Jewish Lessons from Wordle
Perhaps you’ve seen it in your social-media feeds—lines of green, yellow and gray boxes. Five boxes per row, up to six rows in length.
These boxes are part of the game Wordle. A code-breaking game in the tradition of Mastermind, Wordle challenges players to guess a five-letter word, giving clues as to which letters and which placement are correct.
Every day the word resets, giving a new one for the global community of players to figure out.
The game has gone viral.
And it has a Chassidic message at its core.
The Chassidic masters teach about the power of speech. The world, after all, was created by Divine speech.
Letters are imbued with a creative power. They form words that can act as conduits for the deepest, most profound concepts. Each complex permutation of Hebrew letters serves not just as a guide to making sounds, but is the key to unlocking all the potential lessons that the word conveys.
The Hebrew letters bet-resh-chaf form the word baruch, “to bless,” and within that word can be found the depth of the word “blessing.” Memories of making Kiddush starting with the Baruch … heartfelt requests for goodness in our lives … complex ideas of a brachah serving as a conduit to imbue the mundane world with the Divine. It’s all there.
Yet break off a letter, and the word evaporates.
The foundational Kabbalistic work, Sefer Yetzirah, often translated as the “Book of Formation,” is the earliest extant Jewish esoteric work and the only one mentioned in the Talmud.
Sefer Yetzirah explores the creative power of words. Each word is a stone, a block that can be used to build houses, complex ideas. … Two letters can make two houses, three letters can make six houses … until we get to five letters, which can build 120 ‘houses … ’
And from here, you may see where we’re going with Wordle.
Person after person has shared rows of colored blocks, white, yellow, green—all clues showing how they solved the correct sequence of letters that form the daily word, steps towards building that house.
And in that world of possible words is the greatest lesson of all: We combine letters in our own way to build houses. … But that construction is complete only when it reveals The One Word.
Thus, we must set aside time to make a spiritual accounting of what we’ve accomplished—learning from our mistakes, figuring out what can be improved and acknowledging what we got right—and then proceed to once more approach the task of revealing the One that created all by His word in this world.
