Mamash — ממש — is one of those rare Hebrew words that seems to mean itself. In rabbinic literature, it means substance, actuality, presence — not a concept, not a feeling, but a thing with weight. One of its most famous appearances is in the rabbis’ description of the ninth plague in Egypt: a darkness so dense that people couldn’t move from where they were sitting. The sages didn’t call it “very dark” or “extremely dark.” They said it had mamash. Substance. Something you could, in theory, reach out and touch, if you could move your arm, which you couldn’t, because the dark had mamash.
Many trace the word to mishush — to touch, to feel your way through a room with the lights off. Whatever its exact lineage, the usage is consistent: mamash was originally less an adjective than a property. A thing either had it or it didn’t. Idolatry, the sages said, has no mamash — meaning: hollow, performative, nothing behind the curtain. People kept doing it anyway, which tells you something about people, but that’s a different essay.
Fast forward a few centuries, and the word does something unexpected. Rabbi Schneur Zalman, writing the Tanya in the 1790s, describes the soul — the G-dly soul, the part of a person that is, per the text, literally a piece of the divine — as being “mamash.” Tangible. Touchable. Made of stuff.
This is, depending on how you were raised, either a throwaway intensifier or the most audacious sentence in the book. The most ethereal thing a person contains is described with the most tangible word in the vocabulary. Not “kind of” divine. Not “in a sense” a piece of G-d. Mamash — actually.
By the time the word reaches Yiddish, and then the kitchens and sidewalks of Jewish neighbourhoods, it’s lost the theology and kept the punch. Mamash now just means really, truly, no joke. Your soup was mamash delicious. The traffic was mamash insane. Your cousin’s wedding was, mamash, three hours late, and somehow everyone agreed it was the best in months.
We named the company after it because we make posters, and a poster is, by definition, a piece of Torah and Jewish culture you can touch.
That’s the whole pitch, more or less. Not a moodboard. Not a vibe. A verse, a niggun, a line from a Chassidic discourse — something that lived in books, in melodies, in the air of a shul on a Shabbos — pinned to a wall in your hallway where you’ll walk past it eleven times before you notice you’ve memorised it. Mamash, from intangible to inkjet. (Or, more accurately, 12-colour fine art printing.)
I have synesthesia, which means I see things differently than most people — either a gift or a diagnosis, depending on the doctor. Letters and numbers come with colour. Colours have taste and smell. A poster doesn’t start as a layout. It starts as whatever a particular phrase from the Tanya looks like at 11 pm, which is a strange way to run a print shop and, mamash, the only way we know how.
So: welcome to Root Systems, where we’ll dig into the Hebrew and Yiddish words, the history, and the occasional rabbit hole that ends up on your wall — or doesn’t, and just lives here, in the part of the internet where we get to think out loud.