Dear Friends,
There is an unusual verse in this week’s Torah portion. The verse is exceedingly long – it has 30 words, and ten of the words, in five pairs of two, are the same words. The phrase, b’nai Yisrael - the Children of Israel - appears five times in the same verse!
Numbers 8:19 reads: “And I have given the Levites – they are given to Aaron and to his sons from among the Children of Israel to do the service of the Children of Israel in the tent of meeting, and to make atonement for the Children of Israel, that there be no plague among the Children of Israel, through the Children of Israel coming nigh into the sanctuary.”
What do we make of this? Is it merely clumsy syntax? After all, we are taught while studying English not to repeat the same word in a sentence, or even in a paragraph or maybe in an essay. In Hebrew however, it is not improper to repeat words; rather it is demonstrative of a deft writer to reuse the same word or words in slightly differing formats, as our biblical verse reveals. This is not poor writing; heaven forbid such be found in the Torah!
Or, can we discover interpretive meanings for our exotic verse? The commentary, Or haChayim of Rabbi Chayim ben Attar, an 18th century Moroccan-born sage, wrote that the five iterations correspond to the Five Books of Moses. Often when we find “fives” in sacred text, we are prone to apply them to the Torah’s five sections, just as “fours” correspond to the matriarchs, “threes” to the patriarchs (remember Pesach’s counting song!). Expanding upon Rabbi Attar’s teaching, the five repetitions link the Children of Israel with the books of the Torah.
Torah only exists, and its five books, when we are the Children of Israel, and the corollary: we are only the Children of Israel when we engage in study of Torah. The two are inseparable; we cannot be Jews without Torah. Ahad HaAm, the great Zionist poet, once stated, “As much as Israel has kept the Torah, even more has the Torah kept Israel.” We are one and the same: The Children of Israel!
This Shabbat, how nice to have this reminder of what is most central in Jewish life!
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Douglas Kohn
There is an unusual verse in this week’s Torah portion. The verse is exceedingly long – it has 30 words, and ten of the words, in five pairs of two, are the same words. The phrase, b’nai Yisrael - the Children of Israel - appears five times in the same verse!
Numbers 8:19 reads: “And I have given the Levites – they are given to Aaron and to his sons from among the Children of Israel to do the service of the Children of Israel in the tent of meeting, and to make atonement for the Children of Israel, that there be no plague among the Children of Israel, through the Children of Israel coming nigh into the sanctuary.”
What do we make of this? Is it merely clumsy syntax? After all, we are taught while studying English not to repeat the same word in a sentence, or even in a paragraph or maybe in an essay. In Hebrew however, it is not improper to repeat words; rather it is demonstrative of a deft writer to reuse the same word or words in slightly differing formats, as our biblical verse reveals. This is not poor writing; heaven forbid such be found in the Torah!
Or, can we discover interpretive meanings for our exotic verse? The commentary, Or haChayim of Rabbi Chayim ben Attar, an 18th century Moroccan-born sage, wrote that the five iterations correspond to the Five Books of Moses. Often when we find “fives” in sacred text, we are prone to apply them to the Torah’s five sections, just as “fours” correspond to the matriarchs, “threes” to the patriarchs (remember Pesach’s counting song!). Expanding upon Rabbi Attar’s teaching, the five repetitions link the Children of Israel with the books of the Torah.
Torah only exists, and its five books, when we are the Children of Israel, and the corollary: we are only the Children of Israel when we engage in study of Torah. The two are inseparable; we cannot be Jews without Torah. Ahad HaAm, the great Zionist poet, once stated, “As much as Israel has kept the Torah, even more has the Torah kept Israel.” We are one and the same: The Children of Israel!
This Shabbat, how nice to have this reminder of what is most central in Jewish life!
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Douglas Kohn
