Vamoose (to depart quickly), gewgaw (a showy trifle), and fewtrils (things of little value), are just some of the thousands of words participants had to spell at the Scripps National Spelling Bee last week. The winning word spelled by Zaila Avant-garde, the first Black American winner, was murraya (a flowering plant in the citrus family). Yet, as amazing as it is to see these middle schoolers spell words most adults have never even heard of, we wonder why it matters.
This, in many ways, is the central question of this week’s Torah portion Devarim, meaning words. The fifth and final book of Torah, is Moses’ final opportunity to address the People of Israel, his final opportunity to ensure Judaism survives at all. His central tool, just like for the judges at the Spelling Bee, are just words. And, as we understand thousands of years later, words will suffice.
Even as obscure as some of the words in the Torah or the Spelling Bee, it is important to remember that each one of them was created for a purpose as a tool for better explaining the world around us. Some words, even in the Torah, lose significance over time, other become even more important. Pandemic, for example, is fresh on our mind, but would not have been a year and a half ago. The Torah is a triumph not only of religion, but of language itself. In it there are approximately 8,000 unique individual words, each one central to achieving Moses’ vision from three thousand years ago.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex