Explanation Text

Dome - Before Creation

"By means of 32 mysterious paths did the eternal, Lord of Hosts, the Supreme God of Israel,.... engrave and establish His name and created his world."

The concept for the Dome is basically simple, it is the time before the Creation.
First of all God created the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and with them He created the Torah.
Using the Torah, the ten Sefiroth and the three pre-existent elements of air, fire and water, (sometimes included as Sefiroth) the Creation was initiated.
For something to come into being, God only had to say it. The Word is enough. At the very beginning of the Torah, in the Book of Genesis, God said "Let there be light". The Word was the act.

In the text below is contained the the idea of God consulting and then using the Torah.
Proverbs 3:19 "The Lord by wisdom founded the earth, by understanding he established the heavens"
(wisdom and understanding being synonymous with the Torah.)
Proverbs 8:22 "The Lord made me (Wisdom) as the beginning of his way, the first of his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning...."
The Torah became personalised as a kind of artisan, a medium by which the creation of the world was set in motion, and the whole creative process planned.

The concept for the dome was developed from the ideas contained in the Sefer Yetzirah - Book of Creation, ascribed to Abraham. It is the oldest speculative work in Hebrew.
In it there is a fusion of mysticism and philosophy which form the constituent elements of the Kabbalah.

The keynote of the work is provided by the opening statement

"By means of 32 mysterious paths did the eternal, Lord of Hosts, the Supreme God of Israel,.... engrave and establish His name and created his world." The thirty two paths are the twenty two letters of the alphabet and the together with what are designated the ten Sefiroth.

The name Sefiroth has been connected with the word sappir (sapphire) which gives a link to the heavenly throne in Exod 24.10 and Ezek 1.26. which is said to be made of Sapphire. The Sefiroth would accordingly owe their name to sapphire like rays which God poured forth at creation. They are said to contain the three entities 1. spirit/air, 2. water, 3. fire. The six others are the six dimensions of space. The four cardinal points of the compass plus height and depth and the Spirit of God. The Sefiroth are described as "without anything". They are abstracts, non material entities constituting, as it were, the moulds or forms into which all created things were originally cast. The letters on the other hand are the prime cause of matter which, by its union with the forms, gave rise to the world of corporeal beings. The part the letters played in the creation.

The letters of the alphabet fall into 3 groups;
1. the soft breathing alef, (a) - air
2. the mute mem, (m) - water
3. the hissing shin, (sh) - fire

In the beginning, these three entities had a non-material existence; by the articulation of the letters the received a material substratum which made creation possible when the infinite space represented by the six other Sefiroth was produced. Cosmic importance of the letters....

In an early Mishnah it is declared that the world was called into being by a series of ten divine utterances.
This in turn is an exposition of the declaration of the Psalmist;
"By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the hosts of them at the breath of his Mouth." (PS 33.6)

According to the Sefer Yetzirah the divine utterances contain all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet which in there various combinations, make up the holy language (Hebrew), the language of creation this relates to the numbers from one to ten provide for all possible numbers to infinity. Language and number conjoined together are thus declared to be the instruments whereby the cosmos in all its infinite variety of combinations and manifestations was called into existence by God.

Almost all of the information on which I based this work and these notes is from 'Judaism' by Isidore Epstein.