Friday, October 05, 2007

Tosefet Bracha - Bereishit 2

In the beginning (1: 1)

There are many hints in this first verse. Look at Rashi, who brings some of the allusions. We can also find a hint to what we explained in the previous piece. We have a tradition in the Talmud that the world will exist for 6000 years, and then be destroyed for 1000 years. We explained above that this is a 7000 year cycle which repeats over and over again.
We can find a hint to this in the first verse. The Hebrew word for 1000 is eleph, and the word for destroyed is shamam. In the first verse there are seven words – Bereishit Bara Elokim Et Ha-shamayim v-Et Ha-Aretz. Each of the words contains the letter aleph (related to the word for 1000) except for the word Ha-Shamayim The root of the word Shamayim is the word shamam (as we find in Iyov 32: 43 “Utterly destroyed without any life”). The six words with the letter aleph allude to the six thousand (eleph) years, and the seventh word (Shamayim) alludes to the destruction (Shamam), which is the only world without the letter aleph.

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