Parashah Shemini, 5755, David Mostardi
Parashah Shemini
Leviticus 24.1-24.23
Delivered on March 25, 1995 / 23 Adar II 5755
David Mostardi
[When that anonymous person said 'the longest journey begins with but a single step,' he was only telling the half of it.] The human experience is full of beginnings and endings, and most cultures have developed rituals for these events. Jewish tradition is no exception.
'All beginnings are hard.' This is the theme running throughout Chaim Potok's book In the Beginning. There is also the famous proverb 'the longest journey beings with but a single step.' Endings are also hard: anyone who has lived through a divorce, or the death of a loved one can attest to that. Beginnings and endings are so fundamental to the human experience that every culture has developed rituals for them. As Jews we celebrate a bris for the beginning of a life, a bar/bat mitzvah for the beginning of adulthood, a wedding for the beginning of a marriage. There are also rituals for endings, usually sadder ones, but just as important to the psyche.
With all these rituals for beginnings and endings, it occurred to me to wonder what rituals there were for middles. The answer, as I found out, is none at all. I found this puzzling, since middles are arguably just as tough as beginnings and endings.
The Encyclopedia Judaica tells us that there are 17 places in the Torah where a letter is written extra-large or extra-small: the scribal terminology is majuscule and miniscule. There are six miniscules and eleven majuscules. For example, the first letter in the Torah, the beth in the word bereshit, is a majuscule (this is probably the origin of the illuminated capital of medieval manuscripts). The most famous majuscules are certainly the ones from the Shema in Deut 6:4. In this case, the letters are large to avoid confusion: a large ayin in the word shema to avoid confusion with aleph: 'perhaps O Israel.' The large daleth to avoid confusion with resh: 'the Lord is another'.
And now for the hands-on portion of today's drash: I'd like to show you a word from today's parsha, which is conveniently located in the portion of the triennial cycle we read today. This particular word is on page 453 of your chumash. Lev 9:42 begins: kol holech al-gachon 'all things which crawl on their belly.' The letter vav in the word gachon is one of the eleven majuscules in the Torah.
When I said earlier that we are at the middle of the Torah, I really meant it. This vav is written large to indicate that it is the center letter in all the Torah. The central letter! Can you imagine how long it took some rabbi to count it all out! (Today, of course, the average 12-year-old would not be impressed with this feat: no problem! just read the Torah into my computer, run a word count, then divide by two and search for the middle letter. You could even find out such cool things as: the middle word in the Torah, the longest word, the number of times the word shabbat is mentioned. [As a matter of fact, all these things were counted by the rabbis.])
There are [twenty-two] letters in the Hebrew alphabet, and even given the fact that vav is perhaps the most numerous letter in the Torah - again, this would be easy to figure out on the computer - the odds of any given letter being a vav are still only about one in ten. To me, though, the vav is the perfect letter to be in the middle of the Torah. Vav is the narrowest and most vertical of all the letters. Visually it reminds me of the blade of a knife, pointing down into the earth. I have this wonderful image of the vav perfectly balanced, with all the thousands of letters on the Genesis side balancing all the letters on the Deuteronomy side: the whole Torah sublimely balanced on point of this single vav. Moreover, the sizes of all the letters balance as well - if the left side were all the letter shin, the right side the letter yod, that wouldn't do - even the total number of drops of ink balance in perfectly equilibrium.
In the same way, we balance on the same precarious knife-point when we encounter a middle. When we're hiking up that mountain, or …, it's easy to despair, to forget why we started the job in the first place. What can help us in that troublesome time - what inspiration can we look upon? I suggest looking back to our New Year's resolutions. Not January the 1st, but Tishri the 1st: on Rosh Hashana, when we said "I will make myself anew on this day. I will make this year different from the last." Why limit it to the year? Do something new this day, something different from yesterday. How better to sanctify God's marvellous creation of the human being, than to use this gift of life to write a new book, or climb a new mountain, [marriage, child]. This last Rosh Hashana, Rabbi Deborah Orenstein quoted Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, who suffered from clinical depression, yet strived to find joy every day.