Kabballah

The workbook’s Tree carries a numbering that matches no standard diagram: Keter ①, Tiferet ②, Hokhmah ③, Binah ④, Hesed ⑤, Gevurah ⑥, Netzah ⑦, Hod ⑧, Yesod ⑨, Malkuth ⑩. Da’at is drawn but left unnumbered. A student who has seen any other Tree will stop on page 2 and ask why the heart is second.

The answer is on the companion sheet. SFR.pdf p. 2 lists ten divine names in order — Ehyah, Ya, Yahweh, Elohim, Elohiem, Jehovah, Yahweh Zavaot, Elohim Zavaot, El Shaddia, Jehovah Adoni — and that is Sefer Yetzirah ch. 6, including the doubled אלהים that the sheet distinguishes by spelling. Page 1 of the same file plots those ten names as a tree. Read the plot against the workbook and the rule falls out:

Two things follow. First, the numbering is not arbitrary. Second, it carries a doctrinal consequence: because the names alternate across the pillars, the Tetragrammaton-names and the Elohim-names end up braided rather than sorted. The standard reading — YHVH on the right as mercy, Elohim on the left as judgment — does not survive this arrangement. Mercy’s pillar gets Yahweh (3), Elohiem (5) and Yahweh Zavaot (7); Severity’s gets Elohim (4), Jehovah (6) and Elohim Zavaot (8). Each pillar carries one of each.

The ring draws that braid elsewhere too: the interlaced Magen David of Gnostic Star Of David.pdf is two triangles that pass alternately over and under each other. The Tree and the star are the same figure.

Eleven boxes in the order the workbook prints them: ten numbered, and Da’at between Binah and Hesed with no number at all. Nine carry a citation. Two — Hesed and Gevurah — carry a gloss instead.

The page offers both etymologies and keeps both. Where each stands: on descent the question is settled and the answer is Hebrew: the root ספר, to count — and the proof sits in the ring’s own library, since Sefer Yetzirah 1:1 has God create the world בשלשה ספרים בספר וספר וספור, three books from one root: sefer (text), sefar (number), sippur (telling). A word that plays that game with itself is not a loanword.

But the Greek is not an anachronism, and that is the page’s point. Sefer Yetzirah is generally placed somewhere between the second and sixth centuries, inside a Jewish intellectual world thoroughly in contact with Greek, where σφαῖρα was already old and the concentric spheres it named were the working cosmology. Holding the two together is a claim about what the word was heard as, not what it descended from — and those are different questions, only one of which philology answers.

The same choice has one knock-on: the Sefer Yetzirah sheet glosses ספרים at 1:1 as “spheres,” where the sense is books. The gloss immediately beneath it — “with letters / and numbers / and score” — already carries the triad, and “score” renders a hard word.

Text — Sefer Yetzirah 1:1 (Warsaw 1884, via Sefaria). Dating — Hayman, Sefer Yeṣira, TSAJ 104 (Mohr Siebeck, 2004).

The crown carries אהיה אשר אהיה, Exodus 3:14, glossed word under word: I am / that / I am. The English is the traditional one.

Two things the box does not say. The Hebrew verb is imperfect, so the more literal rendering is I will be what I will be — and that is what makes the verse belong at Keter rather than anywhere else on the Tree. Read as a statement of being it is a definition; read as the Hebrew has it, it is a withholding, which is “Hidden Light, Beyond Knowledge.”

And אהיה is Name 1 of Sefer Yetzirah ch. 6 — the Name the ordering two sections above puts at the crown. The page’s own citation matches its own numbering, sitting in the first box on the page.

One inconsistency, of transliteration rather than substance: the workbook romanises אהיה as “Ayah” and SFR.pdf romanises the same word “Ehyah”; the usual form is Ehyeh. “Ayah” is also a homograph of Arabic آية, āyah, the word this project prints on every al-Dīn page.

Source — Exodus 3:14. Cross-link — Sefer Yetzirah ch. 6, Name 1; SFR p. 2.

“Wisdom is radiant and unfading, she is easily discerned by those who love her, and found by those who seek her.” The Wisdom of Solomon is deuterocanonical — canonical for Catholic and Orthodox Christians, outside the Jewish and Protestant canons — which makes its appearance on a Kabbalah page inside an Islamic frame a deliberate act of reach rather than an oversight.

Source — Wisdom 6:12 (NRSV wording).

