Torn in the Center: On Gematria, Insanity, Meaning and Emptiness

“The sort of mental sharpness you need for the kabbalah is almost perpendicular to sanity, more like a very specific and redirectable schizophrenia. I stayed functional by keeping my mind in a very specific state that probably wasn’t very long-term healthy.”

- UNSONGBOOK, Chapter 1, by Scott Alexander

“Pay attention to the obvious words, like ‘URINATE’. This puts “I AM” at the center- the famous “IN” and then all these peripheral sections divide by 3, so what you get is “holy”- so what you get is “HOLY I AM HOLY”. Made in the image of God, you are. Very nice.”

- PEE & POO SOLVED (M2U06256) by FATHER58

Have you ever watched a youtube video with zero views? It can feel almost… sacred. Someone made the effort to put a little bit of themselves on the internet, and up until you decide to, it languishes there, unredeemed by the holy quantum act of bearing witness. An unwatched youtube upload is like the world before God invented it, void on the face of the water, a mirror reflecting nothing. Until you click on it, it is a sort of Schrodinger’s MP4- sitting in a limbo state between existence and nonexistence until you illuminate it with the light of your awareness. To watch is to create. To watch is to be God, for a moment.

I like to watch. It’s a lot of what I was doing in lockdown. Often it’s all I had the energy to do, I’m sad to admit. I’ve watched so much I have graduated to weird corners of the internet, where YouTubers, instead of asking you like and subscribe, implore you to recognize the obvious signs all around that God is alive and well, and beaming specific messages from the sun into the minds of his children, you and me. There’s something honest, and for me at least, relatable in their videos, and that’s why I keep watching.

Well, that’s part of why. The other, bigger, more difficult to admit reason is that I used to be like these lone wolf tubers. Like FATHER58 I was once high on bible codes. I know how he feels, and part of me misses that feeling.

It misses being convinced the sun was invented for me, specifically. It misses being able to see personal divine messages in road signs. It misses God, not the vague pantheistic God of reasonable men like Einstein. It misses G-D, the guy who sent me a personal troop of deer to drink from a river by my feet as I uttered Psalm 42: “As a deer thirsts for streams of water, so I thirst for you, God”. It misses being absolutely certain about something, anything. It misses amphetamines.

I remember the first time I learned of the bible codes. I had read a bunch of giant, gnarly tomes about the holocaust and I was asking all the questions one asks after finding out about mass genocide swam around my head. How, I thought, did this happen. Why did God do this to us? When would it happen again?

I found a book that promised some answers to these questions. It has what looked like a word search on the bottom half, but the words were clearly from the bible. It had the words ‘The Bible Code’ in big letters in a font that attempted to make them look like the script the Torah was written in. I googled it as I wrote this story and found out that he has since written two follow-up books: The Bible Codes II: The Countdown, and The Bible Codes III: Saving the World. 

It started with an amazing hook: Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, the 5th prime minister of Israel, received a letter in 1994, informing him that his future was foretold. He was going to be assassinated. One year later, Rabin was, in fact, assassinated, by a young rabbinical student who told the court that he was acting under the orders of God.

The book followed this up with a somewhat consoling response to the horrors of the holocaust. No, it was not random evil chance, God had a plan all along. Do you think it is a coincidence that the villain Haman and his ten sons as described in the book of Esther are numerically equal to the ten nazis hanged at the Nuremberg trials? Of course not. God was, is, and always will be with us, even when it doesn’t seem that way. 

Feeling the presence of God and following His Divine Will become the highest priority and obsession of my life. After ‘becoming a man’ (having a party thrown for me by my mother) I shipped off to yeshiva, an ancient Jewish institution for full-time study of the Talmud.

My schedule on good days was as follows: wake up at 6, take a large dose of amphetamines. Go back to sleep, wake up at 715 with full speed-brain. Then I would pray with my whole heart and mind from a prayer book that was not the custom of my father- I switched to a more kabbalistic version with more incantations, and kabbalistic intention-setting, and gematria. Gematria is an Aramaic term for a Kabbalistic method of interpreting the Hebrew scriptures by computing the numerical value of words. It is the method by which the bible codes are detected.

I saw gematria everywhere. 

I’d say the blessing for tzitzit, the strings tied into the four corners of my garment, representing the four corners of the world. The word tzitzit (in its Mishnaic spelling, ציצית) has the value 600. Each tassel has eight threads (when doubled over) and five sets of knots, totaling 13. You end up with 613, the number of biblical commandments.  365 negative precepts, corresponding to the number of solar days (in the year), and 248 positive precepts, corresponding to the number of members in a man's body (joints, or bones, covered with flesh and sinews, excluding teeth). Simple, really. 

