“Whatever crawls on its belly…” (Leviticus 11:42).
The word for stomach/belly is gachon. The letter vav in this word is always written enlarged in a Torah scroll. It happens to be the middle letter in the entire Torah, the center point.
The meaning of vav in Hebrew is a hook. The letter actually has the shape of a hook. The vav is also the letter in the Hebrew alphabet used as the conjunctive – it means “and”. We connect two Hebrew words by placing the letter vav at the beginning of the second word.
We learn from here that the belly, the core, the guts of the Torah is captured by the letter vav which means “connection”. The entire goal of Torah is connection. Connecting us to our true selves, to each other and to the Creator.
By Rabbi Michael Skobac
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