Text & source
וְהָיָה אִם שָׁמֹעַ תִּשְׁמְעוּ
V'haya im shamoa tishme'u
"If you will truly listen…" (opening of the second paragraph of the Shema)
Source: Deuteronomy 11:13 · דברים י״א:י״ג, repeated at the base. The three "mother letters" א־מ־שׁ of Sefer Yetzirah (Sefer Yetzirah 3:1 · ספר יצירה ג׳:א׳) descend above; at the center is a six-winged seraph (Isaiah 6:2 · ישעיהו ו׳:ב׳).
In Sefer Yetzirah, the Hebrew letters are among the elements out of which creation is assembled. The upper part of this work loosely follows the sefirot, the map of divine emanation: the mother letters אמש, air, water, fire, come down through forms I associate with Binah, Tiferet, and Yesod. It is not a strict diagram. It is a movement downward in order to rise: from possibility into understanding, into balance, into a channel, into embodied form. Along the way the connections spell out אמת, truth, and אמן, faithfulness. The numbers underneath are exact in a way I still find startling: אמן comes to 91, the sum of יהוה and אדני, while שמע and קדוש each come to 410.
At the center is a seraph, a burning one. In Isaiah's vision the seraphim have six wings: two cover the face, two cover the feet, and two are for flight. I read them as concealment, humility, and action, gathered around a single open eye. Beneath the wings, והיה אם שמוע, if you truly listen, repeats until listening stops being a feeling and becomes a discipline. Abulafia treated exactly this kind of sustained attention to the letters as a way of ascending. The danger in it is the one I keep watching for in myself: how to attend closely enough to find something real, without mistaking my own hunger for meaning for revelation.