What does tohu va'vohu actually mean? Most of us grew up hearing it as a word for chaos, the thing your mother said when she opened the door of your room. In this episode of Kabbalah Talk, Eric asks Rav Yakov Shepherd what tohu and bohu mean, and the answer turns out to be a building site, not a mess.

We read the Ramban on Bereishit together with Meirat Einayim by Rabbi Yitzchak of Acco. The Ramban says the raw matter the Greeks called hyle is called tohu in the Holy Tongue: material with no shape yet, ready to receive form. Bohu is the forms built out of it. Yeshayahu speaks of the line of tohu and the stones of bohu, the string a builder stretches across an empty lot to mark the plan before any stone goes in.

If there is something in your life that has no shape yet, maybe it isn't a mess. Maybe it is tohu waiting for its bohu.

The full study, verse by verse, is in this week's Ramban Yad'a newsletter (PDF):
https://kingdavidkabbalah.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Ramban-Yada-Bereishit-5787.pdf

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