If creation came into being through HaShem’s speech, then the deepest question is not only how the world began, but how anything finite can bear an Infinite light without breaking. The Torah opens with a mystery disguised as a sentence: “And Elohim said.” Before form, before time, before measure, there is a divine utterance that does not merely describe reality, but brings reality into being. Yet every “Let there be” also implies a restraint—an inward concealment that makes room for a world that can receive, distinguish, and endure. What if the same pattern that stabilizes the cosmos is the pattern that stabilizes a life? What if thought is the hidden root, speech the measured revelation, and deed the vessel where light can finally live? If so, then the question becomes intimate and urgent: are my words building a dwelling-place for Presence, or scattering sparks into noise? Enter the palace-from-within—where breath carries letters, where boundaries are mercy, and where the ten utterances are not ancient poetry but the living architecture of creation, repeated again in every mouth, every choice, every act. The Torah teaches that creation is disclosed to us through the language of speech: “And Elohim said, ‘Let there be light’” [Genesis 1:3], and “By the word of HaShem the heavens were made, and by the breath of His mouth, all their hosts” [Psalms 33:6]. In the inwardness of Torah, this is not a claim that HaShem “needs” voice and breath (for He is not subject to change or process), but that the created order can only receive His will as it is clothed in measured revelation, a dibbur that gives shape, and a ruach that animates what is shaped. Thus the mekubalim speak of the first concealment (tzimtzum) not as a spatial “inside,” but as a concealment of overwhelming infinity so that finite being can stand without dissolving; and simultaneously, the Ein Sof is unchanged in His essence, for no created unfolding can touch HaShem’s oneness and immutability [Mishneh Torah, Foundations of the Torah 1:11]. This is why the first chapter of Bereshit is built as an architecture of boundaries and distinctions. Light is separated from darkness, the waters are distinguished above and below, and time itself becomes countable through ordered differentiation [Genesis 1:4–5, 1:6–8]. The separations are not “cuts” in divinity, chas v’shalom, but the merciful form through which the world can receive holiness without shattering: disclosure becomes intelligible precisely because it is given measure. In this sense, “within” means concealment-and-revelation as a single divine act—concealment that protects, revelation that vivifies—and the work of creation is the ongoing stability of that measured disclosure, not a one-time event that departs. Chazal therefore speak of the “ten utterances” not as poetry but as ontology: “With ten utterances the world was created” [Pirkei Avot 5:1]. Each ma’amar is a channeling of force into a vessel, so that existence can endure as existence; and the commentators note that even what appears as “In the beginning” is itself counted among the utterances, for “By the word of HaShem the heavens were made” reveals that creation is founded on articulated will [Bartenura on Pirkei Avot 5:1]. Speech, here, is the boundary that lets light become inhabitable. Thought and speech, then, are not merely stages but inner and outer faces of the same divine bestowal. Sefer Yetzirah frames the imprint of reality through “ten sefirot belimah” and “twenty-two letters” [Sefer Yetzirah 1:1], teaching that there is an inner patterning (the root of form in unified potential) and an outward articulation (letters that define), with breath as the living current that carries the letters into actualized worlds. The tradition further speaks of interinclusion (hitkallelut), that within each revealed measure the whole is mirrored in miniature—ten within ten—so that the divine order is not a flat ladder but a living recursion of relationship, where every sefirah contains a full interior world of the others, enabling harmony rather than chaos. In this light, “voice is eternal” means that the divine word does not wear out, because it is not a finite expenditure; it stands forever and does not return empty. “The word of our God will stand forever” [Isaiah 40:8], and “So is the word that issues from My mouth: it does not come back to Me unfulfilled” [Isaiah 55:11]. The endurance of worlds is bound to that constant vivifying word, while “mixing is finite” belongs to the realm of composites that shift, decay, and recombine within time: “A season is set for everything, a time for every experience under heaven” [Ecclesiastes 3:1]. In the sod of history, mixtures are the experience of concealment and entanglement, and time becomes compassion because it grants a framework for clarification and return—birur—so that what is confused can be refined back toward its proper root. This also deepens the meaning of the first “light.” Chazal teach that the light of the first day was not merely physical illumination, for the luminaries are set on the fourth day, but a primordial clarity through which Adam could see from one end of the world to the other, and it was hidden away for the righteous [Chagigah 12a; Bereshit Rabbah 3:4]. Light, in the inner reading, is the first intelligibility of creation—revelation in measure—so that the world can bear meaning without being overwhelmed by infinity. And all of this descends into avodah as an exact mirror of the cosmic pattern. “The matter is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it” [Deuteronomy 30:14]: what is held in the heart and mind seeks truthful articulation, and truthful articulation seeks deed. Speech is the bridge between inner worlds and outer worlds; it builds vessels for blessing or, when distorted, it scatters sparks into confusion. Therefore “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” [Proverbs 18:21]—not as superstition, but because words shape relationships, awaken forces in the soul, and either preserve or rupture the boundaries through which Presence can dwell. When a person aligns concealed thought with faithful speech, and speech with measured action, one’s small world becomes an echo of Ma’aseh Bereishit: separation without alienation, order without cruelty, and light revealed only as much as the vessel can truly hold.