A friend once told me in Germany during Christmas: “Don’t go to the forest at night, it’s dangerous.”
In that moment, something miraculous happened. An entire world appeared before me: dark trees, shadowy paths, hidden threats. None of it was physically there, yet it became vividly present. A whole reality materialized through a few spoken words.
This is the miracle of language. What is it about words that suddenly conjures worlds in front of us? How does speech create presence out of absence?
The prophets understood this power. They used language to mobilize entire nations, not through force, but through נביעה של נבואה, a spring of prophecy. The word wells up from hiddenness (העלם), bursts forth as expression (הבעה), and transforms consciousness.
Heidegger, in his work on language, described speaking as a spring (נביעה) that flows outward into the world, reflects an appearance, and returns to concealment. Language, he understood, is like an infinite ocean of consciousness sending waves to the shore, each wave a word, each word creating a field of consciousness, navigation points within awareness itself.
When God in Genesis said ויהי אור (Let there be light), the text tells us ויהי אור, and there was light. The book of Zohar teaches us something profound about this: it speaks of a light that already was.
What does it mean, a light that already was?
The light which is stored in the revelation of the word was already present in concealment, let’s look at this idea through the Hebrew lens. The Hebrew word for God is Elohim written in 5 letters: א-ל-ה-י-ם. When we remove the first letter א (alef), the remaining four letters ל-ה-י-ם spell מילה, the Hebrew word for ‘word.’
When the word emerges from God (א-להים), it carries within it the light that was always there in hiddenness. The word doesn’t create something from nothing, it reveals what was concealed. ויהי אור, the light came into appearance, but it already was in the hidden unity of the divine.
This is why John 1:1 writes: “And the Word was God.” Not “became” God. Was. The word is the movement of God from concealment into revelation, the spring bursting forth, carrying what was always within.
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