Meaning of Beth: Kabbalah Question

[Joan Marie]

I'm writing to request that our friends here who know a bit about the Kabbalah help us out.

Today is day 3 of our Sacred days of Yule reading and here is the theme:

Day 3 - The Time of Beth: - Dec 22nd
This card points to the inner blocks and resistance that is holding us back from following our dreams.

I am assuming that this is in reference to the Hebrew letter Beth, ב and that "The Time of Beth" is related to Hanukkah.

I wonder if anyone out there can help us understand better the significance of this and how it relates to this 3rd day of Yule and the theme that has been assigned to it.

Thank you!

[Joan Marie]

I'm learning bit-by-bit here. And I'm trying to tie the theme of the day to all this.

I think, the Hebrew letter Beth, ב and the "The Time of Beth" is related to Hanukkah in that Beth means "home" or can also refer to "family" and Hanukkah is very much a home/family celebration and ritual.

Tonight, Sunday Dec. 22nd, the first of 8 candles of the Hanukkah menorah is lit. The word Hanukkah ( or Chanukah ) means "dedication.
The theme if the reading today is about following dreams. This is a kind of dedication is it not? It requires strength, courage and determination.

I'm still reading. Learning so many interesting things but I thought I would share this little bit with you. It's just my own ideas, trying to understand our exercise. I would still love to hear from anyone else who knows more about all this.

[Charlie Brown]

Have you seen this article?

Reading that and thinking about it relation to the day's definition, I'm wondering if the Day of Beth is more or less the idea of giving oneself over to a higher power. That is, letting go of those inner restrictions.

[Joan Marie]

Have you seen this article?

Reading that and thinking about it relation to the day's definition, I'm wondering if the Day of Beth is more or less the idea of giving oneself over to a higher power. That is, letting go of those inner restrictions.

I'm reading this right now. It's excellent. I'm about halfway through and I'm seeing this little word "beth" is just positively filled with meaning and symbolism.

I'm just going to pick out one thing I just read and then I'm diving back in:

That house is represented by the letter ב Beth. That house is us; it is our mind, our heart, our soul, our body.

That seems interesting. But then it goes on to say:

We have filled our house with thieves, desires, egos - thieves who steal the wealth of God, who steal the consciousness, who steal energy, who steal our life. This is a very easy thing for one to confirm for oneself, if we're serious about self-observation. If we watch and observe our psychological house, which is our own Beth, we can see who inhabits it. If we observe our mind, our heart, and the actions of our bodies, we will see a den of thieves. We will see rampaging pride, which seeks to control our entire psyche in order to sustain itself, who seeks to steal the wealth of God - all the benefits of life, all the fruits of being in a body - in order to feed lust, to sustain resentment, to nourish envy. These are those thieves who have inhabited the temple of God, and this is why Jesus represented in a symbolic way the fury of Christ against those moneylenders, those thieves who have filled the temple with the desires of merchants, wealth, and all kinds of materialism. Those thieves are in our own psyche. Our ב Beth, our temple, our house, is filthy.

Yikes! To be honest, my head is really swimming. This is all so interesting and answering so many questions I didn't even know I had, and raising even more.

[Diana]

We have filled our house with thieves, desires, egos - thieves who steal the wealth of God, who steal the consciousness, who steal energy, who steal our life. This is a very easy thing for one to confirm for oneself, if we're serious about self-observation. If we watch and observe our psychological house, which is our own Beth, we can see who inhabits it. If we observe our mind, our heart, and the actions of our bodies, we will see a den of thieves. We will see rampaging pride, which seeks to control our entire psyche in order to sustain itself, who seeks to steal the wealth of God - all the benefits of life, all the fruits of being in a body - in order to feed lust, to sustain resentment, to nourish envy. These are those thieves who have inhabited the temple of God, and this is why Jesus represented in a symbolic way the fury of Christ against those moneylenders, those thieves who have filled the temple with the desires of merchants, wealth, and all kinds of materialism. Those thieves are in our own psyche. Our ב Beth, our temple, our house, is filthy.

Yikes! To be honest, my head is really swimming. This is all so interesting and answering so many questions I didn't even know I had, and raising even more.

We mustn't be too hard on ourselves. We have centuries and centuries of conditioning that have caused our House to be polluted. As soon as we're born, the conditioning starts.

In all the Bible stories, which are allegories, there is naturally always a deeper meaning behind them. They are called dark sayings. I'm glad that that text you quoted mentioned Jesus chasing the moneylenders out of the temple and his fury. And its connection to Beth.

(It's like the turning of the water to wine at the wedding in Cana. There may very well have been a literal marriage, but underlying, or rather overlying that, that is the real marriage, the spiritual marriage in heaven. There's always a literal and a darker meaning.)

There's a beautiful psalm that says : Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain. When I read the words "The Lord", I often replace them by the "the Law". Lord is pretty vague.

[Diana]

That article that Charlie Brown referenced also speaks of the Belief that you brought up in another thread, Joan Marie, about "believing in the Tarot".

