Transcription
Here, I have zebra soil chloride. I'll pour that in first. This is the other one, the hexamethylene diamine, which I'll pour on the top of this first layer.
So, in the 1940s, the DuPont Chemical Corporation developed the first synthetic fiber to be used for clothing, and they decided to call it nylon. And you can probably also see some goo has been formed there. We go, thread of nylon. Where did that name come from? Well, the corporate legend is that the labs at the time had one branch in New York and another in London: nylon, nylon. And that's exactly how naming things works in the English language. Names are random; they're just arbitrary labels that are applied to objects. The word nylon doesn't tell us anything meaningful about what this substance actually is.
But in the Hebrew language, each letter of the alphabet has its own meaning, and we can come up with the names for things by stacking together the right set of ideas. The major premise we have as Jews is that Hashem created the world by first creating the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and by combining letters together, he created the reality of everything that we know. The first letter is Aleph. Audience, audience, meet Aleph. And Aleph always has a connection to God. That might be why it's the only letter in the alphabet that has no pronunciation; it's not a vowel, it's not a consonant; it's completely silent. And you can find that connection to God in the words that begin with Aleph. Aleph means the leader of an army. Ahav—that's a good one—that means love. Most of the names for God, obviously, are going to start with Aleph, right? Elohim, Adonai, as well as the name for our species, Adam.
The second letter is Bet. That's where the Greeks got the word for alphabet, and it means a tent or a house. You can even picture a little guy standing in there somewhere. So the word for household is Bayit. The word for womb is Beten. And really interesting, if we put a Bet at the beginning of any word, it just becomes a preposition that means inside that thing, like a house for that word. So, in the womb is Bay-Beten, and in the house is Bay-Bayit. Really cool. The word for the first city in the Bible is Babel, and that word also starts with two of these bad boys: Bet, Bet, Lamed. That Lamed—where's my Lamed? I have a Lamed somewhere, I promise. Lamed. And it means royalty or something special. It's the tallest letter of the alphabet, rising a head and shoulders above all the rest. So it makes sense that the second letter of words like Eloth and Elohim, which is the word for God, that means Majesty, would be a Lamed, because there's a sense of royalty in those things. So the word for Babel or Babel carries within the name itself the idea of what it is: it's a royal, not just a royal house, but a royal set of houses. Fun fact: that word, that would just be royal house—one Lamed and one Bet—is the word Lev, which means your heart. Special, just language sometimes. Man, actually, I'm gonna need that Bet back.
If we have Aleph and Bet, we have the word Av, which means father—a connection to God in the home. You know, there actually is another language that works like Hebrew that tries to name things in a similar way, and it's the chemical language. The chemical name for nylon is C6H11NO—brackets—lowercase n. Nice name, huh? It's pretty bulky, but it's actually a pretty useful name because it tells us something about what the substance is and how we could recreate it. The chemical language, like Hebrew, tries to describe reality from the inside. That's why in Hebrew, by the way, what's the word for thing? What's the word for word? Why is it the exact same word in the Holy tongue? Because when God spoke it, it became the thing.
Did you know that there's a word in the very first verse of the Bible that hasn't been translated into English? I'm serious. Genesis 1:1: Bereshit. In the beginning, Bera—created—Elohim—God. But wait a minute, what is that word, and why hasn't it been translated? What is "Bera"? Well, if we take a closer look at this word, it's two letters: we have an Aleph, which is the first letter of the alphabet, and a Tav, which is the last. In the beginning, God created. He created the Aleph—that was the first creation, the creation of the artifact of the alphabet. So now this is a very interesting premise because it means that if we know the meaning of the Aleph-Tav, we can know reality. If even if I didn't know the alphabet, but I knew reality—I knew what something meant, I knew what a chair is, I know what a table is—I would come up with the language myself. That's how specific it is; that's how exact it is. We already saw how those letters for gift and seeds spell the word for garden. Gone. Now, if we add an Aleph to the beginning of this word, this changes the word from garden to pelvis. One more: if we change the last letter to a Mem, which signifies water, we get God's Gift of Water—a Gum. What do you think this word means? You might have guessed it; it's the word for lake. I won't say this is an exact rule for every Hebrew word, but it does exist at least as a poetic ideal of the language—that you should be able to look at the letters of a word and tell what it means. Here's a list of all 22 letters and the ideas that they represent, and the ideal is that with these 22 blocks you should be able to create the right name for any concept. Now there's a lot more to the story of the word "Bera" because it doesn't just exist in Genesis 1:1; it actually appears over 11,000 times throughout the Bible, and it's never ever translated. But many Torah scholars say that the first time that it appears in the Bible, it means literally God created the alphabet, and this seems like a pretty compelling theory given that the very next thing God proceeds to do is form Reality by speaking the names of things, and then he gives our species a name, and then our first job is to name the other creatures. I had always wondered why the Bible seems to be so obsessed with names, and it may be because in the very first verse we completely ignored the meaning of a word. Is…amazing.