Last week we were promised a poem, and this week, we get it: Ha’azínu is the climax of Mosheh’s farewell orations, a long poem mostly given over to dire threats of retribution should Yisra’eil fail to keep their part of the covenant with G-d.

Very early on, however, something strange happens, typographically. In Dəvarim 32:6, we read: הַ לְיְיָ֙ תִּגְמְלוּ־זֹ֔את עַ֥ם נָבָ֖ל וְלֹ֣א חָכָ֑ם הֲלֹא־הוּא֙ אָבִ֣יךָ קָּנֶ֔ךָ ה֥וּא עָשְׂךָ֖ וַֽיְכֹנְנֶֽךָ׃ | HA l[aSheim] tigməlu zot am naval vəlo ḥakham halo hu avíkha qanékha hu asəkha vaykhonənékha. | “HA Do you repay [haSheim] thus, foolish and unwise people? Isn’t He your father, your creator? He made you and established you!”

That HA breaks all the normal rules of Hebrew: It’s not really a word — it could be a form of the definite article (“the”) floating detached from any word, or it could be some similarly shorn-off form of the interrogative prefix, but neither of those can stand independently, as this word does, and normally every single word in the Biblical text is supposed to have at least one cantillation mark, which this HA very much doesn’t. What is it, and what’s it doing here?

It’s worth noting that this HA is also printed larger than the letters around it — it’s not just a weird letter, but it’s a big weird letter. We’ve seen letters of different sizes before, of course, and it turns out there’s another oddly sized hei all the way at the other end of the Torah: Bəreishit 2:4 features a very small hei in the middle of the word בְּהִבָּֽרְאָ֑ם | bəhibarə’am | “in their [Heaven and Earth’s] being created”. It’s almost like there’s some sort of conservation of hei size going on between the first full portion of the Torah and the last.

Indeed, the fourteenth-century commentator Rabbeinu Bahya directly ties these two letters together, suggesting the different sizes are used as a subtle hint to the idea that repentance is what made the whole project of creation worthwhile to begin with: At first, maybe the universe seemed like not such a good idea — a little hei to express doubt! — but then once returning and repair were made real, all doubts were swept away — and the big hei comes to shout that out with joy.

That’s a lovely reading, and it’s especially nice to spend time with after all the admonitions and spiritual excavations of Yom Kipur, but, with all due respect to the sages of the past, it’s a reading I have a hard time fully accepting.

After all, a verse scolding Yisra’eil as “foolish and unwise” isn’t exactly a celebration of təshuvah. The context of the whole poem doesn’t really make things better, either; the overriding message is one of condemnation for straying from the path, not celebration of returning to it — less “even in dire straits, you can repair your relationships and be welcomed home with joy” and more “you are going to fuck up, you are going to be punished for it, and every bad thing that happens to you will be your fault”. Surely if we wanted to hint at the supreme creation-justifying value of repentance, there were better verses we could have dropped this strange letter into.

Yet I do find myself compelled by the link between these two verses. But rather than a refutation of Bəreishit’s doubts, I can’t shake the notion that Dəvarim is a confirmation of them. If the small hei at the beginning of the world is a tiny nagging doubt that maybe this whole Earth thing isn’t the best idea, the big one at the end of the Torah is a loud, honking “I told you so!”, a baleful recrimination that this whole project was mistaken from the jump.

One might suspect that there’s a self-fulfilling prophecy playing out in the background here. I have, from time to time in my life, undertaken a project that I had some doubts about. And often, when I do a project like that, those doubts lead me to hold a little of myself back. I don’t put my all into it because, well, I have a hunch it might not work out, and I don’t want to pour my soul into something that’s only going to come to grief. And then, wouldn’t you know it!, the thing I’m only puttering after halfheartedly winds up being kind of a half-hearted flop. Maybe it’s a song in a show that I think may need to be cut for time — I’m not sure it’s even going to be in the next draft, so I pull back from it, and the music just doesn’t quite click, and it turns out to just not be a very good song. Or maybe I’m looking at the intense Medieval mystical verbosity of the Yom Kipur liturgy, and I don’t quite put all my heart into davening, because like, really? The Thirteen Attributes again? I don’t even believe in this whole Book of Life business, anyway! And I pull back, and don’t give myself over fully to the prayers, and then wouldn’t you know it but I don’t have a very meaningful time in shul.

Perhaps you can relate.

And perhaps that’s what’s going on in the background here. G-d had some doubts about creation and pulled back a little, didn’t quite put Voix whole pussy into it, as it were. And, well, look around at the world — can anyone say it turned out well? Half-assing it causes the very evidence used to retroactively justify the lack of initial effort; big hei proves that small hei was right to be small.

The mystical notion of tzimtzum | “contraction” suggests that to create the world, G-d first had to pull away and shrink down — G-d is infinite, after all, but in embodying that infinitude fully, there was no room left over for the universe to exist, so G-d had to shrink down to make room for everything else. It’s an attempt to navigate the paradox of G-d simultaneously being infinitely present everywhere and also so palpably, achingly absent — an attempt to explain how there can even be all this stuff that so clearly and transparently isn’t G-d.

But I think it’s possible to link this concept to these verses. G-d — infinite, uncontracted — had doubts about creation and shrank down, making room for Heaven and Earth while also pulling away from them, holding Voidself in reserve a little bit, not quite trusting that everything would work out. Tzimtzum, but also hesitation, a world with cracks and chasms and aching absences. And after that creation-by-shrinking (and here it feels pertinent that hei is the final letter of the Tetragrammaton, a quarter of G-d’s most Holy and personal name), the off-kilter world spins away out of contact with G-d, big hei swelling into all the space the little one left.

The concept of tzimtzum is linked to the concept of tiqun | “repair”. If G-d is withdrawn from the world, hidden in the covered-over caverns of creation, then some of the Work of Jewish life is uncovering those caverns to reveal the hidden sparks of the Divine so as to uncontract G-d, as it were. And perhaps that notion of tiqun points us towards a way out of this cycle of little hei leading to a self-confirming big hei over and over and over again. We have to be willing to put our whole hearts into things, even when they are silly, even when we think they might not work out. We have to set aside our insulating ironic distance from the world and embrace it, even if it hurts, even if it might all go pear shaped. We have to make a world despite our doubts, despite our fears, despite our foolish-unwise lack-of-knowing. We have to trust in our collective competence to carry one another across unexpected rifts in the fabric of the world, our collective ability to see each other thru, if only we don’t give up on one another, if only we don’t pull away from one another.

Then we will even out the sizes of the heis. Then we will build a world worthy of having been created.

[This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read the full series here.]