Vayikra

In the synagogue the Torah is read aloud in a fixed annual cycle of fifty-four weekly portions (parashiyot), one each Shabbat morning, with certain adjacent portions doubled in ordinary years so the sequence fits the calendar. Each portion is named for a distinctive word near its opening and is paired with a haftarah, a reading from the Prophets. The cycle closes and restarts on Simchat Torah. Vayikra ('And He called', Leviticus 1:1-5:26) opens the book of Leviticus with the system of offerings brought at the sanctuary, the burnt offering, the grain offering, the peace offering, and the offerings for sin and guilt, the ritual vocabulary of ancient Israelite worship.

Vayikra's opening word, giving the whole book of Leviticus its Hebrew title, is written in the Torah scroll with an unusually small final letter, aleph, a scribal tradition rabbinic commentary explains variously as expressing Moses' own humility in receiving the honour of being specifically called by God, or as distinguishing the verb 'called' from the similar word used of Balaam's more chance encounter with God in the book of Numbers, read as marking the difference between direct prophetic summons and incidental revelation. The sacrificial system detailed across the portion, burnt, grain, peace, sin and guilt offerings, each with its own procedure and permitted worshipper, functioned in the Temple period as the central vocabulary of Israelite worship, and its detailed regulation of unintentional sin (Leviticus 4) is read by commentators as reflecting a legal system concerned with restoring right relationship even where no conscious wrongdoing occurred.

The Masoretic tradition preserves a distinctive scribal feature at the very start of Leviticus: in the word vayikra, 'and He called' (Leviticus 1:1), the final letter aleph is conventionally written smaller than the surrounding text in many Torah scrolls. Classical commentary reads the small aleph as an expression of Moses' own humility, contrasting the deliberate, invited calling given to him with the verb used for Balaam's encounter with God later in the Torah, vayikar, 'and He happened upon him,' written without the aleph at all to suggest a chance, lesser encounter rather than a sought and welcomed one; the contrast is drawn entirely from the two verbs' spelling rather than from any statement the text makes explicitly.

A long-standing Jewish educational custom, recorded in Midrash Vayikra Rabbah, begins children's earliest formal Torah study with the book of Leviticus rather than with Genesis, on the reasoning that just as sacrificial law is chiefly concerned with purity, the youngest students, held to be pure of sin, are best matched with a text concerned with purity before other material. Source critics attribute Vayikra's sacrificial legislation to the Priestly source, generally regarded as one of the latest strands to reach its final form, in contrast to this same portion's central place in the earliest stage of traditional Jewish education.