The Letter That Left Heaven Carrying Trouble

Click for full size

The Line Outside the Throne Room

They had been going in one at a time since the world was still an idea.

Each letter came before the Holy One with the same request. Make the world through me. Each one had verses to prove it was the right choice, and each one came back out, and the next one went in.

Then it was Tsadi's turn.

Tsadi Makes Its Case

It went in standing straight and it had the argument ready.

"Master of the World, may it please you to create your world through me. Because it is through me that they will say of you, every day, your righteousness. Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains. Righteous are you, Lord, and upright are your judgments. The Lord is righteous, he loves righteous deeds."

It was not a weak case. A world starting on tzedek, righteousness, would stand up straight the way the letter did. Every morning of every generation would open on the same sound.

Tsadi waited.

The Answer Was No

"No," the Holy One said.

Nothing else came after it. No softening, no explanation offered, no verse cited back. The letter had brought four proofs and heard one syllable.

"Why?"

The Other Word It Carried

"Because through you," he said, "many troubles are going to come upon Israel."

Then he said the verses back at it. "You have shown me many and grievous tzarot, troubles." "Great is that day, there is none like it, and it is a time of trouble for Jacob." "They will fear the name of the Lord from the west and his glory from the rising of the sun, because distress will come in like a river."

Tsadi stood in front of the throne and heard both of its own names in the same breath. Righteousness at the front of the word. Trouble at the front of the word. The same opening of the mouth, the same first stroke of the pen, and it could not carry one without dragging the other in behind it.

Jacob's day of trouble was not an idea in that room. It was a brother coming across a river with four hundred men. It was a night of wrestling and a hip that never worked right again. It was a coat brought back bloody and a son sold to traders and famine and a wagon ride down to Egypt in old age. All of it already sitting inside a shape that had come in asking to start a world.

Out of the Court

Tsadi left the court of heaven immediately, crushed, carrying both of its words out with it.

Nobody escorted it. It walked out past whatever letters were still waiting their turn and it did not tell them what had happened in there. The world got made out of a different letter, and Tsadi went into the alphabet like everyone else, and scribes have been writing it ever since without knowing what it asked for.

The Branch at the End of a Word

Later, the prophets handed out something the Torah's letters had not had. Five of them were given a second form, a shape they take only when a word ends: mem, nun, tsadi, peh, kaf. And with each doubled letter went a promise attached to one of the fathers.

The doubled kaf sat in the two words God said to Abraham when he sent him out, and their count came to a hundred, which is how old he was when Isaac was born. The doubled mem promised Isaac strength in both worlds. The doubled nun answered Jacob's cry of save me with rescue here and rescue there. The doubled peh was in the promise Joseph made his brothers swear over his bones, that God would surely remember them, in this world and the next.

The doubled tsadi came last, and it was not in Genesis at all. It was in the prophets. Behold, a man whose name is Branch, and he will branch out from where he stands. I will raise up for David a true branch.

The letter that was refused the first word of creation got the last word of a name that has not arrived yet.

In a schoolroom somewhere a child copies tsadi twice, once open and once with the long tail it takes at the end, and asks why it changes. The teacher does not tell him about the throne room. He says some letters finish differently, and the boy copies both shapes until the ink dries crooked.