And HASHEM said to Moshe: Speak to the kohanim, the sons of Aaron, and say to them: (LO – LAMED-ALEPH) Do not let anyone defile himself for a dead person among his people. (Vayikra 21:1)
The Cohanim are told “LO”- do not become contaminated by dead bodies! What does “NO” mean?
Original Hebrew is a Holy Language. Although western letters and characters are ideographic, that is they are merely signals or triggers for certain sounds, their shapes and the names of letters are arbitrary. The eastern languages are pictographic. The word for a house is a picture of a house but how to pronounce it is a matter of oral tradition. In Loshon HaKodesh, the Holy Language, each letter has a pronunciation but the names of the letters mean something, and the shapes are telling too. The first time a letter is used not as a prefix in Chumash is also an indication of the meaning of the letter.
Imagine you are looking at a periodic table of elements while reading this short paragraph from Sefer Yetzira; “Twenty-Two Foundation Letters. He engraved them, He carved them. He permuted them, He weighed them. He transformed them, and with them, He depicted all that was formed and all that would be formed”.
The letter LAMED is not an arbitrary sound and the shape of the letter has a pictorial quality as well. The name of the letter LAMED means to learn. LAMED is the silhouette of someone who is sitting and learning. Draw a line from the foot to the knee and then from the knee to the back and all the way up the back to the head and you will have written the letter LAMED. LAMED as a prefix means, ‘to” or “for”, because when one learns, they gain both direction and purpose. ALEF means to teach, to be a general, Elef is 1,000. It is the largest numeral word in Tora. It is a silent letter – a Silent Teacher! In Chumash ALEF is used first as the beginning letter of ELOCHIM. ELOCHIM is plural and yet Alef is ONE. It is the unity in the multiplicity. Alef is made up of two YUDS which are 10 each and a VUV which is 6 which adds up to HASHEM’s name – 26. “HASHEM Hu HaELOCHIM”.
Together they combine to spell the simple word LO -NO! NO does not mean that you want to do something and somebody tells you not to. NO! “LO” means that one is seeking direction, living with purpose and he meets the supreme authority, HASHEM! He experiences an unyielding wall of ultimate reality. Cecil B. Demil who made the movie the Ten Commandments famously said, “You cannot break the law. You can only break yourself against the law!”
In Loshon HaKodesh, the chemistry set with which HASHEM created the world, the word for table is Shulchan. A Shulchan does not mean a flat surface. Shulchan defines the ideal function of a table. The root of Shulchan is – send. It is a mailbox of sorts from which gifts are launched and received.
HASHEM takes ultimate spirituality and miraculously creates various delicious foods for our table and we then reconvert those material goodies back to spirituality. We return the Ruchnios and then HASHEM delivers more Gashmios. Mashiv means to return and HaRuach refers to Ruchnios – spirituality. Morid is to bring down and Geshem refers to Gashmius – physical matter. HASHEM made and constantly makes the world Yesh M’Ayin, something from nothing. Our task in this world is defined by this phrase Mashiv HaRuach v’ Morid HaGeshem. We take the material stuff of this world which is really dense Ruchnius and by eating and drinking, and through making Brochos, and through learning Torah and Davening, and serving HASHEM, and even by refraining from the forbidden, we convert this physicality back into Ruchnios – Mashiv HaRuach. We return the material stuff back to HASHEM by revealing the ultimate spirituality within. Since we are making the ideal use of this world, HASHEM then brings down and delivers to us more Gashmius, material matter to work with, – U’Morid HaGeshem.
We are like nuclear power plants. We produce light that travels forever. In the latter part of the 20th century, we discovered what happens when we split open the smallest particles. How much light awaits us in Olam Haba! So, when the Torah tells us “LO”, it means NO!