Numbers were everywhere, and they weren't numbers- they were letters. And letters were a game I could play. Meaning was something I could wield, and if that meant letters temporarily had to be numbers, that was a price I was willing to pay. They were how God talked to me, the tools he used to create and maintain the world, and I could see and feel and touch them. 

I went quite far with my love of letters. I even practiced a specific kind of kabbalistic visualization meditation in which I 'carved' the letters of the tetragrammaton- the classic name of God- into my visual snow. First behind my eyelids, then opened- until the name of God was before me at all times- a turn of phrase from psalms. This felt exhilarating and mystical but complicated masturbation in unexpected and unfortunate ways. 

Then I'd go to class. Depending on what I was obsessed with at the time, I'd hide whatever was behind my Talmud, which is a very tall and wide book that is great for hiding stuff behind. During my gematria obsession, I'd set my graphing paper up, and spurred by an excessive number of neurotransmitters I'd list hundreds of numerical values of words that mattered to me and find connections and messages from God between them. 

“Excessive gematria leads to excessive insanity,” my rabbi told me. But I didn't care. If insanity was the price of seeing the truth, I was willing to pay it. He didn’t know of my unthinkable childhood sins, that I had been messing with holy and unspeakable letter combinations as soon as I could read. 

I remember being eight, sitting on the floor of my home with a controversial Aryeh Kaplan book, shocked to discover he had included the exact spelling of some of God’s most secret, powerful, unspeakable names. I looked out the backyard, to the tree I would sit in and sing songs to God- songs about pouring my heart out like water before him, about his infinite love for me, and I just followed the compulsion, despite fear of being smitten or burned up in a fire my physical flesh could not withstand, I spoke the names.¹

Nothing happened, but that only strengthened my faith that one day I’d get the pronunciation right, I'd be properly purified, that my kli (vessel) would be big enough and I would bring the infinite unfiltered light of God into the physical world and the vessels would not shatter and endless light would stream out onto the nations and the world to come and the world we were trapped in would be as one, permanently basking in the presence of our creator. 

I knew this with my entire tiny gigantic child’s heart. There’s something misleading to me about the term ‘messiah complex’- it implies an elaborate delusion, but to me, it felt very simple. I just knew, man. I just knew God loved me and he wished all the bad stuff would stop happening and that he wanted to show me how to redeem all the evil he’d made. I just knew. 

This is what FATHER58 knows, too. His more ecstatic vibes can be found in his outdoor videos, where he is moved nearly to tears by the numerical value of the sun and the love God has for him by shining it at him. Those are my visceral favorites. Think about how good it feels to feel sunshine on your skin. Now think about how good it would feel knowing, as the warmth of a star sunk into you, that it was your sun, created by your God, for your enjoyment at that moment. That’s what Father58 tries and in my opinion, succeeds in imparting to his extremely rare viewers. What it feels like to be God's chosen child, feeling God's light. 

But myself, I couldn't stay there forever. Amphetamines and fundamentalist religion can push you really far, but they don’t catch you gently when you fall. I fell and got back up, over and over again until I fell apart from all the falling apart. My vessels were not big enough. The endless light was too much for my finite body, for the finite lens I was peering at God through, for the finite amount of hormones my overworked adrenal glands could churn out.

I quit both God and speed cold turkey, and the withdrawal nearly killed me. It got dark, so dark, I even gave up on meaning for a while and took a long cold bath in the chilly dark depths of nihilism. My religion died. God died. It felt as if many cherished parts of me died.

In Kabbalah there is a term for this- ‘Shviras Hakeilim’, the shattering of the vessels. As God tried to create the universe, he kept breaking it. Every time he’d shine his light in, the whole thing would shatter, he did this over and over again, on purpose, to create a world in which evil was possible. The way God makes room for his light to shine is where it gets really heretical- God must create a rock he can’t lift, so to speak- he withdrew himself from a space, leaving a truly empty hole he could shine himself into. A space where he isn't, an empty space. God made a crack in everything, and that's how the light gets in, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen.

