Black Fire upon White Fire: You cannot See with the White but only with the Black
by tillerofthesoil
“She opens פִּיהָ (piyah), her mouth, with wisdom (Proverbs 31:26)—ב (bet) of בְּרֵאשִׁית (Bereshit), In the beginning (Genesis 1:1), as they have established” (Zohar 1:145a).
“The Torah was given in black fire upon white fire, to include right in left—and left turning into right, as is written: From His right hand, a fiery law for them (Deuteronomy 33:2)” (Zohar 2:84a).
“Torah was given in fiery flashes, all in aspect of fire, written in white fire upon black fire, letters flying and rising through the air” (Zohar 2:226b).
“Rabbi Ḥaninah said: the blessed Holy One says: in the eyes you possess there is white and black and you cannot see with the white but only with the black” (Bemidbar Rabbah 15:7).
“We can see by the eye of our intellect why in the Torah [scroll] handed down to us one letter should not touch the other. The fact is that also the whiteness constitutes letters but we do not know how to read them as [we know] the blackness of the letters. But in the future the Holy One, blessed be He, will reveal to us even the whiteness of Torah. Namely we will [then] understand the white letters in our Torah, and this is the meaning of For [a new] Torah from Me shall go out (Isaiah 51:4) that it stands for the whiteness of Torah, that all the children of Israel will understand also the letters that are white in our Torah, which was received by Moses” (Rabbi Levi Yitsḥaq of Barditshev, Imrei Tsaddiqim, 5b, cf. Rubin Vase).
“When we look at the negative space around the first letter of the Torah, ב, we see the letter, פ, which means ‘mouth.’… We read the words ‘In the beginning…’ starting with a black ב that emanates from within a white פ, the mouth of God” (Mel Alexenberg, The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age, p. 123).
“Thirty-two [iterations of] אֱלֹהִים (Elohim) in the Account of Creation [corresponding, perhaps, to the number of teeth in the פֶּה (peh), mouth]” (Zohar 3:82b, Ra’aya Meheimna Qedoshim; Tiqqunei ha-Zohar, 27a).
In Sefer ha-Temunah a doctrine of shemittot (cosmic cycles) was expounded, according to which creation is renewed every 7,000 years, at which times the letters of the Torah reassemble, and the Torah enters the new cycle bearing different words and meanings. The Torah is read in a different way during each shemittah and every shemittah corresponds to one of the seven lower sefirot. The author further stated that one Hebrew letter is hidden in the Torah, and will be revealed only when the world moves to the next sefirah.
“[Rabbi Me’ir said] When I was studying under Rabbi Akiva I used to put vitriol into my ink and he told me nothing, but when I subsequently came to Rabbi Yishma’el the latter said to me, ‘My son, what is your occupation?’ I told him, ‘I am a scribe,’ and he said to me, ‘Be meticulous in your work, for your occupation is the work of heaven; if you omit or add a single letter, you will destroy the whole world” (BT Eruvin 13a).
“Know, with appropriate investigation, that the nature of semen is that it is similar in all ways to ink… [The] father writes it with his hard quill… in the hard womb of [the] mother, and it congeals there” (Rabbi Avraham Abulafia, Otsar Eden Ganuz, 64, cf. Zohar Ḥadash 74c).