What Does “Galui Veyadua” Add to Asher Yatzar?

By: Rabbi Elie Feder PhD

Rosh Hashanah is the day Jewish tradition associates with the creation of the first man (Vayikra Rabbah29:1). As it approaches, it’s worth turning to the berachah we say multiple times each day about that act of formation: Asher Yatzar.

The text of this berachah includes an unusual phrase, galui veyadua lifnei chisei kevodecha—“it is revealed and known before Your Throne of Glory” (see Berachos 60b). Berachos don’t ordinarily tell us that their subject is known to Hashem. In Hamotzi we simply say, “Who brings bread from the earth.” We don’t add, “It is revealed and known before You that You bring bread from the earth.” So why does Asher Yatzar include this seemingly unnecessary phrase?

Of course everything is already known to Hashem. The berachah could have just said that if one opening or cavity were improperly opened or closed, a person couldn’t survive. So galui veyadua must be doing more than simply restating that Hashem knows everything. It must be telling us something specific about this berachah.

Maybe this phrase is actually explaining the opening words of the berachah, asher yatzar es ha’adam bechochmah—that He formed man with wisdom.

The wisdom of the body isn’t just that it has openings and cavities, but how precisely they’re arranged. Every part is set up with an eye toward what would happen if things were arranged differently. Certain passages have to stay open, certain organs have to stay sealed, and even a small failure in this delicate system could make life impossible. Because Hashem knew exactly what would happen under every possible arrangement, He formed the human body the way He did.

This is what makes galui veyadua relevant here in a way it wouldn’t be in Hamotzi or other berachos. In Hamotzi, saying that Hashem knows He brings forth bread would add nothing to the praise. In Asher Yatzar, by contrast, Hashem’s knowledge of what would happen under alternative arrangements is itself part of the chochmah being praised. Galui veyadua doesn’t merely tell us that Hashem knows; it identifies the foreknowledge embodied in the body’s design.

None of this requires rejecting evolution. Natural selection may well explain how these mechanisms of storage, continence, and elimination came about. This process itself, a “blind watchmaker,” doesn’t need to foresee its own results. But Hashem established the laws and natural order that make evolution possible with complete knowledge of what they would produce. The body that emerged through that process therefore reflects the same wisdom: its openings and cavities are arranged in light of what would happen if something meant to remain open were closed, or something meant to remain sealed were opened. What’s blind from inside the process is still galui veyadua, revealed and known, before its Creator.

This may also be why the berachah uses two different phrases, l’hitkayeim and la’amod lefanecha. The body’s system for eliminating waste actually does two jobs at once. First, waste has to be able to leave the body—otherwise a person couldn’t go on living, l’hitkayeim. But waste also has to stay contained until it can be released at the right time and place. If the body couldn’t hold it in, a person would be surrounded by waste constantly and unable to stand before Hashem in prayer and service—la’amod lefanecha. The same design that keeps us alive is what makes a life of cleanliness, dignity, and kedushah possible in the first place. Indeed, the Torah requires waste to be covered so that v’hayah mechanayich kadosh—your camp shall be holy (Devarim23:14-15)—and the Gemara uses “standing” as a term for prayer (Bersachos 26b).

There’s one more detail in the text worth noticing: why does the berachah say galui veyadua—“it is revealed and known”—and not haya galui veyadua, “it was revealed and known”?

Since yatzar describes the act of forming man in the past tense, we’d expect the berachah to say that these consequences were known to Hashem back when He formed man. But putting it that way would place Hashem’s knowledge inside of time—as if He came to know this at some past moment, the way we might divide what someone knew back then from what they know now.

Instead, the berachah switches to a phrase with no expressed tense: galui veyadua, “revealed and known.” Hashem’s knowledge isn’t past, present, or future. What we call His “foreknowledge” only seems to precede the fact because we ourselves are inside time. But Hashem doesn’t first anticipate the future and then watch it arrive. Every possibility and its consequence stands eternally before Him. Therefore, the knowledge behind the body’s wisdom isn’t given the same past tense as the act of forming it.

Put together, the berachah is saying something like this: “You formed the human being with wisdom and created within him openings and cavities—because it is eternally revealed and known before You what would happen if even one of them were improperly opened or closed.”

Asher Yatzar, then, is more than gratitude that the body happens to work today. It’s a reflection on divine intelligence. Whether Hashem formed the body through immediate action or through laws unfolding over time, its wise arrangement reflects His timeless knowledge of the whole system and all its possibilities.

That idea has special meaning on Rosh Hashanah. On the day when we stand before Hashem in judgment, Asher Yatzar reminds us that our ability to stand before Him at all, both physically and spiritually, depends on the wisdom with which He formed us.

The berachah opens with bechochmah and closes with umafli la’asos. Once we see the knowledge built into the body’s design, what looked ordinary starts to look wondrous. 

Rabbi Elie Feder PhD, a Rebbe at Yeshiva Bnei Torah and a math professor at Kingsborough Community College, is the author of Gematria Refigured (2022) and Happiness in the Face of Adversity (2024). He is also a cohost of the podcast “Physics to God” and the host of the podcast “Simply Deep.”