Stringing the Pearls: How to Read the Weekly Torah Portion

2. The Weekly Torah Portion: What Is a Parashah?

9 2. The Weekly Torah Portion: What Is a Parashah? We open the Humash and turn to the portion of the week. Then what? We are puzzled. What are we looking at? A finely crafted literary unit? An amorphous chunk of text? Bible scholars would affirm both views and would not regard them as mutually exclusive. But they would not call the text amorphous. They would say that a weekly reading of a portion of the Humash is an assemblage of pieces of texts that are often diverse in kind and frequently speak in different voices. They would add that these pieces were not randomly assembled but arranged in an order that is meaningful and has a logic to it by an unnamed super-editor or editors they call the redactor(s). I will write more about them presently. There are, in fact, some commentators, ancient and modern, who would insist that if one knows how to look and looks hard enough, one can find some formal or esthetic principle or principles that serve to bind up and integrate a parashah into a more or less coherent unity. Perhaps. But I must immediately make two things clear. First, when we speak of a weekly Torah portion we are not referring to a group of chapters. As everyone knows, the five books of the Pentateuch and the entire Hebrew Bible are divided into chapters, and verses, too. Such demarcations in the text are completely beside the point as far as this discussion goes. 10 PRELIMINARIES: WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT? The division into chapters was made by Stephen Langton, later to become the Archbishop of Canterbury , when he was a doctor at the University of Paris towards the end of the twelfth century. The division into verses was first made . . . by Rabbi Nathan, in 1448, as a help in Jewish debates with the Christians.7 For anyone trying to get a bearing on a weekly Torah portion, this division into chapters and verses does not help. It may actually hinder. The slice of Torah to be read each week presents itself to us as a discrete unit, to be sure; but it is not a unit defined by the good Dr. Langton’s markers. Many weekly portions break right in the middle of a chapter. So in reading Torah, the chapter and verse divisions serve only one purpose: as a reference tool. They help us locate a particular passage or verse or word—no more than that. Second, though Jews have for a long time now called the weekly Torah portion a parashah, that was not the original meaning of the term. In Rabbinic times a parashah (sometimes called a parashiyah) referred to a shorter unit of text, what we would today call a paragraph. It is paragraphs that constitute the textual units of the Humash, and what breaks them up and marks the dividing point between them is empty space. Look at a Torah scroll and you’ll see this layout (see photo on the next page). Look very closely and you’ll see that not all paragraphs, that is, parshiyot, are uniform in appearance. Some are what we call “open” and some are “closed.” When a parashah ends in the middle of a line, the scribe leaves a blank space equal to the width of nine letters, and if there is still some room left on that line, the scribe begins writing the next section on that line. The paragraph just completed is called a “sealed” or “closed” parashah (Heb. parashah setumah). When, however, a paragraph ends in the middle of a line and the blank space extends all the way to the end of the line, the scribe starts the next section at the beginning of the next line. In that case the paragraph just completed is called an “open” parashah (Heb. parashah petuchah). Exactly which parshiyot are to be written “open” and which “closed” was stipulated by scribal tradition a very long time ago. According to Rabbi Menachem Leibtag, “As a rule of thumb, [an open parashah] usually indicates a major change of topic, while a [closed parashah] indicates a more subtle one, but . . . there are many exceptions.8 11 THE WEEKLY TORAH PORTION: WHAT IS A PARASHAH? Now none of these details has any direct bearing on what we are focusing on in this book. What we today call a weekly parashah is really...