NO GAPS

If you get the chance this Shabbat to observe closely the Hagbaha – the lifting up of the Sefer Torah after leining, you will notice something very unusual.  This week’s parasha, Vayeitzei, is written in the Sefer Torah as a continuous piece of Torah text of more than five columns. There are no gaps, no paragraph breaks.  Neither open paragraphs, which begin on the next line (known as petuchot), nor closed paragraphs which begin, after a break of nine letters, on the same line (known as setumot). There is only one other sidra in the Torah that shares this feature: the sidra of Mikeitz, also in the book of Bereishit.

The Chassidic leader, Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter of Gur (1847-1905), known by the title of his masterpiece, the Sefat Emet, suggests that this layout reflects the contents of the parasha.  In this sidra Jacob leaves the land of Israel, to return only at the end of the sidra. However, although Jacob physically departed from the land, he never left it emotionally or psychologically.  Later he would say, im lavan garti, ‘I sojourned with Laban’, meaning that in his mind, his time with Laban was always a ‘sojourn’ or temporary stay.

Jacob left Israel with the instruction from his mother that he should stay away until his brother’s anger had subsided, for yamim achadim, literally a ‘few days.’  In fact, he was away for thirty-four years.  The same phrase is used to describe the seven years that Jacob worked in order to marry Rachel.  The time felt to him as a ‘few days’ because of his love for her. Just as love has a way of making time pass quickly, so too, Jacob’s intense connection with the land of Israel enabled those thirty-four years to seem a much shorter time or just a ‘few days.’

Some twenty-six centuries later, the great Hebrew poet, Judah Halevi, whose love for Israel suffuses his writings, would compose those immortal lines: libi bamizrach… ‘My heart is in the East, and I am at the ends of the West.’  Jacob embodied a similar passion for the land of Israel. From when he left his precious land until he returned there were no lapses in Jacob’s love. The continuous flow of Torah text that comprises this week’s parasha symbolizes Jacob’s uninterrupted devotion to his land.

May Jacob’s example be an inspiration for us.