By Divine Design

The Kabbalah of Large, Small, and Missing Letters in the Parshah.

Was that a…mistake?

There are no mistakes in Torah. That said, week after week when reading the weekly Torah portion, scholars and laymen alike encounter broken, enlarged—and even missing—letters without stopping to realize that the bodies of these oddball letters themselves hold some of the Torah’s most cogent life lessons. A missing vav can teach us how to more closely connect with G-d; an enlarged letter beis can awaken our receptivity to beauty and change; and a conflict between the way a word is written and the way it is pronounced (kri-ksiv) can afford us a new layer of understanding of the parshah than if that word had been written “correctly” in the first place. Studying such anom­alies more closely, and with the right teacher, we unlock the door to the very structure of Torah.

Rabbi Aaron L. Raskin, author of Letters of Light (a chapter-by-chapter study of each of the 22 Hebrew letters), takes his lifelong love of Alef-Beis and graphic design to the next level in By Divine Design. He analyzes the con­textual anomalies; cites Midrashic, Talmudic, and Kabbalistic source texts; and peppers the parshiyos with warm Chassidic stories and insights that bring the letters’ inner meanings to light. This is not just another book on the parshah. Layreaders of the weekly Torah portion will appreciate the book’s simple writing style and unusual mystical insights; scholars and lecturers of all stripes will find the book to be a rich resource for their weekly drash. Its stories and jokes are infinitely quotable, and its arguments well-annotated with numerous cross-references to source materials.

By Divine Design is a book that you will return to again and again. Of that there is no mistake.