Always Start With Bet, Rather Than Aleph
• If you were writing the most important and popular literary work of all history, would you not begin your magnum opus symbolically with an enlarged first letter of the alphabet, the Aleph? Yet the Divine Author chose to begin His work with the second letter, the Bet. Why?
• There is an important teaching here. To ensure success in any endeavor one needs to first prepare adequately. For example: a competitive athlete’s main goal is to win the competition. That is the Aleph of his true endeavour. But to get there, the athlete must train, work-out, practice – in other words, must do all the things that are secondary to winning, the Bet of his or her endeavour.
• Likewise in the primary goals of life’s quest – happiness, fulfillment, and meaning – the Alephs of life – cannot be acquired without initial search and endeavor, the Bet of life.
• Learning the Torah without having first a background of contextual understanding of the four levels of its depth and meaning, viz. Peshat (obvious translation) , Remez (allusion), Derush (metaphor and analogy) , Sod ( mystical symbolic dynamics), makes it study almost meaningless. • Hence the Torah begins with the second letter Bet – to teach us the sequence of true insight. Nothing seems as it is. One first needs to study context, background, depth. Only then does the Aleph of life become apparent.
To Bet-ter yourself start with Bet.