There are 305,805 letters in the Torah. Given this, the middle point occurred several weeks ago in parashat Tzav in Leviticus 11:42 in the form of the letter vav in the works Gachon, meaning belly. This is a section pertaining to the laws of kashrut where we are forbidden to eat anything that crawls on its belly, like a bug or a reptile or a snake. While there is a certain irony of the middle letter of the Torah being found in the middle of a word referring to the mid-section of an animal, it is not very inspiring.
Perhaps, a better question to ask is one Rabbi Akiva does in the Talmud (Nedarim 30b), “what is the heart of the Torah?” The verse that immediately comes to mind is from this week’s Torah portion Acharei Mot-Kedoshim, Leviticus:19:18: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Only a handful of chapters from the actual middle of the Torah, this is the verse that best captures the essence of the Torah.
Interestingly, the verse is not about God, but about our treatment of one another. The Golden Rule does not require religion at all to fulfill, only a commitment to our fellow human beings. So, it’s off by a few verses, in my book this has got to be the center of the Torah. After all, if religion is not fundamentally about how we treat one another, what is it for? There are 305,805 letters in the Torah, all of them with the express purpose of getting us to love our neighbor as ourselves. The rest is commentary, now go and study.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex