Just before Shalvi turns five, I ask her what she would like for a birthday present. She tells me that she wants “either a dancing unicorn or a Sefer Torah,” and I can only laugh. The dancing unicorn was actually a gift her twin sisters received two years earlier from my mother-in-law – the furry stuffed animal, equipped with a set of double A batteries, dances and sings a repetitive song about prancing on rainbows when the button on its horn is pushed. The song drove me crazy, especially because I was forever knocking the button inadvertently when cleaning up the kids’ stuffed animals or tripping over their toys. At some point I conveniently “lost” the stuffed unicorn – I gave it away along with some clothing the girls had outgrown, hoping they wouldn’t notice. Unfortunately they had not forgotten, and Shalvi was still asking for a new stuffed unicorn to replace the one that had disappeared somewhere over the rainbow, to my relief and my daughters’ consternation. Needless to say, there is no way I am going to buy her a new stuffed unicorn.

            A Sefer Torah, on the other hand, is a different story. We own many printed editions of the Five Books of Moses, but Shalvi was asking for a Torah scroll – long sheets of parchment handwritten with ink from a quill, wrapped around two wooden rollers, often encased in a velvet mantle with an ornate crown and other ornaments. A proper Torah scroll—one fit for ritual use—costs several tens of thousands of dollars, but as I learned from a bit of googling, it is possible to buy a “toy” scroll that contains the entire Five Books of Moses computer-printed on a long sheet of white paper wrapped around lightweight wooden rollers with a faux-velvet mantle, and metallic ornamentation. Confronted with the choice between a dancing unicorn and a Torah scroll—between a golden calf and the Ten Commandments—there was no doubt in my mind about what I would give Shalvi for her birthday.

            I ordered a toy Torah scroll from a Judaica shop in Geula, a religious neighborhood in northern Jerusalem. It arrived a couple of weeks later, just in time for Shalvi’s birthday. When we unfurled the scroll, we were surprised to discover that the Torah scroll was printed with vocalization and cantillation marks – a series of dots, lines, and symbols written above and below the letters to indicate how the words of the Torah are meant to be pronounced and chanted. While printed books of the Bible are generally written with these notations, a proper Torah scroll contains only the Hebrew letters – the reader who chants from the scroll in synagogue must have already learned and memorized how to pronounce and chant all the words. My kids were excited to discover that it was so much easier to read from Shalvi’s birthday scroll than they had anticipated – they didn’t have to learn and memorize the words, but could simply sound them out. They could take it out of its “ark” – the top shelf of our playroom closet—on Shabbat and conduct their own Torah service, parading the Torah and calling up one another to take turns reading from it. This Torah scroll, legible and accessible to my early readers, was truly their own.

            Five hundred years ago, the chief rabbi of Egypt—Rabbi David ben Solomon ibn Zimri, also known as the Radbaz—was asked a question about why a Torah scroll must be written without vowels and cantillation marks. According to tractate Sofrim, an ancient rabbinic work dating back to the eighth century, it is forbidden to ritually chant in synagogue from any scroll that contains such notations. Why not, the Radbaz was asked? After all, it would be so much easier to chant from a Torah scroll without error if only the reader did not have to commit so much to memory. Moreover, the vocalization and cantillation are aids in understanding the meaning of the Torah, and according to the traditional understanding, they were conveyed by God to Moses on Mount Sinai. Why omit these explanatory aids from the Torah scroll?

            The Radbaz responded by invoking a midrash from the Talmud (Shabbat 88b) about the revelation on Mount Sinai. The midrash teaches that when Moses when up on Mount Sinai to receive the Torah, the angels in heaven bristled suspiciously: What business had a flesh-and-blood human being in ascending to the heavens? God instructed Moses to field the angels’ question, and Moses explained that the Torah simply wasn’t relevant for them. “The Torah teaches not to murder – is there murder among you angels?” Moses asked. “Do you have a father and mother to honor? Do you have business that would make you swear falsely?” The angels, upon hearing, Moses’ response, realized that in fact it was they who had no business receiving the Torah, and praised God’s rightfulness and majesty in giving the Torah to humanity.

            The Radbaz goes on to explain that this answer is not entirely satisfying, because in fact there are two ways of reading the Torah, one that is appropriate for the angels in the heaven, and one that is appropriate for human beings on earth, as Nachmanides also taught. The angelic Torah is printed not just without vowels and cantillation marks, but also without spaces between the words, because the angels read the entirety of the Torah as the names of God. The Torah given to human beings, however, contains spaces between the words, and we parse the Torah such that it teaches about permitted and forbidden behavior, purity and impurity, and the rest of the laws. The angelic Torah and the human Torah contain the same letters, but they signify very different truths.

The Torah is thus like the DNA code in which, as we know from molecular biology, the sequence of nucleotides is broken into three-nucleotide units known as codons, which translate into various amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Depending on how one parses the nucleotides—where the first codon starts—one can come up with completely different amino acid sequences, and thus entirely different proteins. To combine the insights of molecular biology and Nachmanides, the angelic nucleotide sequence would look something like UAGCGCACG, whereas the human sequence instead looks like UAG CGC ACG. Neither sequence contains vowels or cantillation marks, because even the human Torah with its spaces between the words nonetheless lends itself to multiple interpretations depending on how the words are parsed and pronounced once they are infused with human breath and spoken aloud. When human beings speak words of Torah aloud, we breathe life into the inert text on a page, just as God breathed life into Adam to make him a living being. Creation and revelation are parallel: Human beings infuse God’s Torah with meaning, rendering it a tree of life, in much the same way as God created humanity in the garden.

There are an infinite number of ways of reading and understanding the Torah – no two people read the text in exactly the same way, and no one person reads the text the same way at different points in his or her life. There are always new meanings to be deciphered, new insights to be gleaned. It is for this reason that a Torah scroll is written without vowels and punctuation. As the Radbaz teaches, “If one adds vowels and punctuation to a Torah scroll, one gives it boundary and measure… However, because a Torah scroll contains all kinds of perfection and in every word hangs heaps and heaps, we do not add vowles so that it can be interpreted in all different kinds of perfection.” My children’s Torah scroll is easier to read – there is no doubt about that. But it is also more limited in its possibilities. Each word can only be pronounced and read in one way. For now, that’s not a bad thing – they are still working at sounding out the words and making meaning. But with time, I hope that the Torah’s dots and lines will fly up to the heavens, leaving them with the infinite Torah to read and parse and infuse with their own creative insights.