[Avodah] THE STILL SMALL VOICE

cantorwolberg at cox.net cantorwolberg at cox.net
Sat Mar 9 18:57:29 PST 2013


Next week's portion begins with "Vayikra el Moshe" -- "And He called to Moses..."
This is the only time the word Vayikra is neither followed by Hashem, nor has its antecedent.
It is true that the first three words are followed by "vay'da-ber Hashem..." but that's for another
lesson. It still doesn't explain why "Vayikra" is alone, so to speak.

The word "vayikra" appears 90 times throughout the Torah and 14 of those times it refers to
God and of the 14 times, this is the only time it appears by itself. In addition, this is the only
time the last letter of "vayikra" [aleph] is in miniature. Several reasons have been put forward,
but I wish to propose a new reason. The letter "aleph" can refer to God. In fact, the aleph has 
a yud on top, a vov in the middle, and a yud underneath the vov. The gematria of those letters 
is 26, corresponding to the gematria of the 4 letter word, Hashem (the tetragrammaton). 

In the entire Book of Esther, the name of God never appears even once. This is not by accident. The
absence is a deafening silence. It shows God at work, even when not apparent. The miniature
aleph in this case also shows God's contraction (tzimtzum). Rashi points out that the call came 
exclusively to Moshe. God's voice is powerful enough to shatter trees and be heard throughout the
whole world, but it was the Divine will that it be heard only by Moshe. 

Now here comes the fun part: The gematria of "vayikra" is 317. The following phrase has an exact 
gematria of 317: "Ani Hashem Elokechem. Ani Hashem y'chida."  "I am the Lord Your God. I am the Lord alone." 

Who Says There Are No Coincidences?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aishdas.org/pipermail/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20130309/998eb18c/attachment-0001.htm>


More information about the Avodah mailing list