The person chanting Torah from the scroll is the only person in the congregation with no access to the vowels or the cantillation marks. And this week’s parashah presents a unique challenge to the reader.
To a skilled leyner (Torah reader), many of the vowels are intuitive. Verbs are constructed a certain way; nouns might be repeated enough to be remembered. A mixture of grammatical know-how and experience with the sounds of Torah can lead to a confident and competent Torah reader.
Parashat Bemidbar, on the other hand, is filled with names that appear only once. Grammatical conventions are of limited use. Unless the reader has carefully memorised how to say Shelumiel ben Tzurishadai (2:12) or Achiezer ben Amishadai (2:25), or Pagiel ben Ochran (2:27), they are unlikely to read it correctly by intuition alone.
It’s a good week to be kind to our Torah readers.
It is also a good week to wonder why these names need appear at all. These are largely characters whose stories are not remembered in our sacred text and yet we are asked to carefully pronounce their names every year.
Perhaps the answer lies in the fact of the census itself. Here we are, in the beginning of the Book of Numbers, counting off the numbers of the Israelites in the wilderness. We might find ourselves inclined to think of the Israelite community as a unit. We imagine the revelation they experienced together, the rebellions they partook in, the journey from slavery to freedom as a people.
However, these names appear to remind us that the community was made up of individuals. Each person in the wilderness had their own story, their own experiences, their own heart and soul and hope.
So too for the Jewish people in every generation. We are a part of something that is much greater than ourselves, something that spans the world and reaches out across millennia. And we are also a community made up of individuals.
This balance between the importance of the whole and the importance of the individual calls to mind the question of who serves whom. Does the community serve the individual, or does the individual serve the community?
The Torah’s answer here, I believe, is that it must be both. We must be both givers and takers in order to participate in Jewish life. We must be the “I” and the “we” in equal measure, in order to fully address God as the eternal “You”.
Image: Israelites gathering manna in the wilderness, Nicolas Poussin, c 1637 (Wikimedia Commons)
