Rabbi Ari Lucas
Taste of Torah - Sh’mini 5775
Stuck in the Middle with “U”
“Crowns to the left of me, gutturals to the right, here I am stuck in the middle with “u.” Okay, it’s a bad adaptation of the lyric from the Stealers Wheel song, but it’s a perfect description of the big letter vav we encounter in Parshat Sh’mini this week. The vav, nestled in between the final nun with its crowns and the guttural het, is the exact middle letter of the Torah. Tradition dictates that it is written larger than the other letters around it (compare it to the three other vavs in the frame above).
The large vav appears to have less to do with its meaning in the context of the verse than it does with with its position as the midpoint in the entire Torah scroll. The word gahon, where our vav is found, means “belly.” “You shall not eat, among the things that swarm upon the earth, anything that crawls on its belly…” (Leviticus 11:42) Sorry folks, no snake stew for dinner tonight. That the middle letter of the torah is found in the word “belly” or “midsection” is a neat coincidence, but that’s not the central point of the big vav.
So why does the scribal tradition call our attention to this middle letter in the belly of the Torah?
The Hebrew word sofer - scribe - derives from the word for counting. To be a scribe is to be a counter of the letters. There are 304,805 letters in the Torah.This vav is letter number 152,403. Somewhere in the middle of that large vav is the exact midpoint of our holy scroll. Like a construction worker who needs to know the exact middle so that he can make an even cut, the sofer marks the midpoint of the scribal project with special distinction.
Vav is a letter suited for this middle space. Vav is a letter of in-betweenness. Vav is sometimes a vowel and sometimes a consonant. It’s often used as a conjunction between words and phrases. There is even a scribal “trick” to format the columns of the Torah so that each column (except the first) begins with a vav. This helps standardize the formatting across Torah scrolls and it uses the vav as the connector between sections.
Perhaps the goal of this big letter is to highlight the sacredness of the middle.When reading any book, we’re motivated at the beginning and we get equally invested towards the end, but we tend to lag in the middle section. But those middle sections are where much of the nuance and plot development take place. The same is true of the Torah. We read with intrigue the stories of the first families of B’reishit. We pour over poetry and drama of Deuteronomy. But Leviticus often gets neglected - even though that’s where a lot of the best stuff is found.
The big vav calls us to consider the middle. Like a middle child crying out for attention, the big vav pokes its head above the others and asks that we pay it mind. It reminds us that beginnings are formative and ends are where it all comes together, but the middle is where we spend most of our time - somewhere in between here and there. That’s where most of life happens and where, if we pay extra close attention, we’ll find meaning and beauty, like a people finding holiness in the wilderness between slavery and the holy land; like the omer days we count between Passover and Shavuot. The vav reminds us to pay attention to the middle. That’s where the good stuff is found.
This is part of a series Rabbi Lucas is writing on the big and small letters in the text of the Torah.