Taggin, the crownlets on the letters in the Torah
There is a famous story in the Talmud (Men 29b) that when Moses ascended Mount Sinai to receive the Torah, he found God still finishing up, putting crowns onto the letters.
“God,” says Moses, “‘sup? You don’t need these!”
“Aha,” God replies, “but after many generations, a scholar by the name of Rabbi Akiva will arise who will derive from them mountains of laws.”
Mount Sinai is the original Mountain of Law, and on top of the Mountain of Law are squillions of crowns which are all themselves mountains of law, and so ad infinitum. I’m sure there’s a spiritual word for “fractal,” but I can’t think of it at the moment – anyway, it suggests the move from the first mountain, the physical realm, into the mountains beyond, the metaphysical realm.
Sefer Yetzirah (trans. Aryeh Kaplan; 3:7) says These crowns represent the higher spiritual nature of the letters. If the letters themselves are in Assiyah, then the crowns on top bind them to Yetzirah – that is, if the letters are in the lowest sphere of existence, the physical world, the crowns form the link into the next sphere of existence, that which shapes the physical world.
The letters shin, ayin, tet, nun, zayin, gimel, and tzaddi are the ones with crownlets. Actually, what the Talmud says is that these letters are zayinified (why is it that a Jewish blog can’t write Hebrew?; sheva otiot tzarikhot shelosha ziunin), and indeed the crownlets approximately resemble zayins, being a little stick with a lump on the top, which fundamentally is what makes zayin. Of course if you put zayins on a letter, the zayins have zayins, and so on, which is why I made the animation above. (Heh. I’ve been wanting to do that for ages.)
Part of the kabbalistic apparatus is the set of sefirot, sort-of divine levels of understanding. The ultimate one is Infinity, the utterly-unknowable-unless-you’re-God, then you get revelation and understanding (the intellectual realm, apparently), then a bunch of things like mercy and grace (the emotive realm), but this is a very bald rendering and properly it is terribly nuanced and subtle. And there are ten altogether.
Zayin is the seventh letter in the alef-bet, and it has three taggin. That makes ten sefirot! So one interpretation of a zayin is that the seven part, underneath, corresponds to the seven sefirot in the emotive realm, and the three part, the three higher.
In which case, the three taggin correspond to Keter (Infinity), Hokhmah (Wisdom), and Binah (Love). The middle one is the tallest, and represents Keter, which is the highest possible state of being; Hokhmah is the next tallest and the next most important so it sits on the right, and Binah is the shortest and sits on the left (Understanding the Alef-Beis, Dovid Leitner).
Talking of wisdom and understanding, what was the deal with Rabbi Akiva earlier? Rabbi Akiva represents a period in rabbinic history when scholars were looking at the day-to-day Judaism which had evolved with the societies it was part of, noting that in some places it didn’t much resemble the original Torah, and doing something about that. To wit, tracing the exegetical paths that ran between the Torah and the current Judaism. Depending on your attitude towards rabbinics, you may find this more or less evidence-of-divine-planning or contrived-post-facto – logical processes leading to everything we do or customs given authenticity by retroactive and unlikely links to biblical authority. It doesn’t really matter; whichever way you swing, Rabbi Akiva and his successors were engaged in an activity that shaped Judaism. That’s not relevant to crownlets per se, except that it was an activity directed at Keter which required Hokhmah and Bina…anyway, I like it.
What God and Moses were talking about were not the crownlets you are talking about. How can Reb Akivah possibly derive laws from crownlets if they are determined by the letters?
Pre Mesoretic Torah scrolls had letters with crownlets different for every word. Those were part of a tradition. When that tradition was lost, letters defaulted to fixed crownlets. Reb Akivah explained how the unique crownlets on a given word alluded to a rabbinic halachic law.
Hershey, that’s really interesting. I had never heard that before. Can you point me towards a source so I can learn more?
