By Divine Design

by rabbi Aaron l raskin

Was that a...mistake? There are no mistakes in Torah. That said, week after week when reading the weekly torah portion, scholars and laymen alike encounter broken, enlarged and even missing letters without stopping to realize that the bodies of these oddball letters themselves hold some of the Torah's most cogent life lessons. A missing "Vav" can teach us how to more closely connect with G-d; an enlarged letter "Bet" can awaken our receptivity to beauty and change; and a conflict between the way a word is written and the way it is pronounced (kri-ksiv) can afford us a new layer of understanding of the parshah than if that word had been written "correctly" in the first place. Studying such anomalies more closely, and with the right teacher, we unlock the door to the very structure of Torah

436 pages, Hardcover

First published September 14, 2010