The Word as a Spell
Kabbalah
The Word as a Spell
Kabbalah as the mysticism of the word.
Almost two thousand years ago, during what is known as the Talmudic period, the sages who studied the details of the Bible would gather to discuss the meaning of every word, every letter and every space between letters. They understood that there was a mystery in speech: the roots of words, the words that shared letters, and even the way the letters were drawn on the worn scrolls seemed to hold another layer of meaning.
They asked why one word had been chosen instead of another, what its absence meant, what was hidden in its repetitions, and what new meanings were born when its letters changed position. A single word could sustain a debate for generations, and a tiny mark, barely visible on the parchment, could open an entire universe of interpretation.
Centuries later, Kabbalah would inherit that conviction that no letter was there by chance. Other disciplines would later give names such as semantics, semiotics and symbolism to some of the questions those sages had asked millennia before, even if their purposes were different.
For the kabbalists, the word was more than a vehicle of thought. It could create, transform, give life and open a wound. God had created the world through the word and, according to the Sefer Yetzirah, one of the forerunner texts of Kabbalah, creation had unfolded through thirty-two paths of wisdom: ten spheres, or sefirot, and twenty-two letters. The letters were not mere marks on a surface, but the elements with which the universe had been conceived. The world could be read as a text, and so could the human being, created in the image of God.
The Sefer Yetzirah offers an extraordinary image of this power. The Hebrew words oneg (ענג), delight, and nega (נגע), affliction, contain exactly the same three letters. Only their order changes. The book presents them as the extremes of good and evil. The letters turn like a wheel, and what is delight can become affliction, and vice versa. Nothing has been added and nothing taken away. The same letters, arranged differently, lead from one extreme to the other.
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ענג
oneg · delight
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נגע
nega · affliction
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But words do not remain locked inside books. They cross the air and reach other human beings. Some pass without leaving a trace. Others irritate us for barely a moment. And there are words that, spoken almost without effort, awaken a darkness that can stay with us for years.
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I once decided to tell a joke to a close friend. I had tried it on other people and they had all laughed. A joke usually works because it contains an unexpected twist at the end, a break in what we were anticipating. We laugh more at the surprise than at what has been said. But she did not laugh. On the contrary, she was upset in a way I would never have imagined. What had been a reason for laughter for others was, for her, a reason for deep indignation. After a long argument, I asked her whether she had ever lived through something like what the joke described. She admitted that she had, that as a child she had gone through a very similar experience.
That conversation made me understand something about the power of words. I had told the joke intending to make her laugh, but I had unleashed a whirlwind of painful emotions. The same words that had brought joy to some had awakened suffering in another person. A word spoken with good intentions could open a space for evil. The word travelled through the air and entered her, touching something she had not resolved, something that Kabbalah calls a lack of rectification. What can be called evil was not in the word; it was in her: it was waiting for an encounter, and the word made it appear.
Evil is not in the word, nor even in the intention of the one who speaks it, but in the encounter between that word and the history of the one who receives it. The intention belongs to the speaker, but the consequences are born from the history of the listener. Between the two lies a space that neither fully controls. The same event can be lived as a blessing by one person and as a misfortune by another. And whoever knows another's wound can use the word as a spell.
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The spell begins when the other's word no longer belongs to them. Someone calls us selfish, cowardly, ugly or a failure, and, if something in us answers it, we keep hearing that voice long after it has faded. We argue with it, we deny it, we gather evidence against it. But the harder we try to prove that we are not what we have been called, the more present the word becomes. Not because we have discovered a truth, but because someone has said out loud what we ourselves feared might be true. The other may have forgotten us. We, on the other hand, have begun to repeat their word. And each repetition reopens the wound.
Put simply, the human being resembles a C (one could also use the Hebrew letter bet, ב, a symbol of division, value of two), an open figure that is nevertheless not incomplete. Its opening is part of what it is. It never fully closes. Through it the world circulates, with its light and its darkness, its dreams and its failures, love, loss, joy, pain and the words of others. But we live trying to turn that C into an O (or into the Hebrew final mem, ם, closed on all four sides), a perfect circle, without beginning or end, where nothing is missing, nothing is in excess and nothing can disturb us. We want to close the gap through which the unexpected enters. We want to know once and for all who we are, what we are worth and what place we occupy in the world. And we look for those answers in the gaze and the words of others.
A single word can then acquire the power of a spell. "You are a failure," they tell us. Not "you have failed," which describes something that happened, but "you are," which claims to define everything we are. And it is not always an insult. "You are extraordinary," "you are my salvation" can also close the circle, and those are the words we find it far harder to distrust.
The sages left behind a revealing contradiction. The Talmud teaches that even if the whole world considers you righteous, you should see yourself as if you were wicked. Yet it is also taught that you must not consider yourself wicked. Perhaps the teaching lies precisely in that tension: not allowing any sentence to have the last word on what we are, neither the one that condemns us nor the one that flatters us.
Each of those sentences promises a closure, a definitive answer to a question that is never fully formulated. We can reject it, be outraged by it, fight it for years. But as long as we keep organizing our existence around it, we will go on trying to close the circle. The spell does not consist only in the other's attempt to define us, but in our taking part in the effort to turn their word into our truth. That is where one form of evil begins: when a sentence stops being a judgment and becomes a destiny.
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That argument with my friend did not end when one of us was proven right. It ended when I stopped defending my joke and asked her whether she had lived through something similar. A sentence is answered with another sentence, and the circle closes a little more. A question, by contrast, gives the C back its opening.
The spell is not broken by the opposite word. Answering "you are a failure" with "I am a winner" only swaps one O for another. Nor is it enough to know oneself as open, because even openness can become an image to defend. The movement that undoes the spell is the reverse of the O: not closing, but gathering in. Becoming a point.
Not making oneself small before the other's gaze, which is what the word intends, but ceasing to need that gaze. A point has no parts that a word could split and no surface on which a sentence could be written. In the Western tradition it survives as the "jot" of the Gospel ("one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law," Matthew 5:18): the smallest letter, the one with which, according to the kabbalists, the stroke of every other letter begins. It is the yod (י), the first letter of the name of God, which could also take the place of the point.
The letters of affliction are the same as those of delight. What separates them is not their substance, but whether the wheel can keep turning. And a wheel turns only around a centre that does not move.
C
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