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מונחים

Glossary

125 terms of Talmud Eser Sefirot, and the English the official edition actually uses for each one.

Every term here was read off the 737 chapters where the 1956 Jerusalem Hebrew and the Bnei Baruch English could be laid side by side, item against item — 1,448 aligned pairs in all.

The English edition covers parts ⁦1, 2, 3, 5, 6⁩ of the sixteen parts of Talmud Eser Sefirot.

Parts ⁦1, 2, 3, 5, 6⁩ of sixteen

The Hebrew is quoted from the 1956 Jerusalem edition and the English from the Bnei Baruch edition. The short notes are shown in your interface language.

Terms

Showing 125 of 125 terms

How the English is set

Rules the official edition follows beyond single words — how item markers, commentary openings, citations and honorifics are handled — each with passages as examples.

  • Item markers

    A Hebrew letter used as an inline marker is written as its numerical value in Arabic numerals (gematria): aleph is 1, yod is 10, lamed is 30, qof is 100, tav is 400. The letter itself is never kept, and markers are never renumbered in sequence.

  • Commentary items

    Each English commentary item opens with a bold lemma — the phrase from the source it comments on — followed by a colon, and then the explanation. The Hebrew commentary has no lemma and is identified only by its anchor, so a translation has to draw the lemma from the aligned source text.

    • היינו האור המתפשט מעצמות הבורא יתברך.

      <strong> Upper, simple light:</strong> It refers to the light that expands from the Creator Himself.

      Part 1 · Chapter 1 Inner Light

    • היינו בחינה ראשונה מד' הבחינות כנ"ל בדיבור הסמוך.

      <strong> The upper beginning of the line is extended from Ein Sof Himself:</strong> Meaning the first phase of the four phases (see above item).

      Part 1 · Chapter 2 Inner Light
  • Navigation links

    The Hebrew links that lead from a question to its answer and back (“to the question”, “to the answer”) are dropped entirely. They have no English rendering.

  • Table-of-Answers items

    The bold Hebrew headword that opens an answer is not repeated in English; the item starts directly with the definition. A citation that follows the headword is moved to the end of the item or dropped, never left at the start.

    • (לשאלה) <b>הסתכלות</b> (ח"ג פי"ב אות א')<br>התפשטות אור א"ס ב"ה לזווג דהכאה במסך…

      The expansion of the light of Ein Sof for coupling by striking in the screen … or look. (Part 3, Chapter 12, item 1)

      Part 3 · Answers — Terminology The Ari's Text

    • (לשאלה) <b>ראש</b> (ח"ג פ"ו)<br>ט"ס של אור עליון…

      The nine Sefirot of the upper light that expand to a coupling by striking … are called the “Rosh” [head] of the degree…

      Part 2 · Answers — Terminology The Ari's Text
  • Table-of-Questions items

    Hebrew questions end with a full stop; the English edition writes them as questions ending in a question mark. When a citation is appended, the question mark is usually dropped and the item ends with the closing parenthesis.

  • Citation abbreviations

    Hebrew abbreviations in citations are written out in English, never transliterated: part and chapter references become “Part 3, Chapter 5”, the two commentary layers are named in full as “Inner Light” and “Inner Observation”, and “item”, “page” and “see answer” take Arabic numerals. Back-references become “ibid.” or “see above item”. Every Hebrew letter-numeral becomes an Arabic numeral.

  • Honorifics and pious formulae

    “Blessed be He” after Ein Sof is always dropped, so “Ein Sof” stands alone. The honorific on the Creator’s name is dropped or absorbed into “His” and “Him”. The Hebrew idiom for “God forbid” becomes the adverb “whatsoever” in negative clauses, or is dropped, and is never rendered “God forbid”. “See there” is usually dropped.

    • אע"פ שבחינה ד' שבא"ס ב"ה צמצמה את עצמה

      Although phase four in Ein Sof restricted herself

      Part 1 · Answers — Topics The Ari's Text

    • אין הכוונה על אויר גשמי ח"ו

      This does not refer to corporeal air whatsoever.

