Ilustration Credit: Elad Lifshitz, Dov Abramson Studio

Pashta is a very simple note and it appears in almost every verse in the Torah. It means “stretching out” and it looks like an arc going up to the left—exactly like a kadma! So how do you tell them apart? Well, a kadma goes on the accented part of the word. But a pashta is always at the very end of the word, and the accent will always be on the last syllable where there’s a pashta, but the pashta won’t necessarily appear on the accented letter. If you see something that looks like this note and it is hanging off the word, you know it is a pashta. Take a look at this example from our parashah:

The first note, on the right, is a kadma. It is above the samekh, which is the letter where the accent is in the word ha-o-SEIF. But the last note, on the left, is a pashta. Even though the accent should be on the reish, since the word is ha-pa-RAH, the note hangs off the last letter, because that’s where a pashta always goes. Here is a very clear example from much earlier in the Torah, where you can see the difference between a pashta (at the end) and a kadma (in the middle), both on the same word:

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