The Most Sacred Sound In The Universe

So, in the Jewish tradition, the name of God is a big deal. It might be the most sacred sound in the entire universe. 

Just to give you a sense of how sacred this sound was: when the Temple in Jerusalem was still standing, there was one most special day of the year, the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur. And on this one special day of the year, one special person, the High Priest—the cleanest, holiest, and, let’s face it, probably smuggest member of the community—would go through the various precincts of this holiest space the Temple, and enter the holy of holies, the chamber within the chamber, and pronounce the sacred name of God there.

Traditionally, the name of God is called the Tetragrammaton, meaning “made from four letters.” It’s represented by the four Hebrew letters: yud heh vav heh. Because of those letters, we’ve come to know the name as Yahweh or Jehovah, but those are only speculations as to the actual pronunciation. In fact, the vowels are missing, and are never written because the name was considered too sacred and secret for ordinary humans to pronounce.

It was kind of like the ultimate four-letter-word. 

After the Temple was destroyed, some people believed the secret pronunciation of the name was lost forever. Another tradition holds that in every generation, only one extremely wise person knows the true pronunciation. 

But in the Jewish mystical tradition, maybe the only branch of Judaism that actually knows how to party, another interpretation arose. This mystical rabbi was like, No, no, you’re making it way too complicated, with the vowels and the secrets. Think about it: what would it sound like if you were just to pronounce the letters? They’re all aspirated consonants, they’re full of respiration. Haaa.

The rabbi continued, If you were actually just to pronounce the letters in the most sacred name of God, what we would hear is simply the sound of breath.

Take a moment and I’m going to invite you to take a few deep breaths and as you do, imagine that what you’re hearing, what you’re sensing is the most sacred sound in the universe. 

Does that change how you sense the breath? The quality of attention you give to it? Your sensitivity to its rhythms?

A lot of the time, when we’re on autopilot, and we forget to notice the breath. 

What I love about this mystical teaching is the way it bridges the most sacred with the totally ordinary. 

When I was thinking about writing this, I was asking myself, What is the beauty of the breath? And the answer I came up with is, the beauty of the breath is the beauty of bridging. 

When we start to pay attention to it, we can see the breath is the bridge between so many things in our lives. 

It’s the bridge between the inside of us and the outside, passing back and forth between what’s beneath our skin and what’s beyond it. 

It’s the bridge between the human and the non-human parts of nature—we can see this in the mutual silent conversation we have with the trees to produce the atmosphere we all live in, receiving oxygen and offering back carbon dioxide. 

Breath can carry us from narrow to spacious, from scattered to focused, from resisting to surrendering. 

One way of saying it is: breath is the bridge from thought-based reality to sense-based reality. From living in our concepts about the moment, to living in our actual, alive, vivid sensations of the moment.

And the revelation is that this sacred, revitalizing, ever self-renewing aliveness is always present. It is mind-blowingly closer than we might imagine. It is as near to us as the name we call the source of all creation. When we breathe consciously, we reestablish our connection, we reopen the conversation.

Now take three breaths. Can you hear the unspeakable essence of your mysterious life?

 (Image Credit: Gregg Bordowitz, Tetragrammaton)