Baruch She’amar 1: The Structure Of Creation

Baruch She’amar

 

The Structure of Creation

 

In Judaism ten is a holy number. We see it in the Torah with the ten statements with which God created the world. We see it in Kabbalah with the Ten Sefirot—the ten spheres or channels of Divine energy that permeate all existence. And we see it in the siddur with the ten phrases of Baruch She’amar (“Blessed is He who spoke”).

 

In fact, Baruch She’amar is considered so deep that tradition teaches that the text was actually a gift from heaven!

 

The opening phrase, “Blessed is the One Who spoke and the world came into being,” reminds us that God used speech to create the world. Words have power and the fact that we are praying is an indication that we recognize the power of speech. Why else would we be speaking our prayers? Speech was used to create the world and we remind ourselves that words create worlds.

 

The speech of prayer does not exist in a vacuum. If we want our speech to emulate God’s we must constantly be aware of the power of words even when we are not praying. All of our words must reflect this awareness.

 

The text of this prayer is meant to ignite the spark of powerful speech in us and move us to compose our own words of praise and our own words of thanks. When, and only when, we are so moved that we add our own words to prayer we trigger the effectiveness of the formulated prayers.

 

When we recite this prayer, we are saying to God: “Do I know You? No! But it doesn’t matter. Since I believe in these basic truths of Your existence, I rely on You. I trust You. We have a relationship. Please help me.”

 

Tool Box:

 

We appreciate the structure of Creation.

There is a structure and a system to God’s Creation. We better understand God the more we appreciate the structure of His creation.

 

The siddur contains secrets from the Received Inner Wisdom of the Torah.

We may understand the translation of the words, however, we can only begin to comprehend the concepts that are alluded to by the prayers. We are touching the Beyond when we pray.

 

We appreciate and respect the power of speech .

We practice perfecting our speech all day in order to empower our words of prayer.

 

Practice adding your own words of prayer.

The formulated prayers should trigger spontaneous song to God.

 

We understand enough about God to Trust that our prayers will be heard.

God is unknowable. We list basic praises in this prayer to remember that we have a relationship with God and can rely on Him.