[I’m putting on a reading of the first act of my new opera this May! It’s got a rad cast, and I’m really proud of the music I’m writing for it. And there’s a livestream!]

We’re halfway there. This week, we cross the mid-point of the Torah [a].

[a] Before I realized this, I was planning to write about the shéretz and the difficulties of non-legislative legal systems, which would absolutely have included an extravagantly tortuous buildup to a “Shəmini crickets” pun. Alas, not this time around! You’re welcome and/or I’m sorry.

Or, well, one of them, anyway. Never content with simple answers where complex ones are available (we do have four different new year’s days, after all), the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud (in Qidushin 30a) identify three different midpoints: one midpoint if you count letters, one if you count words, and one if you count verses. One guess as to which of these I care about for this, the one-word Torah project.

And so we learn that the Torah has an even number of words, with the midpoint falling in Vayiqra 10:16, between the words דָּרֹשׁ | darosh and דָּרַשׁ | darash in the verse that describes how Mosheh “investigate investigated the ḥatat goat” after the deaths of Nadav and Avihu. That syntax might read a little oddly to you. The Hebrew is perfectly idiomatic, but it’s doing something that’s a little hard to carry over into English.

In Biblical Hebrew, it’s common to take a regular verb and put the infinitive form of that same verb immediately before it as a way of intensifying the verb. The nearest English parallel I know is the casual “I know he likes me, but does he like like me?” of ambiguous crushes, but the Hebrew doesn’t have this same informal tone. Many translations simply omit this or transmute it into an unrelated adverb, but the Talmudic rabbis often hang breathtaking inferences on these doubled verbs, so I feel quite strongly they’re important to preserve in the context of Jewish study. And it’s also convenient for our purposes because it means that we really only have to deal with one word instead of two.

Are we sure the rabbis counted right? There are an awful lot of words in the Torah, and it’s easy to loose track when you try to count that high [b]. We could plug the whole thing into a computer and digitally parse it out, but that feels bleakly pedestrian and overly final — where’s the fun in it [c]?

[b] And this, of course, is to say nothing of the thorny question of just which text of the Torah you’re counting words in, anyway. We like to talk about the Masoretic Text as tho it’s perfectly fixed, but there are a lot of subtle variations between different manuscripts, and some of those affect the word count. There’s also the question of how to handle sets of consonants that are read differently than they’re written: It occasionally happens that a set of consonants is written on the page as one word but is traditionally read as two. How do you count that?
[c] OK, fine, if you actually do this, it turns out the rabbis are wrong about the letter and word midpoints (and possibly the verse midpoint, too). There are various ways of rescuing them (perhaps they meant the middle special letter and the middle doubled word, or perhaps they were counting vowels in an unexpected way), but I think there’s something charming about refusing to let a matter as rich as the midpoint of the Torah be constrained by anything as prosaic as bean counting.

Fortunately, the words themselves reassure us here: In gematria, darash (and darosh too, conveniently) has a value of 504, and so — and I promise I’m not making this up — does the word for halfway, חָצוֹת | ḥatzot. How do we know we’re halfway thru? The words themselves tell us so.

Delightfully, the word ḥatzot shows up (in its full spelling, as this gematrical link requires) exactly twice in Tanakh. The first is Iyov 34:19, in the context of human impermanence in the face of G-d. Even the mightiest and wealthiest humans, we are told רֶֽגַע יָמֻֽתוּ וַחֲצוֹת לָֽיְלָה | réga yamútu vaḥatzot láilah | “die suddenly, and halfway thru the night”. The other is in Psalm 119:62, a paean to Divine stability: חֲצוֹת־לָֽיְלָה אָקוּם לְהוֹדוֹת לָךְ עַל מִשְׁפְּטֵי צִדְקֶֽךָ׃ | Ḥatzot láilah aqum ləhodot lakh al mishpətei tzidqékha. | “Halfway thru the night I get up to praise You for Your just judgements.” Half the Torah, then, is orderly praise; the other half is chaos and death.

Can we say which half is which? I don’t think we can. I don’t think the Torah is broken into halves like that. (After all, there’s one 504 on one side of the midpoint and an identical 504 on the other.) Rather, I think these halves overlie each other, suffuse each other, the way the 20% of Earth’s atmosphere that’s oxygen is mixed in thoroly with all the other gasses we breathe. The Torah is full of chaos, and it’s full of attempts to regulate that chaos in an orderly way. Sometimes the chaos is destructive (think, perhaps, of the Flood or the Plagues) and sometimes the order is (the precise engineering of Babel’s tower, the hierarchical stratification of Mitzráyim under Pharaoh), but the two are never far apart. The world dissolves, and walls are built to hold it together. Structure ossifies into stagnation, and exuberance bursts forth into new modes of being. The dance goes on, neverending.

We’re halfway thru the Torah, but there are two full halves left to go. Investigation is behind us, but investigation is before us, too. There’s nowhere else to go but on.

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