What's In The Torah Is Also On The Torah
by Ira Rosenberg
Last Thursday, we studied the Sefat Emet's parsha on Va-Yikra -- the
beginning of the Book of Leviticus. Naturally he had a lot of wise
things to say about doing Mitzvot, but then he launched into something
entirely new to me and I got especially attentive. " With regard to the small
Aleph of Va-Yikra..." he said, in the middle of his talk ... What small
Aleph? I didn't know there were small Alephs or big Alephs, and not capital
letters either. Tammy, Ann, Mike and Rabbi Margaret knew all about them,
because they read from the Torah scroll itself, while Walter, Jerry and I
were unaware.
Apparently at a few strategic places in the handwritten scroll a
letter of a different height is thrown into the calligraphy -- it's been done
for a couple of thousand years. But why? to the Sefat Emet (who died in
Poland in 1905, which is not that long ago by Jewish reckoning,) said that
the "reduced letters seem connected to matters that depend upon action,
the light of Torah flowing in a reduced and concentrated way into the
actual doing of the mitzvah." I was sitting there thinking I'd like to see
that aleph -- it was like a little homeopathic dosage -- when Rabbi
Margaret suddenly said "I've been thinking we ought to use our Torah scroll
more regularly. Let's go look at it."
With a little due ceremony, but not much, we got the Torah out of the
ark and on the big table opened to the weekly portion. Our Torah, I must
say, even for a renegade like me, commands respect because it's a holocaust
survivor from the town of Sedlcany in Czechoslovakia -- one of the
scrolls the Nazi's stole for their Museum of Jewish History after they
sent the Jews to the camps.
Our Torah scroll was liberated after the war, made its way to London
where it was repaired and resanctified by scribes and then by a series
of remarkable coincidences either we found it or it found us on the
Northern California coast, where we live, due east of Chelm.
And there it was: the little homeopathic Aleph, just as predicted!
And there were all kinds of other gaps and spaces in the columns, all
traditional Margaret told us. At her suggestion we rolled through the
parchment chapter by chapter, book by book, with Tammy and Mike at the
handles. Now we were looking for the gigantic Ayin and Dalet in the
calligraphy of the Shema which also had mystical import.
As we were scrolling along I noticed that the bottom half of two
columns was discolored. It had become reddish, sepia toned, almost pink. Not
blotted, but faded. "What's that?" I asked. "Probably a water stain,"
someone replied. "Who got water on it?" I wondered.
And then the whole scroll writhed and turned and rose to life and
jumped off the table (metaphorically) in a magnificent way.
We kept rolling on and on. Here there was another water stain -- a
couple of chapters later, another one. Then many turns of clear black
scribal lettering. Oops! Here were two grease spots that looked to
Margaret like elbow marks. Maybe someone fell asleep studying. Here were soot stains: a candle, a fire? How did it happen? There were a few holes
too.
But those water stains kept coming back, drawing our attention
because the pinkish color on the parchment was very arresting. "Maybe they had the whole Torah scroll unrolled out of doors for Simchat Torah," Ann
suggested," and it started to rain, so they threw their coats on it, but
some places got wet?"
"Who knows?"
"Who knows?"
"Who knows? Maybe different stains happened at different times."
"Maybe the Nazis threw it into a wet cattle car?"
"Maybe the shul in Sedlcany was damp on certain days?" Then the
outermost parchments, according to where the Torah had been rolled to by that
week of the Jewish year, would have been more exposed to the elements.
The whole history of that scroll, and the people who read it, who
loved it as well as who hated it, was inscribed on it by life itself. As
completely as the laws and legends and genealogies were written in it, so were
the small joys and sorrows of the community written on it. And the great
angst of the Jewish people was too. And both have their truth.
I bet we could discover some of the story. We'd need a forensic
scientist to come and study the ink, the stains, the grease spots. With
different tests we could approximately date the events , and even cross-check
them with the time of year that the parsha would have been read. Maybe there
are DNA samples in the sweat or tears of the readers -- or in the Chazan's
spittle, or in the German anthropologist's finger prints?
Do anyone know a forensic scientist who would like to come and help
us?
(home)
(calendar)
(info)
(articles)
(sponsors)
(links)
(bios)
(reviews)
(travel)
(recipes)
(projects)
(photos)