This is a glass. This is a chair, that is a camera. The moment a thing is named it becomes limited: it is that thing and nothing else.

You will object: but there are Names — Elokim, Shaddai, Shalom, and thousands more. How is that to be understood?

Like everyone, I have several traits of character. Sometimes I am generous, sometimes less so. Whoever sees me generous will say: there is a generous man. Whoever sees me otherwise will say something else. In other words: the way I am perceived receives a name.

We human beings are finite: a beginning, an end. It is therefore not in our power to grasp what lies beyond all limit. But the kabbalists sought to go as far as one is permitted to go.

That is the question my grandson used to ask me, over the telephone, for years — and it was his questions that eventually became a book, the story of a grandfather and a small boy.

Ask yourself: what system is capable of receiving light? Night, someone answered from the hall. More generally: darkness.

He therefore created what is called the ratzon lekabel, the will to receive. For He is mashpia, the One who gives; and if I give and no one is there to receive, nothing happens. Life exists only from the moment there is a transfer between the giver and the receiver.

He opened a space of darkness, which grew and grew, until it took on such proportions that we, who are inside it, have the impression that it is infinite.

That is what happened with the light. It filled everything; and now an enormous volume of darkness is planted in the middle. What does the light want? To return where it was. Its place was taken; it gathered on the rim of the universe, and it wants to come back.

This is what is called Shevirat haKelim, the shattering of the vessels: the universe cracks, and the light that remained outside penetrates within.

This meeting of light and darkness is the model of every union: the light is the principle that bestows, the darkness the one that receives. That is why, when a man marries a woman, he offers her jewels — the image of those billions of stars — for he is about to reproduce, on his own scale, the creation of the world.

Have you ever seen a tsunami on television? Do you believe that wave can be stopped? So it is here: that profusion of light turned to magma went out in every direction, and the universe was nearly carried away by it.

It is told that the son of Resh Lakish was coming out of the yeshiva, and Rabbi Yochanan asked him what he had studied that day. The child answered: that the world is like a ball resting on nothing.

And that is not the only instance. In the Pitum haKetoret, which we say every morning, it is said that three hundred and sixty-eight measures were prepared, three set aside, leaving three hundred and sixty-five, like the days of the solar year. We have known all along that the earth is spherical and that the year has three hundred and sixty-five days.

With the Name Shaddai we enter the circles. So here is a simple question: how many circles of equal size can you place around one circle?

3D animation: the seven spheres, the Magen David, the twelve tribes around the Kohanim, then the Menorah. Drag to rotate, “Replay” to start again. Open full screen

A book normally begins with one beginning. But we read Bereshit, which can be heard as bet-reshit: two beginnings. Why two?

Do you know that you are built on that same model? Look: above, the head and the two arms; below, the two legs. That makes six extremities — and at the centre, the trunk.

Look at your face too: two eyes, two ears, two nostrils — six openings — and a single mouth at the centre. The Sages relate that the mouth complained: why am I alone? It was answered that with two mouths one would speak twice too much. But the mouth is the Shabbat of the face: through it the food enters, and it is the mouth that feeds the whole body.

Let us now verify all this on the Menorah. The branches face the centre: on one side the first, second and third days; in the middle Shabbat; on the other side the fourth, fifth and sixth.

On the third day an order is given to the earth: bring forth a fruit tree making fruit — that is, a tree whose very wood would have the taste of the fruit. And the earth brings forth a tree of wood bearing fruit. It did not do what was asked.

In other words: that disobedience was to preserve life.

Remember the principle: what you find on one side of the Menorah, you find its opposite facing it. If on the third day the earth disobeys to preserve life, then on the sixth day man, drawn from that same earth, receives an order — do not eat of this tree — and his disobedience will bring the opposite.

I am going to say something that requires a prepared audience. If you stop eating, drinking and breathing, what happens? We therefore spend our time dying — and by eating, drinking, breathing and tending to ourselves, we keep ourselves alive.

Why? Because we are not bodies: we are souls. The body is a tool. The driver is not the car; when the car is finished, the driver takes another.

That is why this world was created: we enter it in bodies that are constantly breaking down, and we are forced to seek our sustenance without pause. And since the soul is immortal — a part of the Eternal, therefore eternal — it is precisely in this confrontation with its opposite that it is built. It is in the face of destruction that the soul constructs itself.

We have said that the sin was unavoidable. Why then were they driven from Gan Eden? Because it is not that sin they are reproached for.

And to this day we have inherited it: the little boy who breaks a glass answers at once it was my brother. We have a natural tendency to shift the fault onto someone else.

See the opposite. Yehuda is then av beit din, head of the court. Tamar does not accuse him publicly: she says only that the child belongs to the owner of these objects. He could have kept silent, let it pass, let her be condemned.

So do not be afraid to acknowledge. No one will accuse you for having done so.

A word about communication — which is not the telephone or messaging apps, but the art of speaking with one another. When someone comes to reproach you with something, even if you cannot bring yourself to agree, there is one sentence to say: I understand that you may be angry.

One last point. Where does Moshe Rabbeinu receive the first revelation? At Sinai. Listen to the word: within it one hears sin'a, hatred. Hatred came down into the world together with the revelation. And what is the bush called? The sneh — the same letters.

Moshe at first drew back: how can one announce to people suffering in Egypt that there will be suffering still? And he was answered that he had no choice.