Suddenly I was struck by the nimbus in the middle, the divine throne. The Hebrew letters were large; I could see them even from my chair. But Belbo couldn’t write Hebrew on Abulafia. I took a closer look: I knew them, of course, from right to left, yod, he, vav, he. The Tetragrammaton, Yahweh, the name of God.
And begin by combining this name, YHWH, at the beginning alone, and examine all its combinations and move it and turn it about like a wheel, front and back, like a scroll, and do not let it rest, but when you see its matter strengthened because of the great motion, because of the fear of confusion of your imagination and the rolling about of your thoughts, and when you let it rest, return to it and ask it, until there shall come to your hand a word of wisdom from it, do not abandon it.
—Abulafia, Hayyê ha-Nefeš, MS München 408, fols. 65a-65b
The name of God … Of course! I remembered the first conversation between Belbo and Diotallevi, the day Abulafia was set up in the office.
Diotallevi was at the door of his room, pointedly tolerant. Diotallevi’s tolerance was always exasperating, but Belbo didn’t seem to mind it. He tolerated it.
“It won’t be of any use to you, you know. You’re not planning, surely, to rewrite the manuscripts you don’t read anyway.”
“It’s for filing, making schedules, updating lists. If I write a book with it, it’ll be my own, not someone else’s.”
“You swore that you’d never write anything of your own.”
“That I wouldn’t inflict a manuscript on the world, true. When I concluded I wasn’t cut out to be a protagonist—”
“You decided you’d be an intelligent spectator. I know all that. And so?”
“If an intelligent spectator hums the second movement on his way home from the concert, that doesn’t mean he wants to conduct it in Carnegie Hall.”
“So you’ll try humming literature to make sure you don’t write any.”
“It would be an honest choice.”
“You think so?”
Diotallevi and Belbo, both from Piedmont, often claimed that any good Piedmontese had the ability to listen politely, look you in the eye, and say “You think so?” in a tone of such apparent sincerity that you immediately felt his profound disapproval. I was a barbarian, they used to say: such subtleties would always be lost on me.
“Barbarian?” I would protest. “I may have been born in Milan, but my family came from Val d’Aosta.”
“Nonsense,” they said. “You can always tell a genuine Piedmontese immediately by his skepticism.”
“I’m a skeptic.”
“No, you’re only incredulous, a doubter, and that’s different.”
I knew why Diotallevi distrusted Abulafia. He had heard that word processors could change the order of letters. A text, thus, might generate its opposite and result in obscure prophecies. “It’s a game of permutation,” Belbo said, trying to explain. “Temurah? Isn’t that the name for it? Isn’t that what the devout rabbi does to ascend to the Gates of Splendor?”
“My dear friend,” Diotallevi said, “you’ll never understand anything. It’s true that the Torah—the visible Torah, that is—is only one of the possible permutations of the letters of the eternal Torah, as God created it and delivered it to the angels. By rearranging the letters of the book over the centuries, we may someday arrive again at the original Torah. But the important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little. If this machine gave you the truth immediately, you would not recognize it, because your heart would not have been purified by the long quest.
And in an office! No, the Book must be murmured day after day in a little ghetto hovel where you learn to lean forward and keep your arms tight against your hips so there will be as little space as possible between the hand that holds the Book and the hand that turns the pages. And if you moisten your fingers, you must raise them vertically to your lips, as if nibbling unleavened bread, and drop no crumb. The word must be eaten very slowly. It must melt on the tongue before you can dissolve it and reorder it. And take care not to slobber it onto your caftan. If even a single letter is lost, the thread that is about to link you with the higher sefirot is broken. To this Abraham Abulafia dedicated his life, while your Saint Thomas was toiling to find God with his five paths.
