The Jewish people have been called, “the people of the book.” The reason is that since having become a nation, we have wandered the world with a book in our possession—the Torah, which over the years has grown into a complete library. Every Jew, by virtue of being born or converting, inherits this library and carries it with them in their backpack (even if at times they are unaware of its presence). But to what extent can we say that we truly know the contents of this library?
Espionage stories tell of a special method for transmitting confidential information: a book with double pages glued together. When holding the book and leafing through it in the usual way, it appears as a simple and harmless book; but if one carefully separates its pages, one discovers that there is secret information printed on the hidden interior of every page. It is a book within a book, its concealed pages containing completely different content from the visible book, content that is meant to be read only by those who are aware of the secret pages.
How would you react if we told you that the books in your Jewish backpack are such books? The familiar Jewish library is a whole universe of knowledge, and one could spend a lifetime delving into it; yet it is but the surface of a deeper and more wondrous world, full of ideas, advice, and stories hidden from our eyes. This mysterious concealed world is the Jewish mystical tradition, also called the “hidden Torah” or the “inner dimension of the Torah.” Like the inner pages of the spy books, the inner dimension of the Torah is hidden within the pages of the revealed Torah literature, waiting to be uncovered. Our sages said of the Torah: “Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it.”
The simple reading is that we must turn and leaf through the Torah’s revealed pages, but we can now reinterpret this statement to mean that one must turn the pages of the Torah twice: once to read its revealed pages, and a second time to split them and reveal the interior, hidden pages—the Torah’s mystical tradition.
Another metaphor for the mystical tradition, drawn this time from the literature of the sages, is found the statement that the Torah was written as “black fire on white fire.” This metaphor suggests that the Torah is composed of its visible content communicated to us through the form of its letters (“black fire”), and its hidden content in the form of the spaces between its letters (“white fire”). The mystical tradition is written in the white fire—the space between the inked black letters of the Torah. Anyone who knows Hebrew can immediately read the letters (even if it takes them a lifetime to fully understand them); but to read the spaces between the letters, one needs to acquire a new language—the language of the Torah’s hidden dimension.
