The Word

“And G‑d said, ‘Let there be light, and there was light.’”

—Genesis

“He spoke and it was.”

—Chronicles

In our view of the world, there is a world and then there are our words we speak about that world. There are objects and we give them names. Things happen and we tell stories about them.

That is our view, the view of the little beings created to inhabit this reality, the view from the inside out. But how does it appear from the outside in, from the perspective of the Creator?

To the Creator, there is nothing here other than His words, nothing other than G‑d telling a story to Himself. And inside that grand story are little creatures telling their own smaller stories, creating their own realities within the bubble of a larger reality.

When the first human being began to name the things he saw, he was not simply applying labels—he was completing G‑d’s work of creation, bringing it into greater focus, creating an identity for each thing that would determine its place in the grand story, attaching those beings to their essence in G‑d’s primal thought. How can a name affect a live, tangible creature? Because that’s all the creature truly is: A word, a name. An articulation of G‑d’s mind, a crystallization of His thought.

We ourselves are words. We think of ourselves as beings that speak words. But, no, those words are who we are, they extend from our essence and they define our being. They define our place in the world and they define the world in which we are placed.

Every single word.