The source is Rosh Hashanah 21b: fifty gates of understanding were created and all but one were given to Moses. The workbook’s split — forty-nine “by practice, work, and design,” the fiftieth “by the grace of the Lord alone” — is the standard Hasidic reading of that gemara. It is a rabbinic teaching rather than a biblical one.

Source — b. Rosh Hashanah 21b; cf. Nedarim 38a. Counting toward Shavuot for forty-nine days is the same structure.

The Hebrew in the Da’at box is עשר ולא תשע and עשר ולא אחת עשרה, quoted from Sefer Yetzirah 1:4, with the English glossed word-under-word in the Hebrew’s own right-to-left order. The verse that forbids an eleventh captions the sefirah that is not counted: Da’at is drawn, named, and left without a number, which is its status.

“Image of Keter” is the received teaching, and it pairs across documents: the workbook puts Keter beyond knowledge, and the Simple Judaism Guide opens its four K’s with “Keter: The Lord Knows.” Knowledge belongs to God at the crown; what is reachable is Da’at.

Source — Sefer Yetzirah 1:4. Cross-link — Torah/Simple Judaism Guide, “The Chosen People.”

Glossed “Love,” and expanded as “Love and Kindness — the love of Yahweh for the children of Israel.” No chapter and verse is given; the gloss is the biblical sense of חסד. Ḥesed is not affection. It is the loyalty owed inside a bond — covenant faithfulness — which is why English has never settled on one word for it.

Deuteronomy 7:9 puts both halves in one breath: שֹׁמֵר הַבְּרִית וְהַחֶסֶד, the God who keeps the covenant and the ḥesed with those who love Him. That verse sits three after Deuteronomy 7:6, the “treasured people” verse — which is one of the four citations in Chosenness Notes w/ Rabbi Londy.

So the chosenness thread enters the Tree here. The Torah archive is bolted to the sefirot at two points and they are not the same point: its structure begins at Keter, where the four K’s start, and its subject lands at Hesed, which is where a covenant love directed at one people belongs.

Sense — Deuteronomy 7:9. Cross-links — Deuteronomy 7:6 and 10:15, via Torah/Chosenness Notes; Simple Judaism Guide, the four K’s at Keter.

The most personal line in the ring, and the only sefirah gloss with no citation behind it. Classically Gevurah is severity, restraint, the withheld hand — din, judgment. The workbook glosses it “Awe” and illustrates it with two decreed historical outcomes. “Awe” reads as yirah. The Marathon-and-Jerusalem line is a claim about qadar — that the boundary of an event is set — which is a Gevurah reading, since Gevurah is the sefirah that draws limits. Gevurah is where the line gets drawn — and read that way the two examples are illustrations rather than idiosyncrasies: a footrace whose end is fixed before it is run, and a city whose end is fixed before it is fought over.

Uncited. Nearest anchors: Q 54:49, Q 33:38.

ויאמר אלהים יהי אור, glossed word by word, under the heading “The Harmony of the Sefirot.” It is structurally load-bearing: this same verse is the engine of page 4, where its two halves are split across the two triangles of the Magen David. Tiferet holds the command; the star holds the command and its answer.

Source — Genesis 1:3. See Page 4 below.

Netzach Yisrael is 1 Samuel 15:29 — the Eternity, or Glory, of Israel — and it carries the double sense the page wants, since netzach is at once “victory” and “everlastingness.” “Gone Gone Beyondgone Beyondallgone / Bodhi Svaha” is gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā, the closing mantra of the Heart Sutra, rendered rather than transliterated.

One more thing this box shows, which the two below it repeat. The keyword over Netzah is Gone, and the citation under it begins “Gone Gone Beyondgone.” Hod’s keyword is Here and its citation is Be Here Now. Yesod’s is Seat and its gloss is “kinda like a chair to sit in.” For the three sefirot below Tiferet — and only those three — the English keyword is the hinge word of the source quoted beneath it.

Note what that means for the map of the project: the Heart Sutra is also a Dharma supporting document. Netzah is a door between rings 1 and 3, and it is not the only one.

Sources — 1 Samuel 15:29; Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya. Cross-link — Dharma/The Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom.

Hod rests on a wordplay across two real organisations — Hod, the Israeli fellowship for religious gay men, and the Halachic Organ Donor Society — with “community with courage” as the through-line. It is a derivation rather than a coincidence of naming: הוד (hod, splendour) and הודאה (hoda’ah) share a root that means public acknowledgment — to confess, to give thanks, to say a thing openly. Both organisations exist to acknowledge something publicly inside halakha, which is what the sefirah is.

