• This Week's Torah Portion

The final two portions of the Book of Numbers, Matot and Mas’ei, are most often combined. In their midst is the rarest cantillation in the entire Torah. It occurs in Numbers 35:5, which prescribes the size of pastures encircling the Levites’ assigned town. Note the text in bold: 

In Reform communities, the two cantillation marks are called yerach ben yomo (literally “day-old moon”) and karnei parah (“horns of a cow.”), likely due to their respective appearances. The chant which accompanies them in Numbers 35:5 is a combination of both tropes’ symbols when they appear separately. Why does this particular moment in the Torah merit such a singular melodic exclamation?

On the surface, it would appear we are merely learning about distances the Levites’ cattle can roam (2,000 cubits or about half a mile in each direction). Rabbis of the Talmud pointed to this verse when determining the tradition for how far Jews may travel on Shabbat. But with a wider mindset, there may be more in this verse for us to discern. The final syllable of ba’amah taken by itself, mah,sounds like the Hebrew word meaning what. We might then hear it as the Torah questioning us: what does this matter to us? As we have seen, the word ba’amah occurs four times in this verse, once in each direction. Four instances of the word mah might then lead us to recall the Four Questions famously uttered around the Passover table.

When it comes to interpreting our sacred texts, how far afield are we allowed to stray from our starting place? Two thousand years ago, Rabbi Yishmael listed 13 principles by which the Torah ought to be interpreted. These principles are intended to provide connections between the Torah shebichtiv (the Written Torah, or the text of the scroll itself) and the Torah sheba’al peh (the Oral Torah, or the Talmud of classic rabbinic interpretations). But perhaps our study of Echoes from the Wilderness these last several weeks might prompt us to add a third: the Torahsheba’al ozen– the “Aural” Torah – learning from the sounds and melodies of the words themselves.

In Numbers 35:5, the rapid rise and fall on the syllable mah sounds like a cow mooing – especially if one pronounces the sound maw or muh in an Ashkenazic accent. Even if we don’t know Hebrew, we can hear a cow mooing if our ears are so attuned, giving us a vague idea of the verse’s original context. These last several weeks, I have attempted to draw our attention to aural phenomena like these throughout the Book of Numbers. I pray that as our study of Torah continues, our understanding may deepen in each and every direction.