Thirty-two is two raised to the fifth power, and in the Kabbalah it is the number of the paths of wisdom by which the world was made. The Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation, opens by declaring that God engraved creation in thirty-two paths, the ten sefirot, the primal numbers of emanation, together with the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, ten plus twenty-two making thirty-two. On the diagram of the Tree of Life these become the ten nodes and the twenty-two connecting paths, so that thirty-two names the complete structure of the created order in Kabbalistic thought. The number is reinforced by a further observation: the Torah begins with the letter bet and ends with lamed, which together spell lev, heart, whose value is thirty-two, so the Torah is said to run from heart to heart.
Sefer Yetzirah's count of thirty-two paths of wisdom, ten sefirot and twenty-two letters, is a sum rather than a symbol in its own right, ten plus twenty-two making thirty-two because that is what the text enumerates rather than because thirty-two was independently chosen for its properties; the later scheme of thirty-two paths mapped onto the Tree of Life, ten nodes and twenty-two connecting paths, is accordingly an elaboration of that opening sentence rather than a separate tradition arriving independently at the same figure.