Hayyei ha-Olam ha-Ba · חיי העולם הבא

A commentary on the Explicit Name, addressed to its reader as "my son", from which he is to understand all the ways of prophecy and the ways proper to master and disciple in permutation and in pronouncing. It is so called because its permuted Names win those who prophesy the life of the world to come; with the name goes "the secret of the number of the letters of Jerusalem", the ten arrangements of the seventy-two-letter Name turning within it. From the chain of the Names, the seventy-two-letter down to the four-letter Name, "the root and the principal", it turns first to the long Name: the fifty-four names from its four corners, its ten ways in circles, the three beginnings of the kabbalah — letters, permutation, vowel-points — and a key to the innermost chambers: the pronouncing of the Name with its vowels, breaths, movements of the head and limbs of the body, the circles of the supreme Name, and chapter headings of the forty-two-letter Name. The first letters of the poem at its head spell שם המפורש יהוה, the Explicit Name; those of the poem at its close, רזי חיי העולם הבא, the secrets of the life of the world to come.