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Shabbat Shalom. The conservative movement with which I am affiliated, have a membership card. We're often criticized for occupying the murky middle. We're nish to hint nistaher, as my grandfather would say. We're neither here nor there. We are traditional in terms of liturgy and observance, but not as traditional as our friends in the Orthodox world. We are progressive in theology and our egalitarian values, in our commitment to social justice, but we're not as fabrent, if you know what that means. We're not as fervent in our commitment to those values as our friends in the reform movement. We're pluralistic and inclusive. We offer a big tent for lots of different ideas to coexist, but maybe not as inclusive as our friends in the post-denominational or transdenominational world. And this can cause some measure of confusion both for people on the inside of the movement as well as for people on the outside. And yet, I gotta be what I am. This is what I believe. And I also think that occupying the middle puts us in a unique position to understand the wide spectrum of belief and observance and to bring people closer in a variety of different ways. We can understand both our Orthodox friends' commitments to traditional observance and our reform friends' commitment to egalitarianism. We can understand the need for boundaries in a community and strive to be inclusive and welcoming. Often we can play the role of translator for people who are more extreme than us, helping them to understand one another, because we can understand both of them, and we can harness the best of both parts, even as this can sometimes pull us uncomfortably in both directions, and even as we can feel tension as a community, that we wish we were sometimes more like that or sometimes more like this. Now put me in the camp of people who think that some of the definitions around movements are no longer as helpful or as useful as they once were. I believe in our movement and its institutions, but I also know that most of you, and sometimes me too, we don't fit neatly into a denominational box. Most of us don't go around saying, I'm a conservative Jew. We say, I'm a Jew. And whenever someone comes to me and says, I converted to Reform Judaism or I converted to Orthodox Judaism, I say, I don't recognize that as a religion. You converted to Judaism. And that label may have been the lens through which you entered into Judaism, but it doesn't define your identity. Now this is for sure a much longer topic for another time, but as we arrive at Parshat Shmini, which is, as I pointed out earlier, the exact middle of the Torah, I want to give a plug for the center. In religious life, in political life, in, well, life. I think we've had enough of the extremes. And what we need now is more middle, more center. That doesn't mean a lack of passion or conviction, but it means an understanding that there is some measure of truth on both right and left, and there is also the potential danger for excesses on right and left. And in order for a society for the world to hold, we need a strong center. As they'll tell you at the gym, you need to work on your core. Those are the muscles that help you as an individual thrive. They help us with stability and longevity. Now, when I say parshatmini is the middle of the Torah, I mean it literally. But if you're counting according to letters, it comes towards the very end of the parsha. I've printed a picture for you, and it is pointed out by scribes, those who can see this picture, this vov is bigger than all other vovs in the Torah. Why is this vov different from all other vofs? Because the scribes want you to know that this letter right here, notice this is also a vov, right? And this is also a vov, but this one's bigger because this is the midpoint of the Torah. And the scribes are pointing that out to you with a bigger font. There are 304,805 letters in the Torah. This letter, this vov, is letter number 152,403, somewhere in the middle of that large vov in the core of that vov, which itself, take a look at the vov. Doesn't it look kind of like a person with a head and a body? If I had to pick one letter in the Hebrew language that looked like a stick person, maybe the gimel would compete. But I think the vov is a person. And somewhere in the middle is the exact midpoint of the entire Torah, like a construction worker who measures twice before they cut, who needs to know the exact middle so you can make that center point, so you can have a certain amount of symmetry. The sofer marks the middle point with a special distinction. And scribes have this tradition of writing it big, rabbati. And I've shown this to you before. As some of you know, I have a mild obsession with the big and small letters of the Torah. Now the letter Vav appears in the midst of the word gakon. Gachon means belly. The context is in the law of pure and impure animals, which is the basis for Kashrut. And the Torah says, you shall not eat among the things that swarm upon the earth anything that crawls on its gachon. Anything that crawls on its belly. It's a core. The Gemarrah in Chulan 67b explains that this refers to snakes. Sorry, folks, no snake dinner for uh snakes do for dinner tonight. This middle letter refers to the belly. And according to the Talmud, the fact that it is a snake is not a coincidence either. The Torah and human history began with a snake. A snake who tricked Eve and Adam into eating the fruit of the forbidden tree. And history, according to Judaism, will end with a snake or a sea serpent. We're supposed to, in the time of the Messiah, defeat