Me too, Hersh!…
your contention actually answers the question I’ve had for a while (how can tagin be interepreted if they are completely predictable), but like my teachers always said: “you don’t really know it unless you know the mekorot for it.”
Fascinating! Beautiful animation, too! But what about the tree-crown that appears over one or two words? What’s with that?
Hershey, that is very interesting. Tell us more, do; I would like to incorporate that.
I think the symbolism still stands, though.
And I don’t see why something can’t be interpreted even if it is completely predictable. That’s sort of the point of exegesis. Or compare mathematics; it’s all completely predictable, but that doesn’t mean we know it all already.
@Simcha – that’s called “having fun” 🙂 here, fun with taggin 1 and fun with taggin 2. Seriously, I expect someone has a terribly earnest mesorah about such things, but I think there’s also a mesorah of doing things that just seemed like a good idea.
Kudos on the taggin-fractal gif in post! Mesmerizing.
Hershey – that’s just nonsense. Pre Masoretic scrolls (like those at Qumran) have no taggin at all.
Well, I’d certainly defer to others on this point, but HatamSoferet’s explanation is what I’ve always heard. So I’m skeptical of Hershey’s claim as well, particularly given this sentence:
How can Reb Akivah possibly derive laws from crownlets if they are determined by the letters?
How is this more impossible than other methods by which the rabbis determine meanings and laws? It’s not unusual for the rabbis to blantantly “misread” words or single letters to derive particular meanings, even though those words are presumably determined by their letters. That’s just part and parcel of the rabbinic exegetical method.
I agree with “Chillul Who?’. A drash only comes when there is an anomaly in the text. For example, Reb Akiva may say, why does the Tzadi of Etz Ovoth (Lev. 23:40) have only one tag instead of the usual three? To teach us one myrtle stick is enough for the purpose of the mitzvah, as is Reb Akivah’s opinion (Babli Sukko 34b).
Miri,
How is this more impossible than other methods by which the rabbis determine meanings and laws? It’s not unusual for the rabbis to blantantly “misread” words or single letters to derive particular meanings, even though those words are presumably determined by their letters. That’s just part and parcel of the rabbinic exegetical method.
Some exegetes, most notably Malbim, toiled very hard to repudiate this notion. However, even according to mainstream exegeses, at least a claim is made that an anomaly exists. It is rare to project something unto a word if everything is perfect otherwise.
The midrash about the “ktarim” is more complicated than it seems: R. Akiva himself never expounded on the crowns of the letters, which did not exist in his time. The Bavli says R. Akiva would expound on each “kotza and kotza”, which has nothing to do with the crownlets. The whole story is problematic and hardly makes any sense. But it does point to the fact (actual fact) that there is not ONE homily in rabbinic literature explicitly based on the crowns.
RE: Miri’s claim – the rabbis need a textual peg to hang their readings on. And the would argue they were not “misreading” anything.
Tradition has it that author of this book was Reb Akiva himself.
Read it here:
http://www.hebrewbooks.org/pdfpager.aspx?req=35787&pgnum=47&hilite=
It’s not easy read, but those of you versed in Midrashic Aramaic will make through.
the rabbis need a textual peg to hang their readings on. And the would argue they were not “misreading” anything.
Of course they would (that’s why I put “misread” in scare quotes). But I’m not sure about the larger point. I mean, I suppose if there were, in fact, no words on the page, it would be difficult for the rabbis to derive an interpretation.
But I think many rabbinic readings are so far from the peshat as to be almost unrecognizable (having just taught a class mostly in rabbinics this semester, I encountered a whole classroom of people going “where did they get this stuff?”) and I’m not sure why we want to shy away from this; I think it’s one of the most interesting facets of rabbinic discourse.
Sometimes there’s a clear(ish) link between the peshat and the rabbis’ readings, and sometimes there’s not. At all. Personally, I find that cool.
Miri – far from the pshat, perhaps; consistent and faithful to a certain mode of reading the text – no less.
The animation is not loading. Can check that so we can see it?