Have you ever wondered why the Torah begins with  ב, the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet (Bet), instead of the first letter (Aleph)? Virgil and Homer (in the Odyssey) begin their epic poems with the first letters of their respective alphabets; so does Camões, the Portuguese poet whose Os Lusíadas celebrated Vasco da Gama. Ah, you wonder why the Torah should be considered among epic poems, but surely those are the poems that tell of great travels, of obstacles and victory, furnishing a cultural heritage that unites a group of people into a nation.

Do you think a poet gives no thought to the very first letter of a work designed to secure enduring fame?

Of course, the first letter of all these works may be simply a coincidence, but I have often wondered about the Torah’s first letter.

To me, it suggests that there is no beginning. This is obviously true from the point of view of an eternal and omniscient God who knows all the history that preceded Creation. For me, the world began at my birth, but in time I learned what came before. I know I appeared at lunchtime because the bossy midwife, convinced my mother would be in labor for hours, was leaving for her lunch when I arrived. Later I learned family and national history. Which of us can claim that our beginning–our birth, or the most ancient history of our tribe or species–is The Beginning? Perhaps knowing that we are late to the party, that most of the guests arrived before us and many will stay after we are gone, should teach us a little humility.

Again, it suggests something about the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet. The Aleph has no sound; Lawrence Kushner once demonstrated in a brilliant lecture that’s it’s like a glottal stop, except that it starts instead of stopping, and told his rapt listeners that the Kotzker Rebbe described it as “the sound you make before you make a sound.” Oh, is not this a field for mystics to plough? And in that case, surely the second letter of the alphabet is the first external sound, a metaphor for visible and tangible reality. The second letter represents the number two, and can creation take place without division and separation? Surely, unless God somehow compromised God’s own unity, there would be nothing but God (and perhaps there is nothing but God, and all that we think we perceive, even we ourselves, are merely possibilities in the divine imagination). This too is a field for the Hexameral exegesis, of which I was unaware until a recent email from my wise and well-read friend Frank Leib.

Robert Graves’ meditation on the origins of alphabets in The White Goddess offers another path where we can ramble. Some language historians think accountants invented writing to keep count of sheep and other possessions, but Graves thinks it may have been poets, and that their first alphabets may have been a kind of sign language–not to be read or written–a way to communicate with those who understood and to exclude those who had never learned its mysteries. The early alphabets he explores may have had no vowels, and their first letter may have been B. Graves’ focus is ancient Irish and Welsh, not Hebrew, but can anyone encounter the Torah without wondering at the missing vowels, or Hebrew without wondering at the silent letters?

I have no answer for the question I posed. I don’t know if the Torah’s first letter is simply coincidence or if the lines of inquiry I follow can shed any light on the question. But I don’t think the question is an idle one. I think it is strange and wonderful that writing–a few marks on a flat surface–can excite our awe, plunge us into dejection or make us laugh uproariously or shed tears of joy. And that’s why every feature of the written Torah deserves my interest, if not yours.