In the middle of our parsha this week, Shemini, there’s a series of two words, nearly identical, and as it’s written in the chumash, it has an asterisk in between. These words appear as such:
These words, darash darosh (Leviticus 10:16) are in the context of Moshe asking about what happened to one of the goats that was offered as a part of a particular sacrifice in the first day that the Mishkan, the Tabernacle, was in use. The word darash means ‘inquired,’ but it’s certainly noteworthy that the word here repeats. Maybe it means something like, “Moshe really asked” or perhaps, “Moshe doubled down on his question.” Whatever it is, the centrality of inquiring is highlighted in this verse.
But what about the asterisk? The chumash rarely includes notes like that. The Talmud teaches that if you count up all the words in the Torah, and divide them in half, you’d arrive at the exact center point of the Torah, which is right in between these two words. In other words, the asterisk included in the chumash (of course not in the actual Torah scroll) is an indication of the very middle of the Torah, so says the Talmud (Kiddushin 30a).
There is a problem, however, which is that if you count up the words in the Torah, this would not be the middle point. The rabbis notoriously had some funky math, so I’m happy to let them have this one, because I imagine they had a point to make that was far less about the number of words in the Torah, and much more about how we should center ourselves in Torah.
The root of this word - darash - is about seeking and inquiring. It’s about digging deep into things to open them up. Sometimes we find the answers we’re looking for, sometimes we just find more questions. Either way, this is so much the essence of what it means to be a Jew and what it means to ground ourselves in Torah. We should be constantly seeking, constantly searching, engaging with, digging into.
Many years ago, the Conservative movement put together a statement of principles, and in it they wrote, “The ideal Jew is not so much a learned Jew as a learning Jew.” I think this is what the rabbis of the Talmud were getting at when they taught that this was the center point of the Torah. Perhaps it’s not exactly the literal center of the Torah, but it is the center of the Torah in that it is the heart of the Torah. That we should never stop inquiring, like Moshe, that we should keep asking questions, continuing to seek and dig, finding new meanings for ourselves.
