Parashat Vaera contains dots over a couple of words. My plan is to explain more about dots this time next week, but here’s an example to get us started. Genesis 18:9:

וַיֹּאמְרוּ אֵלָיו אַיֵּה שָׂרָה אִשְׁתֶּךָ וַיֹּאמֶר הִנֵּה בָאֹהֶל

They said to him, “Where is your wife Sarah?” And he replied, “There, in the tent.”

The traditional commentators point out that angels are from God, and therefore they know perfectly well that Sarah is in the tent. Why on earth do they ask Avraham where Sarah is?

Because that’s a polite way of starting a conversation, they explain. They ask Avraham how he’s doing, and they ask after his partner.

Now, you can see that three letters of אליו – to him – aleph, yud, and vav – have dots over them. What does that spell? איו, ayo. Ayo is a word that means “where is he?” What’s the very next word? איה, ayeh.

We explain that just as they said “Ayeh” – Where is Sarah? – they also said “Ayo” – Where is Avraham? Just like the angels chatted with Avraham and inquired after his wife, they also chatted with Sarah and inquired after her husband.

This particular part of the Torah is high on action and low on mitzvot. You can read the text just as an interesting story, and that’s nice, but the dots here invite us to consider what mitzvot we can learn even when we’re reading stories. The text stops being just a nice story that you hear during Torah reading, and turns into an extra thread in the weave that binds Torah, Judaism, and human relationships. This neatly illustrates the idea that the Torah contains more than just the plain text.