Gan Na'ul · גן נעול

A treatise Abulafia wrote to one he calls my son and my brother, who had asked him in writing for a commentary on Sefer Yetsirah and on the alphabets that issue from it. Since, he says, not everything can be explained in a book, he speaks with him in a few heads of chapters. After an introduction that opens on the verse "Wisdom crieth aloud in the streets", he hints at some traditions of Sefer Yetsirah and of the alphabets, under its two matters, the knowledge of the ten sefirot and of the twenty-two letters: the sefirot by their names, from Justice, nearest to man, to Thought, the supernal crown; engraving and hewing, weighing, substitution and permutation of the letters; the ten sefirot explained from the secrets of the ten plagues; the ways of the alphabets and the 231 gates; and the forty-two-letter Name that issues from Bereshit, "for in it is redemption", on which the book closes. Sefer Yetsirah, he says, he has already expounded in a commentary "a little long and much abridged", and he looks to the consolation of Zion in the year fifty.