A bit of Hebrew (one word). A bit of Torah (one verse).
Rabbi David Aaron said that whoever reads the Torah isn’t really doing themselves a favor. The Torah isn’t like a piece of literature that you can begin and end. Torah has to be studied. Over and over again. Because in each word, and even each letter, there are more and more secrets waiting for you to discover them, and those secrets become the most apparent when you study the Torah in the holy language, Hebrew. And it’s best to learn with someone. Sure, you can garner the gist of things in English, but for deeper nuance and spiritual meanings, go for the Hebrew.1
Why is it also important to learn the text in Hebrew? Because the translation of every single word in the Torah is an interpretation. And even that doesn’t tell the whole story.
What makes the Torah so different is that Hebrew words are considered vessels2, containing within themselves infinite wisdom about the word’s essence. But this is hard to explain unless you see how it happens. So, I’ll try to show you, with a tiny example.
A verse from this week’s Torah portion, called Devarim (meaning words—-in English Deuteronomy), gives us an illustration. For context: Moses is in the midst of the first of three final farewell talks he gives to the Children of Israel. In a particular verse, he shares the difficulty he’s had as their leader:
How can I bear unaided the trouble of you, and the burden, and the bickering! (Devarim 1: 12). This is the the usual English translation of the Hebrew: אֵיכָ֥ה אֶשָּׂ֖א לְבַדִּ֑י טׇרְחֲכֶ֥ם וּמַֽשַּׂאֲכֶ֖ם וְרִֽיבְכֶֽם׃
But, this is not exactly how we’d understand the verse if we knew Biblical Hebrew, which is important for some depth. So, let’s just look at the first Hebrew word, eichah / אַיֶּֽכָּה [translated as How], which itself is unusual. It’s not an expected form of the word. Usually, we’d expect that word to be written as eich. But eichah is a clue for something more.
The word connotes more that just a question…it’s a plea, said with extreme sadness, almost a lament. How do we infer this?
When we want to learn more about a word, we search for where it first appears in the Torah. Because there are messages embedded right in the text if we look for them. So, where does this word first appear? Way back, in the first book, in Genesis 3:9 we learn that after Adam sins God calls out to him: Where eichah אַיֶּֽכָּה (the same letters but read as ayekhah) are you? 3
God is not playing a game of Hide and Seek…of course God knows where Adam is. Instead, God is asking “What have you done?” “Where is your heart at this time?” “Where is your true self? How could you have committed this wrong?” “How could you have done this after all I’ve done for you…?” “How could you have sunk to this level?”
So now we can understand that there’s a much deeper meaning lying veiled behind the English translation of eichah אַיֶּֽכָּה as “How”. Moses is devastated, disappointed…he gave and gave of himself to his people but was in disbelief about their actions. Moses is not just asking how, but how can they? Where are their hearts? Where is their commitment to him as their leader? How can he continue to advocate on their behalf to God?
The English translation I provided reads: How can I bear unaided the trouble of you, and the burden, and the bickering! but this misses even more nuances contained within the other Hebrew words. Generally though, and more accurately, Everett Fox translates the rest of the Hebrew verse as:
How can I carry, I alone, your load, your burden, your quarreling?
The Hebrew words provided the clues. They allude to how Moses truly feels…he is taking the rejection personally. He feels alone, abandoned. The words themselves convey this. This lack of appreciation stuns him and has brought him to a level of sheer frustration.
So, even with the best of translations, we are liable to miss the deeper meaning of eicha אַיֶּֽכָּה and the rest of the verse.
But there’s an ever deeper reference here for those who are familiar with another text. This word shows up again, in the Writings4 called Lamentations, which we read on Tisha B’Av…coming up next week, known as “Eicha”. This word begins the prophecies of Jeremiah after the destruction of the Temple, who is in disbelief and fraught with intense sorrow over the immense decimation of the Jewish people he witnesses in Jerusalem.
Is it a coincidence that this week’s Torah portion, Devarim, has the unmistaken word eicha there? At exactly the time of year that we are meant to read this portion, evoking frustration and unbelievable sadness at the consequences of our internal petty arguments? Our tradition teaches us that the Temple was destroyed, not due to our enemies…but because of baseless hatred—-the hatred we held for each other.
Those seeds were sown hundreds and hundred of years before, in the wilderness, and called out by Moses.
The message was there. The Hebrew words refer to both bickering and quarreling among ourselves. Our inability to function as one people, Am Echad, after all that we had been through, the slavery in Egypt, the miracles that we witnessed, plus all the challenges that we experienced during the 40 years in the desert—is itself devastating. All that which finally brought us to the foot of the Jordan River, ready to cross over to the Land promised to us….and still, we were not united as a people! That’s what brought Moses a level of intense suffering.
We are at a crucial time now, a time when we’ve gone through intense challenges after October 7th which only for a short time, united us. We were and still are facing a huge spiritual challenge from many who don’t have a moral center.
But predictably, some bickering between us has already started. But the time is now. We must come together and be united as one people. We must put differences aside. Truly, in the grand scheme of things, some of the arguments are petty. They bring us to our worst selves. We have to do better.
Ayekhah? אַיֶּֽכָּה Where is our Jewish soul? Our purpose? Our opportunity couldn’t be more clear.
A good online source for this is www.sefaria.org which has many tools and resources at your disposal.
There are many teachings about this. For example, the word “teyva” means vessel and also word. It’s used in the Torah to describe both Noah’s ark and Moses’ little ark, so there is a spiritual meaning to that—both Noah and Moses were responsible for carrying forth “the word”. In Hebrew, the root for word, D-V-R means “essence” or “thing”. So, it’s not that the word represents something, like the word for table representing a table, but the word IS the thing. I can use any word, or even create one, to mean table…and it would mean table. Not so in Hebrew. There are so many examples of how this is so, but here is just one: the word for humanity, ADAM (Aleph, Daled, Mem) has within it the words (and when using just one or two letters, and switching letters around) for God, blood, red, life, existence, earth, measure (moderating our traits), and to soar (as the highest of animal life). So, this word can not mean anything else, not a table, not a chair. I know this is not explanation enough, but it’s just a footnote :)
In fact, there are no other instances where this exact word shows up in the Five Books of Moses except for a later chapter in Devarim. It does appear elsewhere, which I will share above.
Judaism’s sacred books are part of the TaNaKh an acronym for the Hebrew of Torah, Nevi’im (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Writings).