Sefer HaZohar on the Body Parts of the Torah

"Everything exists for the sake of humanity, as is written: 'I made the earth and created humankind upon it' (Isaiah 45:12). Torah stands calling out to human beings to engage in her, strive for her, but no one bends an ear.

"Come and see: Whoever engages in Torah sustains the world, maintaining every work of creation perfectly, fittingly. Every single smooth member in the human body corresponds to a creature in the world. For just as a human being is composed of members upon members, all standing rung upon rung, arrayed one upon another, yet all one body, so too the world: all those creatures are members upon members, standing one upon another, which when arrayed actually form one body.

"All these resemble Torah, for Torah is entirely members, joints, and sections - standing one upon another, all arrayed, becoming one body."

-- Sefer HaZohar, 1:135a


This section is coded for Shi'ur Qomah.

The Distribution of Mitzvot in the Torah

The Torah is primarily thought of as a book of law. While the word "Torah" means "a teaching / the teaching" generically, some translate the word as "law". This comes from the idea of God giving commandments to Israel through his prophet Moshe. These 'laws' are the 613 mizvot (commandments).

The 613 mitzvot are distributed among the five books as follows:
1. Sefer Beresheet - 3 mitzvot
2. Sefer Shemot - 111 mitzvot
3. Sefer Vayiqra - 247 mitzvot
4. Sefer Bamidbar - 52 mitzvot
5. Sefer Devarim - 200 mitzvot

If you've been reading the weekly Parshah, know that the mizvot will be scarce in Sefer Beresheet. So far, we have only encountered the mitzvah to "be fruitful and multiply" (Gen. 1:28) and the mitzvah that "every male among you shall be circumcised" (Gen. 17:10).

Why are there so few mitzvot in the first book of the Torah? The purpose of the first book is to first set the stage and define the rules of the game, otherwise there would be no context to the narrative of God giving commandments to Moses from Sinai or from the Tent of Meeting. Additionally, the rest of the mitzvot would be incomprehensible if not for the narrative context that they are embedded within.

God gave the commandments to Israel. But who is Israel? We need Sefer Beresheet to first understand how Israel came about. This is why we find detailed lists of the generations of Adam and Noah and the patriarchs in Sefer Beresheet, while very little of this type of material appears elsewhere in the Torah.

Talmud Bavli Makot on the 613 Commandments of Torah

"Rabbi Simlai expounded: 613 commandments were related to Moses: 365 negative commandments, corresponding to the days of the solar year, and 248 positive commandments, corresponding to the number of parts of the human body. Rav Hamnuna said: Which verse teaches this? 'Moses commanded us the Torah as a heritage' (Deuteronomy 33:4). The numerical value of the word Torah is 611. To this we must add the first two of the Ten Commandments, 'I am YHVH your God' and 'You shall have no other gods', which we heard directly from the Almighty, and are thus distinct from the 611 commandments that we heard from Moses. All told, then, there are 613 mitzvot in the Torah."

 -- Talmud Bavli, Makot 23b

613 = 365 + 248 is probably the most important equation in Torah mathematics.

Every one of the 613 mitzvot is a fractal subspace of Torah, that is, it is resonantly self-similar to the overall 304,805-letters in the complete Torah codespace.