The life-sustaining wellspring of Judaism

Rabbi Ammos Chorny

Most books we read, we open but once! A classic draws us to revisit it on occasion. Not so with the Torah. As we finish its yearly reading in synagogue, we immediately begin it afresh, without interruption.

By the Middle Ages, a special festival of Simhat Torah emerged to mark the completion of the cycle. As the name suggests, our “joy in the Torah” gives expression to the centrality of the sacred book in our lives. The processions around the synagogue with bundles of palm, myrtle and willow branches in hand, transmuted into a seven-fold procession of dancing and singing with Torah scrolls in thankfulness for the privilege of finishing yet another round of reading from beginning to end.

Simhat Torah points to the momentous shift from sacred space to sacred Book, which Judaism negotiated after the destruction of the Second Temple. The void came to be filled by the synagogue, with Scripture serving as its oxygen. Words replaced sacrifices, while public reading of the Torah became the vehicle for adult education, the Psalms providing the lion’s share of the liturgy. Emanating from the Book, study and prayer shaped the character of the institution.

Unlike the Temple, the synagogue was portable, democratic and unencumbered by laws of purity. Jews could now build places of worship wherever they might settle. Therein, they approached God in prayer on their own, without a priestly hierarchy. Only ignorance barred one from reading Torah or from leading services. Above all, the synagogue took refuge in the sanctity of the Book par excellence, which harbored not only God’s word but God’s manifest presence.

Every Jew has had access to, and a share in, God’s word, which is why the Torah is never read without asking a specified number to experience the act up-close (a minyan) by taking an Aliyah. As the final portion, read on Simhat Torah, emphatically affirms the Torah is the sacred heirloom of the entire people: “Moses commanded us the Torah as the heritage of the congregation of Jacob” (Deut. 33:4).

From earliest age, children are brought to appreciate that the life-sustaining wellspring of Judaism is a book that, in time, they will make their own. In short, the Torah is an extension of God’s persona.

There is no greater sacrilege in Judaism than the desecration of a Torah scroll. We rise in its presence, carry and kiss it like a child and bury it when worn and tattered as if it were human. Reading it is the central feature of the synagogue service and retaining the archaic format of a scroll over a codex heightens our sense of otherness and holiness.

Among life’s most important and enduring tasks is to study its endlessly expansive contents. Thus, the wraparound ritual of Simhat Torah comports expressively with this book-based value system. The absence of a caesura signifies our yearning to be ever in the shade of God’s protective presence. Especially in dark times, Jews repeatedly took refuge in their books: from the time of the Mishnah to the Warsaw ghetto … the people of the book met brutality with spiritual resistance.

The response, in truth, failed to avert death for many of the victims, but it often left behind a testimony of inspiring consolation. By infusing suffering with dignity and purpose, we have given meaning to our untrammeled lives. I am reminded of the older men, fathers and educators, whom we never met or of whom we have no memory, who in their last tormented months before death in the concentration camps, transcended their appalling confines by reading.

Let us now, in the threshold of a new year, grab hold of the torch that is the Torah, and illuminate the path forward with God’s word and its millenary teachings.

Rabbi Ammos Chorny serves at Beth Tikvah.