Welcome to the third book of the Torah! After spending some five weeks discussing the building of the mishkan, the place from which G-dliness will fill the world, we now spend a few parshiot learning about what went on there.
This week’s sedra starts in a slightly unusual fashion. The opening verse says, ‘And He called to Moses, and Hashem spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting, saying…’. The verse does not tell us who He is, although from the context it appears to be a veiled reference to the Almighty. What is perhaps even more unusual is that the letter aleph at the end of the word Vayikra - and He called - is written in a smaller font size. When reading from the Torah itself it looks like the scribe hit the superscript button!
Rashi draws our attention to a passage later on in the Torah when Hashem appears to the non-Jewish prophet Bilaam. There, the term employed is vayekar, which essentially means that He happened upon Bilaam. As well as implying coincidence and chance, the word vayekar also has connotations of coldness and impurity. In fact, in the additional portion we read this week, Parshat Zachor, the verse refers to the arch enemy of the Jews, the Amalekite nation who attacked us after the exodus. There too the verse uses the same word in a different form, karecha, chanced upon you.
The difference between vayikra hearing a calland vayekar, seeing all events as happening by chance, is one little aleph. Aleph is a silent letter that takes the sound of the vowel that comes under it. Perhaps the opening word of the book that tells us how Hashem is to be brought into the world via the mishkan is telling us that Hashem is to be found in the ‘small thin sound’ of silence.
Bilaam and Amalek represent a world view where everything happens by chance. Theirs is a cold, lonely world where there is no point asking ‘why?’ to any ‘what’. It is a world of needless suffering and survival of the fittest. Vayikra with its mini aleph teaches us to stop and listen to this sound of silence, to appreciate Hashem’s call through the small things, to see Him and His kindness through the wonderful world that He has created, and to realise that nothing happens by chance.