“Abraham Abulafia’s Hokhmath ha-Zeruf was at once the science of the combination of letters and the science of the purification of the heart. Mystic logic, letters whirling in infinite change, is the world of bliss, it is the music of thought, but see that you proceed slowly, and with caution, because your machine may bring you delirium instead of ecstasy. Many of Abulafia’s disciples were unable to walk the fine line between contemplation of the names of God and the practice of magic. They manipulated the names in an effort to turn them into a talisman, an instrument of dominion over nature, unaware—as you are unaware, with your machine—that every letter is bound to a part of the body, and shifting a consonant without the knowledge of its power may affect a limb, its position or nature, and then you find yourself deformed, a monster. Physically, for life; spiritually, for eternity.”
“Listen,” Belbo said to him then. “You haven’t discouraged me, you know. On the contrary. I have Abulafia—that’s what I’m calling him—at my command, the way our friends used to have the golem. Only, my Abulafia will be more cautious and respectful. More modest. The problem is to find all the permutations of the name of God, isn’t it? Well, this manual has a neat little program in Basic for listing all possible sequences of four letters. It seems tailor-made for YHVH. Should I give it a whirl?” And he showed Diotallevi the program; Diotallevi had to agree it looked cabalistic:
“Try it yourself. When it asks for input, type in Y, H, V, H, and press the ENTER key. But you may be disappointed. There are only twenty-four possible permutations.”
“Holy Seraphim! What can you do with twenty-four names of God? You think our wise men hadn’t made that calculation? Read the Sefer Yesirah, Chapter Four, Section Sixteen. And they didn’t have computers. ‘Two Stones make two Houses. Three Stones make six Houses. Four Stones make twenty-four Houses. Five Stones make one hundred and twenty Houses. Six Stones make seven hundred and twenty Houses. Seven Stones make five thousand and forty Houses. Beyond this point, think of what the mouth cannot say and the ear cannot hear.’ You know what this is called today? Factor analysis.
And you know why the Tradition warns that beyond this point a man should quit? Because if there were eight letters in the name of God, there would be forty thousand three hundred and twenty permutations, and if ten, there would be three million six hundred twenty-eight thousand eight hundred, and the permutations of your own wretched little name, first name and last, would come to almost forty million. Thank God you don’t have a middle initial, like so many Americans, because then there would be more than four hundred million. And if the names of God contained twenty-seven letters—in the Hebrew alphabet there are no vowels, but twenty-two consonants plus five variants—then the number of His possible names would have twenty-nine digits.
Except that you have to allow for repetitions, because the name of God could be aleph repeated twenty-seven times, in which case factor analysis is of no use: with repetitions you’d have to take twenty-seven to the twenty-seventh power, which is, I believe, something like four hundred forty-four billion billion billion billion. Four times ten with thirty-nine zeros after it.”
“You’re cheating, trying to scare me. I’ve read your Sefer Yesirah, too. There are twenty-two fundamental letters, and with them—with them alone—God formed all creation.”
“Let’s not split hairs. Five, at this order of magnitude, won’t help. If you say twenty-two to the twenty-second power instead of twenty-seven to the twenty-seventh, you still come up with something like three hundred and forty billion billion billion. On the human scale, it doesn’t make much difference.
If I counted one, two, three, and so on, one number every second, it would take me almost thirty-two years to get to one lousy little billion. And it’s more complicated than that, because cabala can’t be reduced to the Sefer Yesirah alone. Besides which, there’s a good reason why any real permutation of the Torah must include all twenty-seven letters. It’s true that if the last five letters fall in the middle of a word, they are transformed into their normal variant. But not always. In Isaiah 9:2, for instance, there’s the word ‘LMRBH,’ lemarbah—which, note the coincidence, means to multiply—but the mem in the middle is written as a final mem.”
“Why is that?”
“Every letter corresponds to a number. The normal mem is forty, but the final mem is six hundred. This has nothing to do with temurah, which teaches permutation; it involves, rather, gematria, which seeks sublime affinities between words and their numeric values. With the final mem the word ‘LMRBH’ totals not two hundred and seventy-seven but eight hundred and thirty-seven, and thus is equivalent to ThThZL, or thath zal, which means ‘he who gives
