emor and online class announcement!
sholem aleixem!
i've been out of touch for a bit....but i've been cooking up something very special.
but before we get to that, a word from this week's parsha.
in verse 6 we read about the kohanim:
קְדֹשִׁים יִהְיוּ לֵאלֹהֵיהֶם
they will be holy-ones to their gd
the word "they will be" jumped out at me because of its gematria:
יהיו = 10 + 5 + 10 + 6 = 31
this gematria is mostly interesting to me because it is one off from a very important number in judaism: 32.
the whole torah has, in a sense, the value of 32. the first letter of the torah is ב = 2 and the last letter is ל = 30. so the whole scroll is 30+2 = 32.
one way of understanding this: holiness is something we are constantly becoming. this is not "they will be holy at a specific time" but "they will always be reaching for holiness for their gd" or "they will always be becoming holy in the direction of their gd".
or perhaps this is an expression of rashi's comment on the verse: "they shall be holy", rashi says, means "they will be made to be holy even against their will." the missing 1 in the gematria here speaks, perhaps, to the paradox of forcing someone to be holy. you might be able to get close, but you can't get all the way.
now of course the number 18 is the classic jewish number, because it is the gematria of חי, or life. the number 7, of course, is embedded in many aspects of our tradition like the omer count.
32 is less well-known outside certain circles...
and so i am happy to be announcing
did you know that the letters of the alef-bet aren’t just scratches on parchment?
They have their own personalities. They speak with G-d, rule over nature and emotion, and reveal hidden Torah.
Alefbet Soup is a three week text study class in the Svara method. This class will explore everything from early Kabbalistic creation stories all the way to modern queer gematria.
good shabbos,
ada