Ilustration Credit: Elad Lifshitz, Dov Abramson Studio
Can you think of words that aren’t polite to say in public? Some things are best shared with parents or with people we trust, but otherwise aren’t really said out loud. And guess what? That happens in the Torah, too!
Earlier this year, we learned about קְרִי וּכְתִיב (keri u-khetiv, the written form of a word, and the different way it’s said out loud). Usually, that is just a difference of a letter or two, and maybe changing one small sound. This week, though, we have two examples of words that get totally changed!
Part of this week’s parashah is a series of curses that can come about if the people abandon the Torah. In one curse, the Torah says that the people will get struck:
That last word, עפלים, seems to refer to some terrible illness in a private part of the body—we don’t really know exactly what it was. But it was apparently bad enough (and maybe gross enough!) that we don’t read this word in public.
If you look at a printed book of Torah, you will see this:
(כז) יַכְּכָ֨ה יהוה בִּשְׁחִ֤ין מִצְרַ֙יִם֙ [וּבַטְּחֹרִ֔ים]
(27) יהוה will strike you with the Egyptian inflammation, with hemorrhoids, boil-scars, and itch, from which you shall never recover.
And that’s how we read it - a totally different word with completely different letters from how it’s written in the Torah scroll! Crazy, right? In fact, if a scribe actually wrote the word וּבַטְּחֹרִ֔ים in the Torah scroll itself, it would make the whole scroll invalid! (Shulhan Arukh Yoreh De’ah 275:6)
So why do you think we change the words of the Torah in this way when we read it? You might want to talk about this with some grownups at home. It seems like speaking politely in public is very important, and even the Torah reading tries to live up to high standards!
There is another example of a word like this in our parashah—one that gets totally changed in how we read it. Can you find it?
-------------------
-------------------
