It Says What It Says, Part I

It Says What It Says

A few weeks ago our Rabbi and his wife opened their home to us on Saturday morning for a study of the Torah. They wanted to do this for years, but there was Rabbi’s school and a toddler in the house and other things that needed to mature first. Now was the perfect time to start, and start we did.
Now studying Torah is what a Jew is supposed to do. And in one way or another, most Jews ‘engage’ in Torah study at some point in their lives and then they don’t. There are some fewer number of Jews who go on to study Talmud (you look it up, it’ll do ya good) and the more scholarly pursuits. THEN there are some who spend their lives studying Talmud and Torah; of those some are self-supporting and some – don’t get me started on THEM – live their lives on the charity of others and the support of the government while having many children. Feh!
Rabbi’s goal is to really sit down and study the Torah, all five books, one book, one chapter, one verse, one WORD at a time. Yup, one word at a time. So we started at Bereishit, Chapter One, Verse One, Word One. (A few words of explanation might be helpful here. There are five books that make up the Torah: Bereishit, which is also called Genesis, Shemot which is called Exodus, Vayikra, or Leviticus, Bamidbar, or Numbers, and Devarim, Deuteronomy. If the Hebrew names are new to you, you might want to write them down, as I do not refer to the English names.)
Okay. The next thing to learn is that Hebrew has no vowels. It’s all consonants. How do we know what vowel to put where? That’s another story for another post. We DO, however, do something with Hebrew that makes it easier for those who use the Latinate alphabet to learn; we transliterate. We use the Latin script to approximate the sound of the Hebrew.
Since I don’t have a Hebrew script writer, I’ll use the transliteration for the first verse to illustrate what happens when you go word by word:
Bereishit bara Elohim et hashamayim v’et ha’aretz. There are seven little words in that sentence but, oh, how much has been written about them over the centuries.
We aren’t going for the interpretation in our study sessions; we are going for the literal meaning of the Hebrew.
It’s a fascinating study because our modern society is so hell-bent-for-leather on having things all tidy and neat and politically correct that the true, literal words get lost.
Here it is, literally:
Bereishit: be=in, reishit=the head or beginning (rosh=head, beginning, leader)
bara: created (this is the divine, God-only type of creation, not one of the other two)
Elohim= one of the descriptives/names of God; that it is plural is interpretive, not literal
et hashamayim= the heavens; the use of et signifies particular heavens, THE heavens
v’et ha’aretz= THE earth, same construction
So this is how I spend my Saturday mornings.
I hope you’re not too bored, because I intend to post every week about this marvelous study we’re engaged in, so in between pontificating on things political, personal and philosophical, I’ll be sharing a little Torah with you.