Sefer Yetzirah opens with thirty-two wondrous paths of wisdom, through which G-d engraved and created His world. It immediately breaks them down: "ten Sefirot belimah and twenty-two foundation letters, three mothers, seven doubles and twelve simples." The ten Sefirot have their own section. Here you enter the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which the book calls otiot yesod, foundation letters.
The three mothers are Alef, Mem and Shin, summed up in one word: Emesh. The book says that Mem is silent, Shin hisses, and Alef, which is air and breath, decides between them, like the law that decides between the pan of merit and the pan of guilt. The seven doubles are Bet, Gimel, Dalet, Kaf, Peh, Resh and Tav: each is pronounced in two ways, soft or hard, and each carries a pair of opposites, such as wisdom and folly, life and death. The twelve simples are all the others.
How do the letters create? The text answers with a series of verbs: G-d "engraved them, hewed them, weighed them, exchanged them and combined them, and formed through them the soul of every creature." He fixes them on a wheel in two hundred thirty-one gates: Alef with all and all with Alef, Bet with all and all with Bet, so that every creature and every word comes out of a single Name. He also compares them to stones: two stones build two houses, three build six, seven build five thousand forty; beyond that, the mouth can no longer say it.
The idea is not unique to Sefer Yetzirah. The Talmud reports in the name of Rav that Bezalel, the architect of the Tabernacle, "knew how to combine the letters through which heaven and earth were created." The Talmud also reads the word behibaram, "when they were created," as be-heh bera'am: this world was created through the letter Heh, the world to come through Yod. And Sefer Yetzirah ends with Abraham, who contemplated, understood and combined, until G-d revealed Himself to him and "bound the twenty-two letters to his tongue."
The following cards take the letters one by one. For each: its name, shape and value; its place in Sefer Yetzirah, quoted in the Warsaw edition of 1884, the version established by the Vilna Gaon sometimes distributing these correspondences differently; the reading of the alphabet that children gave in the house of study, in tractate Shabbat 104a; another classical source; a short synthesis. Keep the starting point: for this tradition, a letter is not a sign placed on things after the fact, it is that through which they were formed.
