Hebrew Word Study – The Letter Beth  ב

Genesis 1:1: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.”

On our All Access Subscription site we offer a live Saturday Morning Torah Portion study.  The Jews have taken the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, and divided them into 52 portions and every week Jews across the world study the same portion of Scripture. At the end of the year, which marks the end of the High Holidays, the Jews celebrate Simchat Torah or rejoicing in the Torah. I will be discussing this in my Torah Study this Saturday. The following week they and we, start at the beginning of Genesis and go through the whole Torah again.

I will be starting my fourth year teaching the Torah portion and I will not be repeating my classes of the prior years. Those are recorded and on our all Access Site so there is no need to repeat anything.  The Word of God is a well that never runs dry and each year as I prepare my Torah study for each week I am learning something new. 

I thought I knew all there was to know about Genesis 1:1 but, surprise, I still had something to learn. Rabbi Akiva a master of the Otiyot that is the mystical study of the Hebrew letters questioned why God started the Torah off with the letter Beth, the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The first word in the Torah is Bereshith which means in the beginning and starts with a Beth.  Logically you would expect God to start off the Torah with the letter Aleph which represents Him as the God who was, who is and who will be.

Rabbi Akiva points out that the letter Beth is also the number two. Based on this, Rabbi Akiva writes: “God said: ‘I built two (worlds) – one above and one below. I formed the laws of nature and I established the life of the world to come.’” In other words, in the very beginning, God created two worlds for the human being to exist, the world above which we call heaven, the supernatural realm, and the world below which we call the earth or the natural realm. The first human would have had access to the heavenly realm until sin entered the world and blocked his entrance to the realm of God.  So, God had to make a way for the human being to be restored so that he could again enter the realm of God.  He did this through the shed blood of Jesus who died in a corruptible human body but was resurrected in a body that was incorruptible and able to journey between the two realms as the first human could do before the fall. 

What I find so amazing about this is that in the very first verse, in the very first word, and the very first letter of the Bible God declares that He intended for the human being to be a part of His realm for eternity. 

But man blew it and death in this natural world entered and closed off the eternal realm. It corrupted the physical body of the human being which was initially immortal.  But one day God will resurrect this mortal body and change it to an immortal as Jesus had.  Jesus was the first fruit of this resurrected physical body like we will one day have. 

How does that play out in our everyday life?  Well, yesterday I received a phone call in the middle of the day from my cardiologist. When you are 71 years old with a pacemaker that sends data to your cardiologist 24 hours a day and you get a call in the middle of the day from your cardiologist, well go on, get out there, it’s bad news.  Anyways, the pacemaker gave him some information which prompted the call and the news that I would begin a new treatment that very day. Well, just like when I first got the news that would need a pacemaker it took me a couple of hours to process the whole thing but after that I was fine, it was cool. I was at peace with the whole picture. I am 71 years old, if not for the advances of medical science and the grace of God I would not be around to even write this.  I know my time on earth is dictated by God and He will determine just when and how I will enter that next realm.  My life is to write books on the Word of God, teach on the Word of God, and entertain my passengers on my disability bus with the love of God. Beyond that, I look forward to the day that I meet the Jesus I have loved all these years.  I look forward to that Divine Kiss. My comfort is in the letter Beth which promises us that we belong to two worlds.  One world just will not contain this old body that needs a pacemaker and treatments to keep going. So to leave this world is just to trade the old model in for a new one that will not need a pacemaker and treatments. 

The Torah ends with Moses who leaves this world for a new body.  He wishes he could hang around to lead the people of Israel into the Promised Land, but it was not to be and Moses was ok with it.  He and God had it out and Moses said his last words to the people he loved and even ended it by singing a song to them. Moses’s last words were in a song which he sang. Singing is an expression of your heart and that is how he ended his time here on earth sharing the depths of his heart with the people he loved.  I hope when I make that transition, I will be sitting at my desk typing out the last message to my fellow believers.  I can’t sing but I can write and I hope to finish this 71+ years adventure sitting at my desk writing a message from my heart joined with the heart of God. With my luck that will likely end up being a best seller. Oh well, I am sure I won’t care for I will have joys far greater than writing a best seller.

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