Ilustration Credit: Elad Lifshitz, Dov Abramson Studio
Don’t blink during Torah reading this week—you might miss it! That’s right, this week’s parashah has fewer verses than any other—only 30! Why would we have such a short Torah reading?
First, let’s get a sense of just how short it is. Ready for some numbers?
- The shortest parashah: Vayeilekh, 30 verses
- The longest parashah: Naso, 176 verses
- If you lined up all the parashiyot in order of length, which ones would be in the middle? Ki Teitzei, 110 verses; Eikev and Vayikra, 111 verses
And this might be the most surprising–the four shortest parshiyot in the Torah are… the last four! That’s Nitzavim, Vayeilekh, Ha’azinu, and Vezot Haberakhah. Now, why would that be?
Remember a few weeks back how Ki Tavo had a lot of really bad curses in it? Well, we don’t want to go into the new year with all of that awful feeling from the curses, so we always make sure to read Ki Tavo before Rosh Hashanah and also have an extra Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah, to give us a chance to feel better.
But once you are done reading those curses and the verses that follow them, there are only 163 verses left in the Torah. And sometimes—like this year—there are four times we still need to read a parashah between Rosh Hashanah and Simhat Torah. That leaves us with only about 40 verses per parashah, so they all have to be pretty short!
We would say you should enjoy the short Torah reading this week, but we love Torah reading so much we will just hope you aren’t too sad that there’s so little of it!
-------------------
-------------------
