This week's newsletter looks toward the holiday of Simhat Torah. The photo is of a sign from my collection of Jewish material culture specifically of Jewish signs. This is from a Torah scribe from the Lower East Side. The sign says: A scribe from Israel. Torah scrolls--old and new. Tefillin, mezuzot, megillot. Talleism, perakhosin, mantlikh and all other tashmishei kedushah (things used with Torah scrolls). "T'fillin checking while-u-wait."
hag sameah
michael
A word of Torah:
After 40 days together on Mt. Sinai, God gives Moses the tablets. When Moses comes down from the mountain and sees the Israelites worshipping the Golden Calf, he smashes those tablets. Eventually, God invites Moses to return to the mountain and tells him to write a second set of tablets. I used to understand this text as another example of the failure of human beings to accept God’s gifts for them. We only deserve the second rate set of tablets---not one written by the hand of God but by mortal Moses.
I now think that the point is the opposite. The world needs to be built by human hands, guided by laws and wisdom developed and written by human beings. We are seekers of truth not guardians of the truth. The midrash tells us that when the Ark of the Covenant was completed, the second set of tablets were put inside but the broken pieces of the first set were also placed in the Ark of the Covenant (Bava Batra 14b). We strive for a vision of the whole tablets. We may attain pieces of that vision, but for now, the Torah we live with is the human interpretation of the encounter with the divine at Sinai.
Our task is to continue to study the written Torah. As we bring our insights and our questions and challenges to the text, we create the Oral Torah, which changes in each generation. We live in the tension between the written Torah and our contemporary understanding. Each challenges the other. That is the task of all those who are students of Torah. It is why we need two Torahs—the written and the oral. One without the other would be incomplete.
Who is engaged in this extraordinary process? The wisest scholars of our time? In fact, all of us are participants, each adding the piece of our lives to the Torah. According to a mystical tradition, each Jew has one letter of the Torah, our own special letter that we learn and develop and raise up to the Holy One. (See Me’or Einayim on Va-Yelekh) This notion is based on the tradition that there are 600,000 letters in the Torah and there were 600,000 Jews who left Egypt. (Neither count is really accurate). Each person’s Torah is different and unique. This vision, that each of us has our own special letter of the Torah, is empowering, but also frightening for it means that with so many Jews distant from Judaism, whole parts of the Torah are being left unread. According to Jewish law, if even one letter is missing from a Torah scroll, it is pasul/not kosher and can’t be used in the synagogue. Lacking even one Jew, one letter, the Torah scroll is incomplete. Our task is to invite everyone to find their place in the Torah scroll. Adding their “Torah,” their understandings, to ours and to those that came before, will help complete the Torah. On Simhat Torah, we invite everyone to join hands and embrace the Torah with joy.
1.Why do we need both the holiday of Shavuot and Simhat Torah? The Hasidic master, the Sefat Emet, suggests that we receive the Torah at the revelation of Sinai. We study it. On Simhat Torah, we hold the Torah and dance--to embody the Torah spiritually.
2. Rabbi Soloveitchik, the leader of Modern Orthodoxy in the 20th century, taught that during the week of Sukkot, we take out the Torah scrolls and we circle around them carrying the four species. On Simhat Torah, we take out the Torah scrolls and circle around the synagogue in whose center was the Shekhinah/the divine presence. Therefore, he would rope off the central bimah/Torah reading table to prevent anyone accidently intruding on that space.
Song
moshe emet
ve-toratekha emet
Moses is truth and Your Torah is true
A song of the Bratslav hasidim