I'd like to take it a step further than my kabbalist ancestors did and say that the only vessel that can hold infinity must be not just broken, but empty.² Not just on the inside- the actual walls of the vessel, the clay from which it is made itself must be recognized as formless, dependent on components and projections for its apparent inherent existence.³ I think the reason my vessels shattered back in my teenage years wasn't because they were too small- I think it's because they weren't porous enough. You can't hold infinity with finity. You can't hold it at all. You just let it flow through the punctures life and its insights make in your soul. 

We must look inward at the center of our being and find that it is a hole. As Leonard Cohen put it:

You kick off your sandals and shake out your hair
It's torn where you're dancing, it's torn everywhere
It's torn on the right and it's torn on the left
It's torn in the center which few can accept

The stories we weave to hold and create the infinite light of our lives must be recognized as stories and must be recognized as empty themselves. Only then will they paradoxically have the stability to hold what we put in them.

Working with these massive nuclear reactors of meaning between our ears, I have found, is far more manageable when we recognize the words they spurt out at million miles per second as words. This does not mean they are worth nothing. The happenings of earth are not rendered meaningless by the stars or the space both exist in- they enable each other, they provide context, they provide room.

FATHER58 and the rabbis I eventually debated the Bible Codes with on my way out of religion would say that the divine will and letters of God are not a game, and cant be played by mere mortals, but I respectfully disagree. The only Gods worth worshipping are playful. And we ourselves have the power of Gods- the numerical value of the tetragrammaton is the same as the Hebrew word for ‘in my hand’.

Nowadays I can touch into a felt sense of what I once called Hashem, God, Yahweh, or other longer secret names- and I can recognize it as a story. I can feel an even more stable, all-encompassing sense of divinity without losing my fucking mind- well, I can lose it, but now it comes back much more quickly and reliably. It's less schizophrenic, manic, and erratic, and more playful, stable, and manageable. It's at least as loving, and far more gloriously, shimmeringly empty. 

The sun can both exclusively be made for me and be a random giant gas ball in which the atoms that later become the phone screen your reading this on were cooked.⁴ Both are pregnant and barren of meaning, depending on which way of seeing your whimsy and agency takes you. The sun can be made for me and that sentence can be a lie, and I can still feel the sun shining for me, stabilize that feeling, paint my body with it, resonate with it until a tear of bliss rolls down my cheek. In the next moment, I can feel a fart ripple my butt cheek, wafting noseward the smell of poo, the gematria of which is the name of God. Just like every other word, if you look hard enough.

First are always so intense
First, there was only meaning
Then it all collapsed
First I feared it, then I loved it
Then the collapse itself collapsed
Now, something weird is happening
To my meaning gland
It’s pumping the juice of meaning into my blood
Saturating my organs in sense
First Seconds are intense too
Everything is meaning again

Notes

1. In Judaism, the most common name used to refer to God is ‘Hashem’- which translates to ‘the name’- Orthodox Jews are so terrified of speaking even a minor name of God that they use a safety name- hashem- ‘The Name’ to refer to the actual name.

The longer, more secret names of God are even more dangerous- the warnings against them are dire: speak these names and you may die. These are names uttered only in highly specific situations, such as by the high priest in the holiest part of the temple on the holiest day of the year- and even then, uttering the word still often ended in death, so often that the high priest bore a rope around his waist, so his body could be pulled from the holy of holies in the likely event he perished.

Later, when I learned of the high priests Aaron's sons, who died after illegally entering the holy of holies, I nodded. It wasn't a desire to die that led them there, but simply prioritizing God over life.

2. For more on emptiness, ways of seeing, and meaning, I highly recommend the work of Rob Burbea. His book ‘The Seeing that Frees’ is the best meditation guide I have read to date.

3. Love and Drugs took me far along this path. On Drugs, you can feel what my friend Sasha Chapin calls ‘epiception’- the experience of pure meaning itself, sometimes uncoupled from narratives, other times attached to narratives that are absent of any meaning to the sober-minded. To not just intellectually accept, but to Feel and See meaning-as-bullshit and yet simultaneously love it, and experience more of it than ever before is one of the greatest, most useful, gifts drugs have to offer. Meaning can take on a quality like awareness and love - all-encompassing, everywhere and nowhere, like emptiness itself. All these big words- emptiness, awareness, and meaning- can melt into the same thing, if you drink or smoke or meditate or dance or love enough. And that's worth a lot, because that ability can be practiced and stabilized, ushered into stay.

4. Rav Simcha Bunim of Peshicha was said to carry two slips of paper in his pocket, one of which said "bishvili nivra ha'olam" ("the world was created for me") and the other "anochi afar va'eifer" ("I am dirt and ash").