Little Letters in Eicha, part 1

[hatam_soferet]

I’ve not posted much on the Big and Little Letters in Torah, have I? And now I’m posting on the Little Letters in Eicha – well, I’m between Torahs at the moment, and indulging in a spate of megillot, Eicha amongst them, which has something to do with it.

1:12
(Sofer Boyfriend wrote this one.)
לוא אליכם כל עברי דרך הביטו וראו אם יש מכאוב כמכאבי אשר עולל לי אשר הוגה יקוק ביום חרון אפו	Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me, wherewith the LORD hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger.

There’s a whole tradition of interpreting the Big and Small letters. A few of them are in the Gemara, where the context is Explaining Something Everyone Knows more than Telling You How To Do This New Thing; the rest of them have been around for something like a thousand years but mostly we didn’t write down explanations, so they’ve suffered the usual fates of verbal explanations — ambition, distraction, uglification and derision — as you might imagine.

Anyway. Sometimes a Little Letter is interpreted as suggesting a particular Littleness. You may be familar with one from Torah, explained thus: “The conceits of the Cabalistic writers are most curious; for instance, they suppose that Abraham wept but little for Sarah, because a remarkably small letter — “Caph” — is used in the Hebrew word which describes Abraham’s tears, thus evincing that his grief was also small.” (That’s a footnote in a book from 1862 about anagrams; don’t take it too strongly to heart. I just liked the style.)

What would be the Littleness here? I’m going to quote from a book by one Tzvi Ron, ספר קטן וגדול, Gush Etzion, 2006, translated by G. Wasserman:

R. Shelomo Alqabes explains that the allusion is to the smallness of the Jews’ prayer to be spared from punishment: “Their prayer was not offered בעין טובה [generously], for there is no goodness for the wicked.” In Sefer Elyashiv, it explains the smallness as being the smallness of learning a lesson, for the gentile nations did not learn a lesson from seeing that God had punished the Jewish people for their sins.

Tzvi Ron also says “According to Midrash R. ‘Aqiva, it is a hint to words which begin with lamed, for the Jewish people had once been לראש, and now were לזנב.”

You might reasonably point out that lots of words begin with lamed and this concept cannot be uniformly applied, yes. So you might reasonably conclude either that there’s more to it than that but we’ve lost the tradition, or that you should go read the Midrash R. ‘Aqiva and see if it addresses that point.

What I want to take away from this particular point is the idea that a Little Letter is not just a mouseover interpretation, it’s a sort of ambiguation — like a Wikipedia disambiguation, but the other way over — the suggestion that there are vague links here to other instances of that letter. This point to be developed in part 2, coming soon.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.