Smallness and greatness in the Aleph

The first letter in the Hebrew alphabet is Aleph ~ א. The same letters that spell the name of this letter also spell the word for one thousand--Eleph. Correspondingly, there are one thousand verses in the book of Vayikra, the middle book of the Torah.

Aleph is the last letter of the first word in the book of Vayikra. In traditional Torah scrolls, this Aleph is written in miniature form, as if in superscript at the end of the word. The secrets behind the small Aleph have been expounded upon for centuries.

The small Aleph is the 5th letter of the book of Vayikra, in the verse "And God called (vayikra) to Moses". The 5th verse of the Torah also begins with the same word--Vayikra. "And God called the light day and the darkness he called light; it was evening, it was morning, one day." Like in English, the word called can mean both 'to name', as it does in the fifth verse of Genesis, or to 'get the attention of', as it does in Vayikra.

Interestingly, the 5th appearance this multifaceted word 'Vayikra' in the Torah is the first time the word Vayikra with the connotation of 'calling at' someone. "And God called to Adam, and said to him, Where are you?"

These numerological secrets of the letters of the Torah hint at one layer of secrets hidden in the small Alef of Vayikra. In 1 Chronicles the word 'Adam' is written not with a small or standard Aleph, but specifically with a large Aleph. Kabbalah teaches that the Large Aleph (Aleph Rabbati) of Adam is what brought to the primordial error of eating from the Tree of Knowledge before its time. The rectification of this error is brought about through the small Aleph of "And God c(a)lled to Moses".

Even though the small aleph of Moses rectified the fall of pride, our destiny is to return to the divine illumination that was available to Adam corresponding to the Large Aleph, now infused with the nullification of Moses, such that the fullness of God is both experienced through us and returned to its source. 

~ collected from the writings of Yitzchak Ginsburgh and R' Schneur Zalman of Liadi