The Words That Kept Us

New York State passed a buffer zone law on Tuesday. Fifty feet of protected space around the entrances to synagogues, houses of worship, schools, community centers. A misdemeanor if you knowingly use that space to block someone's access or put them in fear for their safety. The UJA-Federation thanked Governor Hochul and the bill sponsors for "strong leadership." Jewish organizations that had been pushing for the law since a string of anti-Israel protests outside New York synagogues started crossing from political demonstration into something else said the law was overdue.

I'll take the win.

What I kept thinking about, reading the story on Tuesday evening, was something in this week's parasha. In Nasso, Moses receives a three-verse text to teach Aaron's sons — the words the kohanim are to say over the people after the offerings. No setup, no explanation. God gives it to Moses, Moses gives it to Aaron and his sons, and the next verse says that is how the priests shall put God's name on the children of Israel, and God will bless them.

יְבָרֶכְךָ֥ יְהוָ֖ה וְיִשְׁמְרֶֽךָ׃ יָאֵ֨ר יְהוָ֧ה ׀ פָּנָ֛יו אֵלֶ֖יךָ וִֽיחֻנֶּֽךָּ׃ יִשָּׂ֨א יְהוָ֤ה ׀ פָּנָיו֙ אֵלֶ֔יךָ וְיָשֵׂ֥ם לְךָ֖ שָׁלֽוֹם׃

May the ETERNAL bless you and protect you! May the ETERNAL deal kindly and graciously with you! May the ETERNAL bestow divine favor upon you and grant you peace!

— Bamidbar 6:24–26

The structure of the Hebrew is worth sitting with. The first verse has three words. The second has five. The third has seven. Three, five, seven — the blessing expands with each line, and the last word, shalom, sits at the end of the longest. The first verse asks for protection. The second asks for grace — God's face turned toward you, lit as if you are worth being seen. The third asks for peace, which in Hebrew carries everything the other two were building toward: wholeness, completeness, the absence of what should not be there.

In 1979, Gabriel Barkay was excavating burial caves at Ketef Hinnom in Jerusalem — a hillside cemetery used from around 650 BCE. In one of the caves, among jewelry and arrowheads, a student on the dig found two tiny silver scrolls, each about the size of a cigarette filter. When conservators finally unrolled them — a process that took years — they found the text of Numbers 6:24–26. Both scrolls. The same verses, twice over, in Hebrew script from the late First Temple period. These are the oldest known physical specimens of biblical text we have. They predate the Dead Sea Scrolls by four centuries. They predate the destruction of the First Temple. They were almost certainly amulets — carried by people who believed the words inside would keep them safe.

We don't know whose they were. We know someone wanted these words with them.

The Talmud notices something peculiar about the blessing's grammar. The kohen stands before an entire congregation, but the Hebrew uses second-person singular throughout. Not you-all. Not you-the-community. Just you. May He bless you. May He protect you. The rabbis conclude this is deliberate — the blessing is addressed to everyone present in the exact same way, each person receiving it as if they alone are being blessed. The singular is not a grammatical error. It is the theological point.

You. May His face turn toward you. May you have peace.

In many Ashkenazi communities the kohanim recite the blessing on holidays with the congregation covered by tallitot, so as not to look at the hands of the priests forming the letter shin. In other communities the gabbai reads the words aloud and the congregation repeats them. The Amidah carries the blessing as a standing daily prayer. And every Friday night, before kiddush, parents put their hands on their children's heads and say these three verses — or something very close to them. My husband learned this from his parents. I learned it from watching him, then from practice, and now the words are in my hands the way they're supposed to be.

The New York buffer zone is a different kind of protection. Civic, enforced by police, punishable by misdemeanor. It does not turn God's face toward anyone. But I don't think the two kinds of protection are in competition with each other. The buffer zone says: the fifty feet around this door belong to the people coming to pray inside it. The Birkat Kohanim says: the whole field of your life belongs to God's attention. One of these was signed by a governor on a Tuesday in Albany. The other has been said aloud over silver amulets since before the Babylonian exile.

Both are trying to protect the same thing.

The scrolls from Ketef Hinnom are in the Israel Museum now. Unrolled under glass, next to photographs of the excavation and technical notes on how conservators opened them without destroying what was inside. The text is not completely preserved — the silver corroded over two and a half millennia — but enough survived to confirm what was written. Yivarechecha YHWH v'yishmerecha. May He bless you and keep you.

Those words will be said again in synagogues this Shabbat. Said over children in living rooms before the Friday night meal. Said in Israel, in New York, in Atlanta. The silver survived. The words survived. And this week, fifty feet of air around the door where they're spoken did too.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham