Rabbi Breit's Blog

There are some beautiful details that only the Torah reader sees. As you listen to the Torah read out loud in services, you might read along in a chumash (a typed and printed copy of the text). But the person looking at the scroll itself sees something vibrant, varied, and beautiful. Here the words are squished together, there they are stretched out, and everywhere each letter slightly different by virtue of the human hand the wrote them.

The spacing of the words, the crowns on the letters, they all draw the reader to attention — to pause even for just a second.  This week’s Torah portion, Va’Etchanan, contains the shma, and in it the ע and the ד are both large and bold. They jump off the parchment as soon as you roll the scroll to that panel. The rabbis have many explanations for why the holy document is written like this: so you don’t read it terribly wrong, reading אחר for אחד — a mistake of polytheism, or to frame our testimony of the shma with עד, the word that means testimony itself.

I see it as a bit of a treasure hunt. A pop of surprise, a feeling like you are interacting with the text that you have found something in it.

When I was a kid my mom used to take me to see Al Hirschfeld drawings. And we had a book of them in the living room. Hirschfeld hid his daughter’s name, Nina, in each and every drawing — etched into the folds of a gown or camouflaged among the shading hatches, sometimes so small or so well obscured that it would take me ages to find it. In every drawing we’d immediately set off to “find the Nina’s”, poring over ink lines to find his tiny mark of love. And when I’d find it I’d get that feeling, like a little wink shared between me and Al; I found the love he’d embedded in his art.

In addition to detail embedded in the art of the shma, this week’s parsha also gives us a powerful promise. Moses explains that God “will scatter you among the peoples, and only a scant few of you shall be left among the nations to which God will drive you. There you will serve man-made gods of wood and stone, that cannot see or hear or eat or smell. But if you search there for Adonai your God, you will find God, if only you seek God with all your heart and soul when you are in distress because all these things have befallen you.”

In the times of our gravest persecution, and we will be persecuted, God is still there, waiting to be searched for, waiting to be found. Sometimes we look for the big evidence -- for miracles or victories or portents and signs. This Shabbat, if God has felt far, may we search with all our heart and soul and be open even to the tiniest of glimpses. Sometimes if you open your eyes and search you'll find a handwritten message, a tiny detail, something that feels like a little wink or a reminder that this too was written with love.