Heh / Hei Hebrew letter meaning
What is the hebrew meaning of the letter Heh? The letter Heh / Hei, is the fifth of the Hebrew Alphabet, and its numerical value is 5. The Heh letter meaning in describes its construction, as a Dalet and a foot.
The sage is taught the Gimel, which means to give, gives as it were part of its foot to the Dalet, the poor person, and that becomes the next letter the Hei. So, it represents a unification of giving and receiving, therefore it’s a letter of great unity and completeness.
We’re taught, that the letter Hei stands for expression and revelation. In most languages when you want to get someone’s attention, when you want to express yourself you say: “hey”.
In Hebrew, we have two expressions like that. One is “Hi’ne”, which means here it is, Here I am. And the other one, a very important word shown many times in the Torah when God appears to a person: “Hi’Neni”, which means I am here.
So, the letter Hei has much to do with revelation and expression, and this is manifest that in the four letter name of God, the only letter that’s repeated is Hey.
There are two of the four letters of God’s name, are the letter Hei that should alert us immediately to how important this letter is.
Yod Hey Vav Hey and God’s Name
When you take the name of God, and you permute it in a different order, it spells out HVHY (Havaya), and many people refer to God with this name.
Havaya is a word of being, because God brings everything into being, and as essential name is very connected to this idea of essence and being.
A further manifestation of the letter hey regards time, because God who is above time and space brings time into being thus, the words in Hebrew for past present and future, are all connected to the letter Hei.
So, God’s name is hinting to, that all being, all time, all reality, is animated by God’s infinite light.
Shape of The Letter Hey
When you look at the shape of the letter Hey, you will notice that it’s made of three distinct lines, and we’re told that this represents breadth, length, and depth, because the expression in the level of worlds, in space is made up of three dimensions.
All expression will see follows these three levels. That’s why we have what’s called, thought, speech, and action. Each one of these is an expression of revealing a person’s inner essence, through speech, and through action.
God also on the level of divinity has these three levels. One is called essence, one is the transcendent nature of God, and one is the imminent nature of God.
In other words there is an essence of God that transcends all time-space and all concept, and then you have a transcendent level of God, that as it were surrounds the world, and then you have an imminent revelation and expression of God that fills all of the worlds.
Now going along with this is the number of the letter Hey. The number of Hey is Five. We’ll see many things that have to do with expression, and manifestation and revelation that have to do with five.
Five Levels of souls
The first is we’re told that there are five levels of the soul: Nefesh, Ruach, Neshama, Haya and Yechida (all three of those words are souls).
In short, the behavioristic level which is called nefesh, the emotional Ruach, intellectual Neshama, the supra-conscious which is Haya and the point of God within a person the highest level is called Yechida. So the soul is expressed to five ways.
On the level of worlds we just look at our hand, and see our hand is made up of five fingers. In other words we act in the world through our hands, our hands represent our ability to act in the world, the way we speak were taught linguistically, that sound comes out of our mouth and from five different places in the mouth.
We see in many different levels how five represents revelation. We are taught that everything has its source in a more spiritual godly aspect, so when we look at the creation of the world, we see that on the first day of creation the word light, is mentioned 5 times.
These five expressions of light represent the five books of Moses- the core of the Torah.
In Conclusion- Meditation
A meaningful meditation on the letter Hay is to take these ideas of three lines, and the number five, because they go together very well, and really meditate on how we express ourselves to thought speech and action, and how this is revealed in the physical world through our hands.
In the spiritual world through the five levels of salt and how ultimately the letter Hei connected very much to God’s name, reveals to us our connection to God, and gives us a strength to express ourselves in this world.
