Chokhmah [Wisdom] is perception without cognition; it is not strictly a faculty of mind but the link between the mind and what lies beyond the mind.
Thus, chokhmah is koakh mah—the potentiality of “what?”
“What?” (mah) is more than an expression of query and quest; it is an expression of nothingness, of the point at which being ends and nullity begins. …
Chokhmah, then, is the faculty of “what?”—the faculty that grasps nothingness and also is nothingness.
Chokhmah is the first of the faculties of the soul, the point at which perception begins from a prior state of nonconception, the transition from nothingness to something.
—Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz