Eats, Shoots and Leaves is a non-fiction book which bemoans the state of punctuation in American lingua franca. 

The title of the book is the punch line of a joke about a panda who goes into a restaurant. 

If the comma is in the wrong place it seems the panda eats, shoots (to kill) and then leaves. It really is supposed to be a description of the panda, who eats a diet of shoots and leaves. 

Another version of this idea is exemplified by the phrase - 

Let’s eat Grandma. 

Depending on where you put the comma will totally change the message. 

Either we are calling Grandma to dinner, or, she IS dinner. 

This past week in our synagogue during the reading of the Torah portion the reader stopped suddenly in mid-sentence. He was peering intently at the black letters on white parchment in the Torah and then called the Rabbi down for a consultation. The law is that if a single letter in the Torah is cracked, erased or missing, it invalidates the scroll and needs to be repaired before it can be read from, so a clarification was required before the reading could continue. 

Why does it matter if a letter is missing? 

Why would it make the entire scroll invalid?

The Torah is comprised of 600,000 letters, each one vital to the completion and usability of the scroll. If even one is missing the whole scroll is invalid. 

The 600,000 letters are symbolic of the souls of the Jewish people. 

Each soul is vital. 

If even one soul is missing the fabric of the Jewish people is incomplete. 

This reminds us that each and every one of us has a unique role to fulfill in the eternal production of humanity. 

There is only one you. 

And there is a unique and vital role that only you can play. 

If you don’t fulfill your mission the tapestry of the world will be incomplete. 

We are celebrating the completion of the Torah with the reading of the last portion on Simchat Torah which is the last day of Sukkot. 

The Torah is celebrated with singing, dancing,  great festivity and joy as we complete the cycle of all the Torah portions. 

There is a a beautiful story told of a bedraggled group of refugees and survivors who return to Vilna after World War II to see if any friends or family have survived. 

One of the group was a Jewish soldier who realized it was Simchat Torah and he made his way to Vilna’s Great Synagogue which was a shell of its former self. There were no Torah scrolls which had survived and as the few ragtag survivors stood about forlorn and unsure how to proceed a little boy came in to the synagogue. 

The soldier could not believe his eyes. 

He had not seen a Jewish child in many years. 

After asking permission of the father the soldier picked up the child and danced with him in place of the Torah scroll. 

He told the group “instead of a Torah scroll which we do not have, let us carry this child, who represents the future of the Jewish people.”

A composer heard about this story and wrote a moving song memorializing the episode. 

A number of years later a historian who works at Yad V’Shem was interested in establishing the veracity of the story and the subsequent song. 

She wondered if it was a lovely figment of the imagination or an actual event that had occurred?

After some effort, she was able to ascertain that the soldier in the story was a Rabbi Goldman who lived in Detroit. She connected with him and he confirmed the story and it’s details. 

The Rabbi ruefully mentioned that he did not know who the little boy was and what might have happened to him. 

It was a mystery that plagued him. 

The researcher said she would continue to search, perhaps she would find the little boy. 

A number of months later the researcher, who was also a doscent at Yad VShem was asked to lead a group of young people who were on a Birthright mission. After the tour was complete she was then asked to bring the group to the lecture hall where they were to be addressed by Mr. Abe Foxman, the national director of the Anti Defamation League. 

During his speech, Mr. Foxman referenced an event in his childhood. During the World War II  he had been hidden by a Catholic family and had no idea he was a Jew. When his father came to reclaim him, Abe had been taught to spit on Jews. But his father persevered and took him to a synagogue for the first time and there he was danced around by all the survivors and told his father he liked the Jewish “church” and wanted to be Jewish. 

Abe Foxman was that child. 

A reunion was engineered, and the two holy souls, the now elderly soldier turned rabbi and the child turned international Jewish activist, met once again and reminisced about that incredible encounter which set Mr. Foxman on the path back to his Jewish roots. 

So it seems we need to be mindful of our grammar (my Mother would certainly agree). 

Each word carries more than just a literal meaning. 

Each of us is a “letter” an integral building block in the edifice of eternity. 

Find your letter!

Shabbat Shalom and so much love.