the Livyatan, the sea monster, and feast upon its body at the banquet table of the Mashiach. So here in the middle of the Torah, isn't it appropriate that we'd have a snake too? Now, Vav is a letter that is suited for middle space. Vav is a letter of in-betweenness. Vav is sometimes a vowel and sometimes a consonant. It's often used as a conjunction between words and phrases. There's even a scribe's trick when they write a whole safer Torah, that every column begins with a vav. They format it so that every column begins with a vov. It's called a vov Torah. It helps standardize formatting across different Torahs, although it wasn't standardized for a long part of our history. So you look at different Torahs and you'll see different variations. Vav is the connector between sections, and while vav is a letter, it's also a word. If you spell a word with two vavs, it's a noun. Vav-vav means vav. The word vav means hook. The tabernacle had many vavim, which were tapestry which the tapestries were hung from. So, in so many ways, in more ways than one, this simple letter, which itself looks like a person, is a connector. And this particular vav stands out as the center of the entire Torah, and the Sofrim wanted you to pay attention to this vov. And perhaps the goal of this big letter is to highlight, maybe a stretch, but bear with me. The sanctity of the middle. When you read any book, you're really motivated at the beginning, and you get equally invested at the end. But sometimes we can lag in the middle, we can languish. But those middle sections are so important to the development of the plot. It's where the characters really encounter the important things that are going to get you to the end. And the same is true of Torah. We read with intrigue the stories of the first families of Breshit. We pour over the poetry and the drama of Deuteronomy of Devarim, but Vaikra, the middle, it often gets neglected, even though that's where some of the best stuff is found. Now, if I protest too much, maybe it's because I'm a middle child. But I think this is all trying to call our attention to the middle. Maimonides, who is famous in Jewish thought for teaching that moral virtue lies in a golden mean, a balanced middle path between extremes of excess and deficiency in one's character traits. For Rambam, we're not supposed to be too courageous, that would be reckless. If we're too generous, we might be wasteful. And if we're not generous enough, we'd be stingy. So Rambam argues that people should train themselves through the habit and practice to consistently choose a balanced path. And he thinks this is the path of God. To ultimately live according to the golden mean leads to ethical behavior and spiritual perfection. And as my teacher pointed out to me when I studied this, it doesn't mean that you need to be meh in all things. It doesn't mean you need to be average or not defined. It's not like you go about your day with a sort of baseline, you know, board. The middle is not boring. It's not an exact midpoint between extremes, but it's a way of finding balance that is strong and stable, measured, especially when considering change. In more recent history, you might look to the contemporary political philosopher Adam Gopnick, who wrote a book back in 2019 called A Thousand Small Sanities. In the book, he describes liberalism, not left-wing progressive liberalism, but capital L liberalism. He calls it a moral adventure that helps preserve our society and our democracy. And in it he describes a middle path, a middle path temperament. Liberalism is a way to navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of right wing and left-wing dogmatisms. I think that's the kind of language that we need to get more comfortable talking about. We can still have our passions and our visions of what the world should look like, but we need to develop those core muscles that enable us to strengthen and stabilize our world. Now there are a lot of reasons these approaches are not popular these days, and they don't get a lot of attention. They're drowned out by the more extreme voices. People, I could list them, you know, people are able to unfollow people who they don't agree with. People have short attention spans, so everyone is quick to judge and slow or even unwilling to understand. The sheer pace and change of events in the world make keeping up more challenging. And the decline of religious life and communal institutions that foster tolerance and understanding have meant that as a society we are losing our core. And usually this is the point in a sermon where I offer you some options about how to put this theory into practice, but I'm not gonna do that this morning. I suppose I could tell you to observe Shabbat so you take time to think more carefully about the world or just to let your brain rest. I could tell you to be more involved in your religious community here at CAI. Those are good, but I'm not gonna ask you to do that today. Today I want you just to pay attention to a little vav, or rather, a big vov. Just pay attention. I want you to think about what the Torah might be calling us to consider by taking one small letter and making it a little bigger. Maybe you want to think about how that draws your attention to the center of the Torah and reflect and ruminate on what its meaning is for you. And maybe that curiosity about a single letter might lead to some discovery that helps heal yourself or our society at large. So my message, this Shabbat, is pretty simple. Just look at a single letter and consider how it might invite us to all be connectors in our world at large. Shabbat shalom.