If you turned this one-word Torah project into a parashah, you’d get parashat vayeitzei. The portion carries forward the narrative story of the Jewish ancestral families, yes, but it’s also obsessed with individual words and what they mean.

Specifically, it’s obsessed with names. Twelve of Ya’aqov’s thirteen named children are born in this parashah, and each time one of the sons is named, there’s a little explanatory gloss giving a reason that he was named what he was named. (The exception, of course, is Dinah, the only daughter, and the only child named without an explanation. There may be room here to expand on traditional trans readings of Dinah [a] to understand her as self-named, reserving the explanation of her choice to her own private thoughts. Goodness knows she deserves to have control over whatever she can in her own life, given everything she goes thru.)

[a] In Bərakhot 60a of the Babylonian Talmud, Rav explains that Dinah was originally conceived as a son, but then נֶהֶפְכָה לְבַת | nehefkhah ləvat | “was transformed into a daughter” due to Divine intercession.

These naming glosses are sometimes described as etymologies and then critiqued for their sometimes lack of scholarly accuracy, but etymology isn’t really the goal here as much as explanation. It’s like saying, “Oh, I call him Frankie because he’s honest to a fault” — you’re not explaining the philological origin of the name, you’re explaining what the name means to you and why you chose it in this context. And so it is with the names of Ya’aqov’s sons.

But curiously, one of these explanations is emended. We’ve talked about these emendations before — moments where the scribes who fixed the text in its final form looked at the text they had received and sought to fix a typo or the like. There’s one here when Lei’ah explains the name of Zilpah’s first son, Gad. In the emended version, she explains Gad’s name by saying בָּא גָד | ba gad | “Luck has come!” (Bəreishit 30:11). But the uncorrected text drops the silent alef and runs the two words together into one: בגד, which you could take as either a strict contraction bagad or perhaps as a more grammatically fragmentary bəgad | “With luck!” [b].

[b] There is some evidence for the existence of a g-d called Gad in the Ancient Semitic pantheon who had power over chance, fortune, and luck, which creates a slight ambiguity here as to whether the gad in the text is just the generic Hebrew word for “luck” or a proper name of a g-d of Luck, not wholly unlike how “hope” in English can be a generic noun for a feeling or a specific person’s name. Ryan Thomas argues (in “The [G-d] Gad”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 139 (2021): 307–16) that G-d isn’t really an independent deity at all but rather just a common epithet for the local g-d in charge — much as many contemporary Jews might refer to our G-d as “HaMaq-m” or “Sh-khinah” or the like.

This is all linguistically fairly uncomplicated. Two verses later, when Lei’ah names Asheir, she uses the same fragmentary בְּאׇשְׁרִי | bə’oshri | “With my happiness!” construction that the unemended consonants of verse 11 imply, so we might prefer “With luck!” to “Luck has come!” as a reading, but the emended version doesn’t pose any particular problems, and there’s lots of variety in the grammatical structure of the various naming explanations, so one structural parallel is hardly decisive.

Instead of teasing out a problem, I’m interested very specifically in the difference between these two versions in the Hebrew text. In this whole word-obsessed parashah, this is the only instance of this sort of emendation; it’s like a tiny sign saying “Hey, something happened here.”.

The difference is slight. Alef, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, has a numerical value of 1 — the smallest possible value in a system that deals only with integers — and is all but silent in pronunciation [c]. It is a sliver of a difference, the least amount of difference you can get, almost, before two things are just the same.

[c] Technically, it represents a glottal stop, the little hiccup that separates the two vowels in “Latin” when US English speakers say it in normal speech. This is already not a very pronounced sound, but people with US English as a first and primary language tend to drop a lot of these stops when they pronounce liturgical Hebrew; we like to run our vowels together. So alef is very frequently not just subtle but nonexistent, audibly, however up in arms prescriptivists might get over it.

Without the alef, בגד sums to nine in gematria; with it, בא גד sums to ten. Nine is the value of אָח | aḥ | “brother”. Ten is the value of בָּדָד | badad | “separation”. What can we learn from this?

First: Gad shares his brothers’ fate, and also doesn’t. According to the Biblical text, his eponymous tribe is one of the ten conquered by Assyria in 722 BC, whereupon those ten tribes are cut off from the rest of the Jewish people and separated from the rest of our history. So he is a brother to those other lost brothers, isolated from the chain of Jewish continuity by the ravages of empire. Perhaps Lei’ah’s gematrial “Brother!” was a plea that this fate be reversed, that the tribe of Gad persist down thru the ages as a brother to the tribes that escaped Assyrian oblivion, and perhaps the Masoretes’ “Separation!” reflects the sad reality of history as it ultimately played out.

But second: As I said, the difference here is very small. As small as it can be — no word can have a gematria between nine and ten; there is no such integer. And so too perhaps this teaches us that the difference between kinship and atomization is similarly small. Not just as a matter of perspective — Gad being both akin to some of his brothers and separated from others — but as a matter of instruction. Perhaps this, vayeitzei’s sole emendation, comes to teach us that there is not so great a distance between joining together with one another in bonds of trust and community and falling apart from one another in helpless individualized isolation.

And what’s more: This separation is distinguished from kinship not by subtraction, but by addition. It is not that we start out isolated and then add something to bring us together; we start out together and then something comes to drive us apart. And it is a very small something! A miniscule, inaudible something! Something as subtle as a slight hitch in the breath between one vowel and another.

From this we can learn: The roots of separation lie not in grand gestures of opposition, but in the thousand little moments of daily life, moments so small we may not even perceive them. A slight tensing of the shoulders, a subtle raising of the guard. A hitch in your breath when you start to call a man your brother.