      Part 1 · Chapter 1 Inner Light
  • Author references

    In this text the Hebrew “the Rav” means the Ari (Isaac Luria), author of the Etz Chaim text being quoted. The English always says “the ARI” and never “the Rav”. Baal HaSulam, the commentator, is not named in the running text.

    • וז"ש הרב, אשר אור העליון הנמשך מעצמותו ית'…

      The ARI writes that the upper light that is extended from His self…

      Part 1 · Chapter 1 Inner Light

    • כמ"ש הרב בע"ח שער י"ח פ"א

      As written by the ARI, the root of the lights and their essence are the four simple letters of HaVaYaH

      Part 3 · Answers — Terminology The Ari's Text
  • Transliteration glosses

    A transliterated term is followed by a short English gloss in square brackets the first time it appears in an item, and is then used bare: “Rosh [head]”, “Guf [body]”, “Ein Sof [infinity]”, “Katnut [smallness]”, “Gadlut [greatness]”. The gloss is used sparingly, not on every occurrence.

  • Numbers in prose

    Phase ordinals are spelled as words in lower case — “phase one”, “phase two”, “phase three”, “phase four” — and never as digits. In the same way “ten Sefirot” keeps “ten” as a lower-case word.

    • כח העיכוב שנעשה על בחינה ד' לאחר הצמצום

      a detaining force that was placed on phase four after the restriction

      Part 1 · Answers — Topics The Ari's Text

    • ע"ס הנמשכות ממסך ולמטה

      The ten Sefirot that are extended from the screen and below

      Part 2 · Answers — Terminology The Ari's Text
  • Grammatical gender

    Malchut, phase four and the Nukva keep their Hebrew feminine grammar in English: “she”, “her”, “herself”. They are never turned into “it”.

    • והיא אינה מקבלתו, מסבת המסך המעכב אותו

      which she does not receive because of the screen that detains it

      Part 2 · Answers — Terminology The Ari's Text

    • אע"פ שבחינה ד' שבא"ס ב"ה צמצמה את עצמה

      Although phase four in Ein Sof restricted herself

      Part 1 · Answers — Topics The Ari's Text
  • Typography

    Quoted terms use curly typographic quotes, never straight ASCII quotes, and glosses use square brackets. Hebrew letters appear in the English only inside letter glosses.

  • Commentary layer names

    “Inner Light”, the name of Baal HaSulam’s first commentary layer, is written in title case; the same words in lower case, “inner light”, are the technical term for light clothed inside a vessel. “Inner Observation” names the second layer. The difference in case is the only thing that tells the layer name from the term.

    • (לשאלה) אור פנימי (ח"ב פ"א או"פ מ') הוא האור המלובש בכלי.

      Inner light is the light that is clothed in the vessel.

      Part 2 · Answers — Terminology The Ari's Text

    • מכח הביטוש דאו"מ ואו"פ

      because of the clash of surrounding light and inner light

      Part 5 · Answers — Topics The Ari's Text

Where the evidence stops

This glossary is only as wide as the English edition. Read these before leaning on a count.

  • The Bnei Baruch English covers only parts ⁦1, 2, 3, 5, 6⁩ of the sixteen. For the other parts, no term is evidenced here.
  • Most of the evidence comes from the Tables of Questions and Answers, which are terminological by nature. Only a handful of running chapters could be compared, so what the glossary shows about prose style is thinner than what it shows about single terms.
  • A few terms occur in only one to three compared passages. That is too little to settle them, so they are left out rather than guessed.
  • A few chapters could be compared only as a whole, not item by item, so passages quoted from them are weaker evidence.
  • The AI English translation on this site was not used to build the glossary; it was only checked against the finished glossary.
How the glossary was built

Wherever the Hebrew (Jerusalem edition) and the official Bnei Baruch English both exist for the same chapter and layer, the two were laid side by side and matched item for item; a match was accepted only when the numbering and anchors lined up exactly. For each Hebrew term, the English renderings that turn up unusually often in the items containing it were gathered as candidates, and every candidate was then confirmed by reading real pairs. Every quoted passage was pulled out of the matched text by program, not typed by hand.

English edition
Bnei Baruch English (KabbalahMedia)
Hebrew reference
Hebrew, Jerusalem edition, 1956–1966
Compiled