“Harold Blume writes of the mystic Kabbalah as ‘a collective, psychic defense of the most imaginative medieval Jews against exile and persecution pressing on them inwardly. So, some Kabbalists spoke of a missing twenty-third letter of the Hebrew alphabet, hidden in the white spaces between the letters. From these openings the larger Torah was still to emerge.’”

—Richard A. Firmage, The Alphabet Abecedarium, 1993.