In ancient times the holy Torah was a manuscript that Jews would write upon a parchment scroll.
Once printing was invented they divided all its verses and its chapters in an annotated book,
but always their interpretation of the words made their imagination play a greater role
than the printed or handwritten text on which they hung their own ideas like an imaginary hook,
and fill up to the brim,
like vavei amudim,
ideas that link like hooks
hiddushim in their books,
to “ands” in columns of
the Torah where a vav
starts each page with an “and.”
A maskil will understand,
thanks to his erudition
the process of addition.
Like vavei amudim
it generates hiddushim,
thereby enabling Torah
to glow, and grow its aura
just like the Torah’s vavim,
lead-letters of its qelaphim,
no less important than
its leading words which fan
the texts and make them cool
for those who use this tool.
The practice of starting every Torah column with a vav
was frowned on by great Rabbi Meir, known as Maharam,
“and” on top of Torah columns showing as little love
as what all great rabbis showed to halakhic decisions that are dumb.
There’s more: another function that each vav — not just a hook
that links all Torah columns in the parchment scroll, by signifying addition —
implies that, like the columns of the tabernacle, all the verses of the book
are templates of reversal of the tense into a non-linear edition.
The second verse of this poem was inspired by David Z. Moster’s article in thetorah.com, “Scribing the Tabernacle: A Visual Midrash Embedded in the Torah Scroll” :
Moster writes about the custom of beginning each amud, column, of a Torah scroll with a vav, the sixth letter of the alphabet, which means “hook,” and points out that the practice follows a paradigm that was applied to the building of the tabernacle. The columns of the Torah scroll are called עמודים (ammudim), the same term as the columns of the Tabernacle, and the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, a ‘ו’ (vav), denotes each hook that was attached to the columns of the Tabernacle to become one of the vavei hamishkan, the hooks of the tabernacle, adding that the scribal practice of the vavei ha‛ammudim is not mentioned by the Talmud or Maimonides and was attacked by Rabbi Meir ben Yekutiel HaKohen (d. 1298) and his famous teacher, Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg (d. 1293).
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.
