to inhabit this I in full presence.   The yud above and the yud below in the letter alef mirror each other across the connector and dividing line of the vav, as if to suggest this parallel, this mirroring effect; the line of connection helps us to become like God, to grow fully into our own yud, that letter of divinity, to mirror God’s Anokhi in our own selves, more than anything, to become ourselves, to be able to say Anokhi, I am, as God says it, boldly and with full intention and presence.      

The Silent Power of Alef

This “I am” is not a doing, nor is it even a speaking.  The letter alef is silent.  There is a mystical otherworldly quality to the silence of this alef, this alef that was spoken into the universe by God as an expression of Anokhi, of Godself.   Earlier in the scene there was thunder and lightning, but then into the middle of this wild storm comes the eye of the storm, in both senses of I, into the middle of all that storm comes the alef of Anokhi, the I of silent, pure presence.  We, too, have a storm inside us, the fluttering and restlessness of our bodies and souls, and we, too, have an I in the middle of that storm, that silent place of calm deep inside you where God’s Anokhi and your Anokhi meet, where your beingness and God’s beingness are joined together in the oneness of the letter alef, where there is only presence, the silent pure presence of the alef with no sound.  

The Strength of Alef

There is strength here.  The alef’s silence is not a silence of weakness or absence, but the silence of great power, unspeakable power and strength.  The alef stands on two strong legs firmly planted in the ground.  Its stance is a warrior two yoga pose, one of its legs bent at the knee going forward while the other one behind it is straight and slanted, anchoring and stabilizing.  There is strength and stability and confidence to this stance.  It says:  I am here and cannot be knocked down.  I will endure and fight fiercely without losing my balance. I can handle whatever comes my way.  You are an alef.  Feel your own strength and confidence.  

Hidden

This isn’t easy.  This alef capacity is not just silent, but also hidden – inside us and in the world.  God created the world with the letter bet for breishit.  It is the bet with its definite b sound and its constructive creative capacities, its bara and its banah, it is the bet that we see and perceive most of the time in this concrete world of separation.    God created the world with the bet right up front but hid the alef till later, buried here, in the middle of the Torah, as it is buried also deep inside us. The alef is quiet and shy.  It is God’s hidden face in the world, as well as our own.   We see the bet easily, we perceive all the duality and polarization and multiplicity of this loud busy concrete world, but to enter into the alef, into the power of silent divine presence, that requires patience and practice, quiet and trust, like waiting for a shy animal to come out of hiding.  

We can get glimpses of this silent alef treasure hidden inside us.  Sitting quietly, letting whatever raging storm is happening in the background gradually die down inside us, we can sense the presence of this alef of Anokhi, both God’s and our own, the capacity simply to say, without words, “I am,” to breathe out into the world – aaaa, the silent alef – our sense of our own beingness.  And maybe it is ok if sometimes, many times, we cannot access this place.  Maybe it is enough for now that we simply know about it and believe in it, remember it as we go through our days, know we can come back to it, that it is always there, hidden like the alef behind the bet, but still always there. 

Image by Ben Burton from Pixabay