the twenty-third letter

It's said that when Moses first came down from Mount Sinai carrying the ten commandments, he was so enraged to find the Israelites dancing around the golden calf that he smashed the stone tablets. The tablets' letters, freed from their prison of stone, flew back up to heaven.

After exacting a terrible retribution, god pardoned the Israelites and gave Moses a second set of tablets. But the substitutes, as substitutes often are, were imperfect. Written in Hebrew by the finger of god, they set out the law in an alphabet* of only twenty-two letters. The original tablets had used an alphabet of twenty-three letters, but one letter, the twenty-third letter, had disappeared.

And so, the story goes, because of the missing letter, our words are misspelled, our sentences are crooked, our grammar twists round on itself, our plans go wrong and our hopes go astray. No-one knows the sound or shape or even the name of the lost letter, but it's sometimes called simply ha-ot -- the letter. Some mystics have imagined ha-ot as looking a little like a shin, a Hebrew letter with the approximate shape of a W. The twenty-third letter, however, would be a more perfect shin, a shin with a fourth, upward-pointing prong.

For obvious reasons, this story appeals to me -- the missing piece, the missing peace. Faith is not one of my gifts, but I believe, as much as I believe anything, that one day, whether through our own efforts or god's grace, ha-ot will return to us. There will be new worlds built of new words; what is broken will be made whole and what is lost will be found.




*Technically, an abjad rather than an alphabet, because the twenty-two Hebrew letters represent consonants, not vowels. And, even more technically, an impure abjad, because Hebrew actually does have additional symbols called niqqud, which represent vowel sounds and, although not used in normal writing, are added in certain contexts such as dictionaries, poetry, or texts for children.