The box also carries Be Here Now, and the keyword above it is Here — see Netzah above for what that pattern is doing.

Sources — Ram Dass, Be Here Now (1971); the Halachic Organ Donor Society; Hod.

“The World Turtle (Yoke / Yoga),” “the turning point from low to high,” “it’s kinda like a chair to sit in” — and the citation From Bindu to Ojas, identified as the core book of Be Here Now, whose 1971 edition is a boxed set built around that brown-paper section.

Bindu to ojas is the yogic transmutation of generative essence into spiritual vitality; Yesod is classically the channel of exactly that — the sefirah of the brit, the foundation through which everything above pours into Malkuth. The parenthesis “Yoke / Yoga” is an etymology: yoga is from yuj, to yoke.

Taken with Hod, the two are a descent drawn in citations: Hod cites the volume, Yesod cites its core. And the World Turtle set down here is picked up again one sefirah later, when Malkuth turns out to be turtles all the way down.

Source — Ram Dass, Be Here Now (1971), From Bindu to Ojas.

The dictum is standard in later Kabbalah and its root is Sefer Yetzirah 1:7, “their end is embedded in their beginning and their beginning in their end.” The ring has it twice over: the workbook says it in words, and SFR.pdf p. 3 draws it, numbering the crown ① and the base ② on the diagram of the ten depths — Begin and End as the first polar pair. One teaching, set down twice: once written, once drawn.

“Turtles all the way down” is a joke about infinite regress, told at Malkuth — the realm, the bottom, the place that turns out to be the top. It reads as flippant without the SY 1:7 line beside it, and as serious with it.

Source — Sefer Yetzirah 1:7; the ten depths at SY 1:4–1:5 (numbering varies by recension; Kaplan’s Gra edition puts the depths at 1:5, Sefaria’s Warsaw text at 1:4).

The page’s architecture is a single claim made three times: the Shema under a heading that reads Seraphim / The High Angel / Holy Spirit, then four archangels — Gabriel, Michael, Rafael, Azrael — then three fallen ones. Below, in the order the page prints them, the pieces and where each one comes from.

The page renders Deuteronomy 6:4 as שמע ישראל יהוה אלהינו יהוה אהד. The last word should be אֶחָד — alef · ḥet · dalet. The page has alef · he · dalet, and the per-letter glosses printed above the word repeat the substitution, so it is not a font artefact.

The correction is inside the ring already. The Sefer Yetzirah sheet’s Hebrew–Arabic table maps ח to ح and ה to ه. Sūrat al-Ikhlāṣ has أَحَدٌ — with ح. The Arabic and the Hebrew are the same word, and the ring’s own table says which letter it takes.

This is deliberate, and it stays. One hard error across thirty-four pages is the right number, and a reader who catches it has read the page the way the page wants to be read. Recorded here so that whoever finds it knows it was found first, and left.

Daniel hears “a man’s voice between the banks of the Ulai” calling “Gabriel, make this man understand the vision.” The text does not name the voice; the page does — “Then Yahweh spoke from the river Ulai.” That is an identification rather than a translation, and it is deliberate.

The identification is what the passage invites: whoever commands Gabriel outranks Gabriel, and the commentary tradition reads the voice accordingly. More to the point, the panel is not only about Gabriel. It is where the curriculum first fixes the distinction between the One who sends and the one who carries — and that distinction is the load-bearing wall of Aletheia, where Logos and Pneuma have to be handled as titles of one man rather than persons in God. Naming the sender here means the student meets ring 5 already holding the tool. Retained, deliberately, as track laid early.

Source — Daniel 8:16–17. Forward link — Aletheia p3, The Trinity; cf. Q 4:171.

Four claims in one small box. Michael is named in the Qurʾān at 2:98 — مِيكَىٰلَ, in the same breath as Gabriel, and they are the only two archangels the Qurʾān names at all. “Master Chief of the divine Host” is Daniel’s title for him: הַשַּׂר הַגָּדוֹל, the great prince, at Daniel 12:1, and “one of the chief princes” at 10:13. And “he will rally the Archangels to battle Iblis and the fallen” is Revelation 12:7 — Michael and his angels making war on the dragon.

What the box leaves unsaid is sitting in the Hebrew it prints. מיכאל is not a description but a question: mi ka-El — who is like God? On a page that sets Michael against the one who would not bow because he judged himself the better creature, the archangel’s name is Iblīs’s error handed back to him as a question. It is the only name in the row that is a whole sentence.

