[I’m putting on a reading of the first act of my new opera this May! It’s got a rad cast, and I’m really proud of the music I’m writing for it. And there’s a livestream!]
[I am grateful to ada morse and other members of the Shel Maala community for helping me think thru some of these ideas and also helping me track down several sources for this dəvar.]

We’ve gotten off track. The past few weeks, I may have cited specific words, but they served more as vague allusive hooks for a theme I wanted to cover than as central focal points of my analysis. Let's get back to the weeds.

If you were to leyn the first verse of this week’s parashah, you’d notice that the first word, וַיִּקְרָא | vayiqra | “and [G-d] called”, is written a little strangely. Instead of the expected ויקרא with the consonants all the same size, the final alef is shrunk down tiny — so every time I write vayiqra, please imagine that it has the final “a” hoiked up high, a la vayiqrª.)

What can we learn from this?

Since I was first introduced to this typographic convention, I’ve always imagined the little alef as G-d’s actual call to Mosheh — G-d has to shrink the Divine Voice down and down to fit between the kəruvim on the kapóret, under the bottom of the curtain shielding the inner sanctum, around the lampstand and the table with the shewbread, out the opening of the meeting tent; a big heavy cloud descends, and all that can force its way out is a squeaky little “weh”, the sound that the :V emoticon somehow makes in my head.

This, to put it mildly, is not a traditional interpretation. Many traditional commentators (like the 14th-century note of Ba’al haTurim) note that without the alef, vayiqra would be read וַיִּקָּר | vayiqar | “and [G-d] chanced upon”, which is the very verb used when haSheim inspires Bil’am to bless the Israelites in BəMidbar 23:4. These commentators then suggest that Mosheh wanted to write vayiqar out of humility but G-d made him write vayiqra to emphasize how great Mosheh is. I don’t find that midrash particularly interesting — it combines two of my least favorite traditional commentatorly activities: lionizing Mosheh and demonizing non-Jews — but others have built some interesting things on top of it that I’d like to bring in and explore today.

To begin with, Ba’al haTurim’s comment goes on to note that this verse (Vayiqra 1:1) contains five alefs, one for each book of the Torah. We can imagine Mosheh, then, haggling with G-d not over his own honor, but over the necessity of including all five books of the pentateuch. Which book might have been on the chopping block? There’s no before or after in Torah, so just because the first alef is small, doesn’t mean it has to be Bəreishit. Instead, I think we should accept the vayiqra this tiny alef is in as a label: Mosheh wasn’t sure we needed the book of Vayiqra at all.

It’s not hard to see why. (Indeed, it’s not an uncommon sentiment today!) Vayiqra mostly contains instructions for priests we no longer have to do rituals we no longer do in a temple structure that no longer exists. The language is tediously technical, and there’s very little narrative to liven things up. This is the central book of our most sacred text?

In his commentary on Leviticus, Rabbi Jacob Milgrom cites several priestly how-to guides from parallel cultures in the Ancient Near East, and notes that many of them contain injunctions to keep their contents secret, to be shared only with other members of the priesthood. He argues that Vayiqra’s repeated commands that Mosheh tell the instructions he’s receiving to all the Israelites are there in pointed contrast to these restricted manuals. The priests may be the only ones, in this Biblical doctrine, who are qualified to officiate at the altar, but there’s nothing fundamentally mysterious about what they’re doing; we even know exactly what the high priest is supposed to do in the most restricted part of the most sacred structure on the most holy day of the year. There’s no attempt to hide this knowledge, to reserve it for some extra-holy inner circle; it’s all written down right here. We’re going to read it, slowly and painstakingly over the next several weeks.

It’s easy for me to imagine why G-d would insist on all this being publicly known. The Wilderness Meeting Tent, after all, is what allows haSheim to be present on earth in the middle of the Israelite camp instead of sequestered off in Heaven. The cult’s elaborate rites are an intricate choreography meant to maintain that contact between realms — the thread linking us to G-d is constantly being frayed by errors, sins, and grievous crimes, and it is only by the priests’ constant labors of repair that this narrow tie can remain intact. If knowledge of the priestly doings were secreted away out of public ken, it’s easy to imagine the whole tabernacle apparatus turning into a priests-only affair, linking G-d not with the whole community but only with the Kohanim. And, too, it’s easy to imagine those priests starting to take on, blasphemously, a semi-divine status: They would have secret knowledge of G-d; they would be able to cross a gulf that separates all other Israelites from G-d; they would be, a little bit, like little G-ds themselves, putting into practice techniques and rituals that mere mortals may not even know about.

This is not the Judaism that haSheim desired. G-d wanted us all to know the workings of the cult, even if we aren’t all qualified to run it — just as we might want everyone in our society to know the workings of the government (both its abstract principles and, via FOIA and related legislation, its specific records and actions) even if we aren’t all qualified to enact new legislation. Judaism is a public affair, for the whole community; the central mechanisms for interacting with G-d aren’t the secret knowledge of a select few.

Maybe Mosheh resented this a little. Maybe he wasn’t too keen on everybody knowing everything. He wouldn’t be the first leader to want to keep some knowledge off limits to the masses. He wrote it, but he wrote it grudgingly, the tiny alef signaling his reluctance in dragging the quill.

That’s one reading. But we can, perhaps, be a little more generous towards our grumpy old prophet.

There is an old midrash that when he finished writing the Torah, Mosheh had a little bit of ink left over (Midrash Tanḥumah, Ki Tisa 37:3 (c 500–800AD)). Rabbi Simḥah Bunim of Peshiskha (c 1765–1827) connects this extra ink with the tiny alef of vayiqra. This suggests that Mosheh kept some tiny amount of revelation for himself. I want to suggest that this is deeply understandable, perhaps even inevitable.

I have written publicly in various outlets various things about various aspects of my trans existence. Many of these things have been deeply personal, and they have been personal in a way that resonates with others, as evidenced by the many kind messages people have sent me over the years. I feel a responsibility to do this kind of writing sometimes, both as a defiance of those who would lie about transness and as a source of information to those less far along in their transitions. I know how hard it can be to find reliable information about doing gender the way I have, and I know how alienating that dearth of knowledge can be, and I hope that writing about my experiences can, at least a little, make the whole gender thing feel less lonely and bewildering to those less far along than I am.

And yet. At the same time, I’m a deeply private person, and there are certain things, I’ve decided, that I’m never going to write about. They are mine, and mine alone. It would probably be helpful for some people if I shared my experiences, but it would be annihilating for me. I must keep certain things to myself, I must have some little collection of oddments that are resolutely no one else’s, some little secret whose knowing delineates me from not-me. To share everything, with absolute transparency, would be to lose the boundaries between myself and the world, would be to unbecome. Perhaps it would be helpful, but I could not bear it.

Earlier in this series, I wrote about the alef of revelation at Sinai, about how obliterating it can be to receive the word of G-d. Maybe this tiny alef here comes to teach us that it can be obliterating to give revelation as well; the baring of secrets with nothing held in reserve can be just as unendurable. Mosheh conceded to G-d and let all the priestly secrets be known, but he kept a little ink just for himself. Not enough, even, for a single letter, but enough, at least, to keep him whole.

[This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read the full series here.]