Rev. Dorothea “Dottie” Brooks was a long-time regular at our Torah study before she passed last year, a few weeks before the pandemic. A brilliant UCC minister who had an intense love of Biblical archeology, she would often regale us with tales of her times spent in archeological digs in southern Israel in the 1970s. In one of her last intellectual curiosities before she succumbed to a two decade battle with Cancer, she shared with our group an article about the origin of the Hebrew letters. In it, we learned how groups of Canaanite laborers (i.e. us) brought in to Egypt to support their major building projects circa 1000 BCE, took the Hieroglyphic symbols for basic words and transformed them into letters. In doing so, they created the first and only alphabet that was later copied by the Pheonecians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, etc.
This week as we read the Ten Commandments in Parashat Yitro, I would like to take a moment not only to honor Dottie’s legacy, but write about just how important the contributions of our ancestors were in the development of human literacy. The ten letters that often adorn the decalogue did not simply come out of thin air, but were the product of hundreds of years of trial and error by the lower rungs of society that eventually led one of the greatest technological breakthroughs in human history. No longer would a small elite control the written word, now it would be open to anyone who could master the twenty-two to twenty-six letter code of sounds that make all language possible. Dottie, understood this at her core, and participated in our Torah study as a way of affirming the great contributions of the Israelites to our now global culture. The “Ten Words” as the Decalogue is often known, are not simply a collection of letters indicating the priorities of society, they are the gateway to the Torah itself. As Ben Bag Bag tells us in the Mishnah, “Turn it, turn it, everything is it.”
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex
p.s. – I am including a chart which explains where each of the Hebrew letters came from. I hope this gives you a better idea of what I am writing about.