A structural note on the row: the four archangel boxes are written in three scripts — Gabriel’s in English, Michael’s in Hebrew, Rafael’s and Azrael’s in Arabic. Four archangels, three alphabets.

Sources — Q 2:98; Daniel 10:13 and 12:1; Revelation 12:7.

The page files Rafael and إسرافيل together, glosses the name “God has healed,” and gives him the horn and the title muezzin in heaven. One of them carries further than the box says.

“God has healed” is the etymology of Raphael — רפאל, from רפא, to heal. Isrāfīl’s own name is generally traced elsewhere: to seraph, שרף, the burning one. Which means the identification the page makes is not merely a convenient pairing — the Arabic name is the page’s own title. The heading “Seraphim” and the angel Isrāfīl are the same word.

One thing to keep straight for both figures: Isrāfīl is not named in the Qurʾān. The trumpet, الصور, is there repeatedly; the name comes from hadith and later tradition. “Muezzin of the people of heaven” is likewise from tradition. It matters here because the ring’s own āyah is إِيَّاكَ نَعْبُدُ وَإِيَّاكَ نَسْتَعِينُ — worship and call. The angel who calls sits in the ring whose verse is the calling.

Status — post-Qurʾānic, well attested. Qurʾānic anchor for the horn — Q 39:68, Q 69:13. Name, muezzin tradition and derivation — Wensinck, “Isrāfīl”, Encyclopaedia of Islam², Brill.

The Qurʾān has مَلَكُ ٱلْمَوْتِ, the angel of death (32:11), and never names him. “Azrael” is later tradition, shared with Jewish and Christian angelology. The page’s Arabic ملك الموت is the Qurʾānic phrase — so on this page the Arabic is scripture and the English name is tradition.

Source — Q 32:11 for the title; the name from later tradition.

This panel carries the ring’s function. The Qurʾānic core is this: the two angels at Babylon teach no one until they say إِنَّمَا نَحْنُ فِتْنَةٌ فَلَا تَكْفُرْ — “we are only a trial, so do not disbelieve” — which is what the page quotes, in the page’s own words.

Everything around it — Venus, the idols, the wine, the killed witness, the choice of punishment in this life over the next — is not in the Qurʾān. It comes through the commentators, and it is one of the most contested passages in tafsīr: al-Ṭabarī transmits it while distinguishing lawful from unlawful magic, and Ibn Kathīr rejects large parts of it as fabricated, tracing them to Kaʿb al-Aḥbār. Any teacher using this page will meet that objection, and the answer is the line between the verse and the story.

The names are traceable. “Harut / Aza” and “Marut / Azaya” are not coinages: the identification is al-Kalbī’s, linking the pair to the ʿAzā and ʿAzāʾel of Jewish angelology. It comes with a wrinkle — the Jewish midrash usually cited as the source (Midrash Abkir) is an eleventh-century text, later than the Islamic transmission, so the direction of borrowing is genuinely disputed. For a project built on two scriptures as one system, that leaves the direction of traffic an open question rather than a settled one.

Source — Q 2:102. Extended narrative — tafsīr tradition, status disputed (al-Ṭabarī transmits; Ibn Kathīr rejects). Aza / Azaya — al-Kalbī, and on the direction of borrowing see Reeves, JAOS 135.4 (2015).

“Iblis / Azazil” follows Ibn ʿAbbās as transmitted by al-Ṭabarī: Azāzīl as the name before the fall, Iblīs after it. Well attested, post-Qurʾānic, and the standard Sunni position among those who allow that an angel could be expelled.

The scene is the Gospel baptism and temptation, and the page makes one silent, deliberate substitution. In Matthew and Mark the voice at the water says “You are my beloved Son.” The page has the dove descend and the voice say “You are the anointed.” That is the Islamic frame doing its work in a single word: anointed is what Messiah means, so the page grants the title in full and declines the sonship — the same manoeuvre Q 4:171 makes when it calls Jesus God’s Word and a spirit from Him in the same breath that forbids “three.”

The temptation is quoted and then re-pointed the same way: Matthew 4:4, itself quoting Deuteronomy 8:3, has “every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” The page reads “the mouth of Allah.” Same word, and the substitution states the ring’s thesis without arguing for it.

