The Secret Garden of Torah
As a child, I had many favorite books, but one held a particular awe and wonder that no other book has ever held for me, except Torah. That book was The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I remember very little of the backstory, and don’t even remember if I read the actual book or one of those abridged young readers versions. But I do have a crystal clear memory of the feeling I got from reading about the secret garden where Mary, the protagonist, finds herself transformed from sad grouch to a nurtured nurturer. That feeling is an awe-filled anticipation of unlocking (in her case, literally and metaphorically) new possibilities previously walled off, and the immense gratitude of tending to the landscape within that peaceful walled garden.
When I study Torah (broadly meaning any Jewish text), a little child within me feels exactly what he felt when he read of Mary and her secret garden. There are secret worlds within the words, endless interpretations to tend to or prune. And through cultivating the torah garden, it in turn begins to transform me.
There’s a phrase in Shir HaShirim, the biblical book of love poetry, where one of the lovers is called a gan na’ool - a locked garden. This phrase popped into my mind as I read a resonant line in Rabbi Adina Allen’s new book The Place of All Possibility (side note: I’m in conversation with her about the book this Sunday, please join if you’d like!).
“In Jewish tradition, each Hebrew word is like a text in and of itself, containing multiple meanings.”
Each word is a gan na’ool, a secret locked garden awaiting discovery.
I think for many of us these ancient texts feel walled off, and there are barriers to encountering them. Hebrew script looks like pig scratch before we are able to identify the letters. Even those of us who can decode and sound out words don’t often know the meaning of what we are reading. Even when we know the basic meaning, there may be literary, historical, and religious context that we don’t (yet) have.
From one perspective, all of these locked gates of meaning can be off-putting. Shouldn’t our tradition be easily accessible to all who seek its wisdom?
But on the other hand, there’s the incredible feeling of finding a key and entering the walled garden through one of its interpretative gates.
In this week’s Torah portion, Vaetchanan, we first read the six words of the shema. In the case of the shema, I’ve found the English translation to be as much of a wall as the Hebrew! Rabbi Adina Allen writes of her own experience: “Every time I’d hear these words translated into English, I’d grimace: ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.’ …Though I tried to rally myself behind the cause, none of these meanings felt particularly alive to me… It wasn’t until decades later, as my own facility with Hebrew developed, and as I encountered other interpretations that opened up new meanings of this prayer, that I began to sense the profound power and ever-unfolding possibilities encoded in these ancient words.”
“What had been translated for generations as ‘our Lord’ melted away into the mystery and beauty of a power that cannot be named or pinned down. And ‘one’ became a force that flowed through all, alerting us to the interconnection and interpenetration of all life.”
We are just a few days past Tisha B’av, the calendrical collector of Jewish tragedy and brokenness. If we map the Jewish seasons onto Mary’s journey in The Secret Garden, we could say that Mary arrives at the home where she will discover the garden in a Tisha B’av state of mind, sad, angry, feeling a bit broken. The next seven weeks that lead us to Rosh Hashanah are traditionally a time of comfort and then transformation. They are a “Secret Garden” season, if we choose to enter.
In that spirit, I want to share one more interpretation of the shema, from the Chida (Chayyim Yosef David Azulay, 18th century). He notes that in the scribal tradition the ayin (the last letter in the word, shema) is written extra large; and the dalet (the last letter of echad) is extra large. The widespread interpretation is that they spell eid, witness, reaffirming the key idea that reciting the shema is an act of bearing witness to God’s oneness. However, the Chida adds on another possibility. Perhaps the ayin stands for anavah - humility, and the dalet stands for dibbur - speech.
“And this is the hint: ‘Return, O Israel, to (ad, which is also spelled, ayin, dalet) the Lord, your God” (Hosea 14:2). So he should be careful about these two fundamentals - humility and speech; and then it will be complete repentance.”
Each word a text, each text a locked garden! And through a particularly strange set of interpretive keys, we can find in the simple word “to, ad” a hint that being humble (taking up the right amount of space) and paying attention to how we use our voice in the world are the spiritual practices of the season.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Jay LeVine
