Parashat Vayeira 5782
This past Sunday I visited our third grade class. One of the students asked me a question – How many letters are there in a Torah? In rabbinic school we learn that although we “Rabbis to be” will not be able to answer every question put to us, we will be able to know where to go and look for the answer to any question we cannot answer immediately. I immediately knew exactly where to go to answer this question. As the students looked on, I whipped out my cell phone and googled it! There were, I told the students, 304,805 letters in the Torah. In addition, there were 79,847 words in a Torah scroll. In fact, the Talmud tells us that the early Sages were called “soferim”, or “counters” because, so dear was the Torah to them, that they counted every letter and word. To this day, a person who writes a Torah is called a “sofer” – a counter – and not a “kotev” or writer.
