Vehuiah
The Flame of the New Beginning
When does strength of will cease to serve the will of God and become the stubbornness that wants only its own?
At dawn over a field still unsown, Eisenheim sits before Vehuiah, the first of the seventy-two Angels of the Kabbalah, guardian of the will and of the strength to begin again. He does not come to ask for drive, nor for the power to overcome his own inertia. He comes to ask one single thing, and he brings his whole life behind it: where, in me, did the will cease to serve and become mere stubbornness?
Out of that encounter is born a long contemplation on the most elementary and most betrayed of all virtues — the energy of beginnings — and on the four shadows that imitate it to perfection. Stubbornness, which disguises itself as fidelity and is born the moment we stop loving the end in order to love our position before it. Impulsiveness, which is fear with legs, and acts quickly not because it has seen, but so as not to have to see. Beginnings without end, which live on advances, because the beginning gives everything the end would give and demands nothing. And the gravest of them all, the impulse that borrows the name of God — grave precisely because it is sincere, for there is no error harder to cure than an error that prays.
Vehuiah answers as a luminous intelligence, servant of ELOHIM: it speaks only the truth, refuses all adoration, and returns every honour to the Source. It teaches how to distinguish the ardour that comes from on high from the one that comes only from the self, how to persevere in what one begins, and how to surrender one’s own will — not to switch it off, but to possess it entire and turn it toward another north. Because the will that burns again in service is not a greater flame: it is the same flame, turned another way.
A literary, symbolic and initiatory work. There is here no evocation, rite, seal, operative psalm or formula — no answer of the angel is to be read as a method to be applied. The angel is not to be worshipped nor evoked: reverence belongs to God, and the angel is a messenger, not a destination. A faithful mirror, for whoever wishes to learn to live the will in truth.
Book I of the collection “Shemhamphorash — Interviews with the Seventy-Two Angels of the Kabbalah”.
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