Both moves work the same way: substitution with a reason, never paraphrase. Read together they say what the page is for — the Messiah given the highest titles the Qurʾān permits, and none higher.

Sources — Mark 1:10–11; Matthew 3:16–17; Matthew 4:1–4; Deuteronomy 8:3; Q 4:171 (cf. Aletheia/High Angel).

The page is titled “How to create a Star of David” and it means create literally. It is a construction, in three moves.

The ladder is the standard Cordoveran and Lurianic one; the page’s own glosses are Empty, Infinite, Illumination. The split of Genesis 1:3 is what makes it a construction rather than a diagram. The verse is one sentence with two clauses — the command and its effect — and the page assigns one clause to each triangle. The hexagram stops being a symbol placed on the page and becomes a proposition: the star is the shape of a word being obeyed.

Below it, the same star is drawn entering a domed building. That is the third pillar of the ring’s own Torah archive — the Dome of the Rock accepted as it stands — rendered as a picture rather than a proposition. The workbook and Simple Judaism Guide are making one argument in two media.

Running up the left margin, in small print, is the source for “As Above, So Bellow”: إن الأعلى من الأسفل والأسفل من الأعلى — “the uppermost is from the lowermost and the lowermost is from the uppermost.”

That is the Emerald Tablet, and it is quoted in the language it was first written in. The Tablet survives earliest inside the Kitāb Sirr al-Khalīqa attributed to Balīnās, an Arabic compilation of the late eighth or early ninth century; the Latin Tabula Smaragdina is a translation made from the twelfth century onward. The page quotes the Arabic.

One note on the naming: the page heads it قرص الزمرد. The usual Arabic name is لوح الزمرد — the emerald tablet rather than disc.

Text — Kitāb sirr al-khalīqa, ed. Ursula Weisser (Aleppo, 1979). Transmission and dating — Ruska, Tabula Smaragdina (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1926).

This is one of only three al-Dīn pages in the project carrying the full three-citation structure, and its three citations are not a list. Read in order they are a syllogism about the ring’s function.

Solomon 27:17

The armies of jinn, men and birds, gathered and set in ranks for Sulaymān — command over the unseen, held lawfully by a prophet

Jahannam 78:21–22

Hell lying in wait; a home for the طاغين — where the same power goes when it is seized rather than granted

Worship and Call 1:5

إِيَّاكَ نَعْبُدُ وَإِيَّاكَ نَسْتَعِينُ — the ring’s own āyah, and the resolution: help is asked of One

Lawful power, unlawful power, and the line between them, which is the direction of the request. That is “how to beat evil magic,” stated in three verses and no commentary.

وَٱتَّبَعُوا۟ مَا تَتْلُوا۟ ٱلشَّيَـٰطِينُ عَلَىٰ مُلْكِ سُلَيْمَـٰنَ ۖ وَمَا كَفَرَ سُلَيْمَـٰنُ وَلَـٰكِنَّ ٱلشَّيَـٰطِينَ كَفَرُوا۟ يُعَلِّمُونَ ٱلنَّاسَ ٱلسِّحْرَ وَمَآ أُنزِلَ عَلَى ٱلْمَلَكَيْنِ بِبَابِلَ هَـٰرُوتَ وَمَـٰرُوتَ “…and Solomon did not disbelieve, but the devils disbelieved, teaching people magic — and that which was sent down to the two angels at Babylon, Hārūt and Mārūt.”

One verse holds Sulaymān, Babylon, Hārūt and Mārūt, siḥr by name, and the warning formula quoted on page 3. It appears in none of the seventeen files — and it is not missing. It is read online from QuranWBW on the first day of Kabballah, before the workbook opens.

The arrangement follows the method. QuranWBW is a word-by-word reader, which is the ring’s own register: every interlinear in this workbook glosses word under word, and day one puts the students inside that method on the verse the whole ring turns on, in a text they can scroll rather than one they have already been handed. The frame is taught live; the pages then work inside it.

One gloss on the page carries weight: طاغين is rendered “tyrants,” where most translations give “transgressors.” The root طغى carries both — to exceed a limit, and to tyrannise — and the Qurʾān uses it of Pharaoh. Rendering it “tyrants” is a political reading, and a choice rather than the standard rendering.

Page 6, the lyric page, is Selena Gomez and Pixie Lott’s “We Own the Night,” closing on لا اله الا الله. Every ring closes this way and the voice is settled across all seven. Here: a ring about magic, night, and who the night belongs to, ending on the Shahada.