"Belief creates nothing. We believe one thing today and another thing tomorrow, but fundamentally nothing changes. We exchange beliefs from moment to moment. Today we believe in a politician and tomorrow we do not. Today we believe in a philosophy and tomorrow we do not. Today we believe in ourselves, and tomorrow we do not. But what changes? Nothing.

Real change occurs through action, but that action, in order to create change in the Spirit, has to be action in accordance with the Spirit. The message that is hidden in Beth, in Bereishit, is how to bring that Aleph, the breath of God in order to create."

[Joan Marie]

Have you seen this article?

Reading that and thinking about it relation to the day's definition, I'm wondering if the Day of Beth is more or less the idea of giving oneself over to a higher power. That is, letting go of those inner restrictions.

I can see that. And so as the Time of Beth, relates to Hanukkah, getting past the inner restrictions allows one to dedicate themselves to the pursuit of their dreams.

So these restrictions (limitations) are the "thieves in our psyche" our ego that is attached to worldly concerns. But our dreams would often seem to be "worldly" so maybe the idea is to find the higher power within and pursue our dreams from this place, a place of pure light energy. The Menorah maybe symbolises this?

[Joan Marie]

We mustn't be too hard on ourselves. We have centuries and centuries of conditioning that have caused our House to be polluted. As soon as we're born, the conditioning starts.

I would personally not take on board all of what is in this article. For sure not.

This is what gets so strange to me about religion. It starts with all this great mystical stuff, but then as if to obfuscate the wonder of it, they start telling us we're dirty and sinful and then tying us down spiritually.

What they describe in that little paragraph I quoted sounds like the shadow to me, sort of, but rather than help guide us in working with it, they would try and regulate how we behave with strict rules and bring the whole subject down to some banal level where we become preoccupied with things like the right and wrong (read: good and sinful) positions during sex and so on.

Then someone like Crowley comes along and wants to celebrate the human spirit and use the mystery of the Kaballah to lift us up and show us we are filled with light and we are stars. He wished for us to find our magick, to find the temple within us. Being "flawed" does not preclude anyone from soaring like an angel, from being a creative being, from living a good life, from being a star. That is if one has the will and the spirit to do that.

So this whole discussion has rekindled my interest in learning more about the Kaballah. Seeing how complex the understanding of even just this tiny word "beth" is, really opens it up for me. With these studies maybe the thing is, as was raised in one of the Plato's Cave topics, the study just raises more questions. More than it answers. But to follow these threads of thought is true mind expansion. If you don't go crazy in the process or get bogged down with dogma along the way.

[Ailsaek]

I just bought a new book on the Kabbalistic meanings of the letters and thought this might be of interest.

[Nemia]

I'm late to the question but here are my thoughts.

Bet is indeed one of the cases where the letter's name is very closely related to a Hebrew word - bayit, house. In its genitive state (house of....) it's pronounced bet, like the letter.

Bayit means more than only house. Depending on the word you add, it shows many facets. Bet David is the House of David, the royal house Jesus belonged to - here, it means dynasty. Bet ha-knesset, the house of coming together, is the Hebrew word for synagogue. Bet ha-sefer, the house of the book, means school. Bet boshet, the house of shame, means brothel.

The Chanukka holiday celebrates a miracle in the temple, called bet ha-mikdash, house of sanctity, in Hebrew. A jug of oil for the menorah lamp had only enough oil for one day but it burned for eight days. Jews celebrate his miracle by lighting each evening another candle until the eight candles of the chanukkia lamp burn (the ninth candle, the servant candle, is used to light the others).

This clip is a bit kitschy but here is how it's done:



So when bet is associated with Chanukka (which I didn't know), it may related to the fact that it's associated not only with the private house but also with the Temple (which appeears on the High Priestess cards - the two pillars belong to the Temple in Jerusalem), the bet ha-mikdash that was twice built and twice destroyed. It remained the center of Jewish thinking and a symbol of the universe.

Bet ha-mikdash is built from two parts: bet means, as mentioned above, house of..., and mikdash means temple (without the bet, it's a pagan temple). Nearly every Hebrew word has a root with a certain meaning attached, and the root k-d-sh means holy.

Words that are "cousins" of the mikdash are hakdasha, sanctification, and kadosh, holy.

[Lionsmane]

This all reminds me of 'Interior Castle' by Saint Teresa of Avila.

[Nemia]

Rather Luther´s Feste Burg, based on psalm 46, עיר אלוקים, the city of G-d.

Teresa's Inner Castle is a metaphor for an inner process, while the divine city relates to a concrete place (Jerusalem) and so does the Holy Temple (bet ha-mikdash). Catholic mysticism went a long distance from its Biblical or Jewish roots. I personally don't believe there is any connection between Teresa and the Hebrew Bible.

Thinking about it now - I don't know where the "time of Beth" comes from, it's all speculation here. I'm firing off a question now to the woman who created this spread. i'll let you know if I find out anything

[Nemia]

She didn't answer yet