אסתכל באורייתא — He looked into the Torah

Zohar II:161a — istakel be-oraita u-vara alma: "He looked into the Torah and created the world." Six words, and they are the whole of it.

The Zohar pushes the midrash further than the midrash went. In Bereshit Rabbah the Torah is a plan the King consults — the plan and the palace remain two things. In the Zohar the distance closes: the world is what the Torah says, so the world can be read, and reading the Torah is not studying a report of creation but handling the thing creation was made of.

Which is why this app is arranged the way it is, and it is worth saying plainly for once. The reason the letters are objects here — turnable, soundable, combinable — rather than a font, is this sentence. If the world was made by looking into a text, then the letters are not notation for the world. They are its material, and a room full of them is a room full of masonry.

⚠ And the honest limit: the Zohar states the relation and does not describe a scene. Nobody in the tradition paints the letters hanging behind the world like a backdrop. Where this app draws that, it is this app's image — see pass-of-light, which says so on the page.