The Point of Torah: Shabbat Bereshit (’03)

Let’s start at the very beginning. It’s a very good place to start. When you read you
being with “abc.” When you sing you begin with “do ray mi.” Good. You know the
song. How about this one…? When you lein you begin with “merpach tipcha munach
etnachta.”

This Shabbat Bereshit, as you’ve seen, we have taken time out to celebrate Yad Hazakah
and honor those congregants who have read Torah at Beth El. Now, if Torah reading was
as easy as do a’deer a female deer… But no such luck. Not only do Torah readers have
to master over a dozen trope (musical notes) but they have to apply it to an unvoweled,
unpunctuated text.

I’d like to spend a minute thinking about the Torah as it appears in a Torah scroll. We
know that a humash can have punctuation and vowels. So why not a sefer Torah? Some
of our Yad Hazakkah honorees might tell us that the trope serves as punctuation and that
the Torah has a system of paragraph breaks. True. But if God wanted to give us a
guidebook on which to base our lives, shouldn’t the instructions be made as clear as
possible? What would have been the big deal to include a period here or there? Perhaps
God was concerned that it was going to be too tiresome for the sofer to add all the dots
and dashes. Or too prone to copier’s mistakes? Or maybe it was God’s way of making
the Yad Hazakah award really a big deal. Whatever the reason, as you might imagine,
the question of punctuation in a Torah scroll is not a new one. In fact, issue was the
source of a great controversy between Kararites and Rabbis and the source of much
mystical speculation. And it’s a question for us to ponder as we begin our Torah reading
cycle yet again.

The sefer Torah as we know it came into its final form in the 1st and 2nd centuries in the
Talmud academies of Eretz Yisrael. It was then that paragraph breaks were systematized.
And it was then that the occasional doted and oversized letters were legislated. But
again, no punctuation was added.

In the ancient world, scribes punctuated their texts with all kinds of signs and symbols
from a simple space to a variety of dots and dashes. In the 5th century, for example, St
Jerome in his translation of the Bible, signaled a new unit of thought by making one of
the letters jut out of the margin. The Samaritan’s who lived in Northern Israel at around
used points to indicate the beginning of a verse in their Bible.

In the Jewish world, we have only scant records of early forms of punctuation. In
masaket Sofrim, a part of the Talmud from around the 6th century that lays out laws of the
Torah scrolls we read that a sefer Torah in which verses are separated by dots may not be
used in the synagogue (3:6) uc treh kt vca oheuxp hatr seubau uexpa rpx/
This statement tells us that copies of the Torah did exist with punctuation- with
something like a period. But that the rabbis legislated against its use for public readings.
Three centuries later, in the 9th century our question was asked of a scholar in Babylonia.
His answer as recorded in a work known as the Mahzor Virti, offers a little more insight
into the issue.

Punctuation, the scholar wrote, was not given to Moses on Sinai. Instead, the sages
introduced it as an aid to study. And since the Torah forbids us to add anything to it, we
may not use a voweled scroll. We should, however, understand that the division of
verses and that the cantillation have been transmitted from Sinai to this day as an oral
tradition. (Jewish Encyc., vol. 10, “Punctuation”)

In his reply, the Babylonian scholar tells us that punctuation symbols were introduced by
sages and were appropriate for study aids only in humashim. And he informs us that the
pronunciation and pauses were based on an ancient oral tradition. Scholars tell us that
this oral tradition was more first organized in Babylonia and then more codified by Aaron
ben Asher and his academy of Masorites who lived in Tiberas in the 9th century. Once
the punctuation, vowels and trope became standardized, a guild known as the nakdanim
or punctuators developed. It was their job to accurately apply the signs to humashim.
And they did so essentially until the invention of the printing press.

All of this is to say that while the Torah was given on Sinai, how we read the Torah week
by week, how we pronounce her words, how we chant her verses and separate her
sentences is based on an oral tradition that was legislated by Ben Asher and his 9th
century Tibereas academy.

I’ll tell the truth and say that when am reading Torah I wish the nakdanim had snuck
some punctuation into the sefer Torah. But on another level, when I look at the Torah
scroll, so clean, so simple and elegant, something about it just feels right- no punctuation,
not even a period after its final verse.

Alberto Manguel wrote: “Diminutive as a mote of dust, a mere peck of the pen, a crumb
on the keyboard, the full stop- the period- is the unsung legislator of our writing systems.
Without it… the travels of the Hobbit would have never been completed.” And isn’t that
exactly the point for us?

There are no vowels because the words of Torah are the raw material. Like a stone in a
sculptures hand, we must carve out meaning through our interpretations. There are no
periods in the Torah because there is no end to Torah.

Last Sunday we completed our reading. And with hardly a breath we began it again.
Last week we read of the death of Moshe, this week the birth of humanity. Last week we
read of the failure of Moshe to enter the Promised Land. This week of the first humans
planted in the Garden of Eden. The Torah it appears is a continuum of creation and
completion, of death and of life, success and failure. Its cycle mirrors the cycle of life.
And so even in it last line there is no period. No explanation point. Just a half a line left
blank “that brings us back to doe doe doe doe- bereshit barah elohim….”

Shabbat Shalom