This Shabbat:

Friday Candle Lighting: 5:43 pm
Shabbat Ends: 6:38 pm

Torah Message:

De-Construction

“In the beginning of G-d’s creating the heavens and the earth…” (1:1)

You drive up to your dream home. It’s been two years in the planning, and three to build it. You usher your guests up to the top of the west wing and proudly fling open the doors to the guest suite. The doors bang against their stops. Then a small shudder shakes the house. What sounds like a distant groan starts to get louder and louder and then, before your eyes, the entire west wing parts company with the house and falls away, crashing to the ground like some slow-motion movie. You and your guests are left wide-eyed in horror and disbelief, gazing into fifty feet of nothingness two inches from the ends of your toes.

The Torah is the blueprint of the world. Just as a builder takes great pains to study the blueprint of a house before a single bulldozer raises its claws in earnest; just as he measures and calculates and evaluates, slide-rule and calculator at the ready, so too G‑d creates the world from His blueprint — the Torah.

Therefore, it stands to reason that a Sefer Torahthat lacks even one letter is pasul — invalid. For just as one missing line in the plans of a building may lead to the west wing crashing into ruins in front of your eyes, so too one letter missing from a Sefer Torah is as though vast tracts of the universe have been erased.