THE COVER
One of the perks of being a yeshiva student forty years ago in Israel was free Torah books! The Ministry of Religion had a warehouse in Yaffa. You had to make an appointment and expect to wait on line for a bit, but when you got through the door, you had a choice of hundreds of foundation texts. Each time I received my allotted three books, if they had any damaged books you could take them also. The annual bus ride into the strange underbelly of Tel Aviv was one of the highlights of my year.
These were the days before cell phones. Once, after making my choices, I had to make a call and in my broken Hebrew asked the elderly man behind the desk if there was a public phone somewhere. He motioned me upstairs. I walked up the narrow staircase and found a big airy room filled with hundreds of Torah scrolls. They were lined up three or four thick against the wall, almost the entire perimeter. In the middle of this ocean of holiness was a man on a stool at table with a scroll opened in front of him. Forgetting all about my phone call, I asked him what was this? He looked up and explained that when Jewish communities in the Diaspora emptied out and the synagogues closed, often the scrolls were donated to Israel to be given to new communities. His job was to check that no letters were missing or damaged. He proudly pointed at the scroll he was working on and said that it was many hundreds of years old. Now he really had my attention. I carefully moved closer to take a look.
A few times a week, some friends and I had a lesson with Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, a scholar and kabbalist who lives in Kfar Chabad, and was actually from the Bronx! At that time, he had been explaining that the Torah was G-d’s eternal will and wisdom. Just as times changed, so also our understanding of the Torah changed through its many different commentaries. Not only that, even the Torah itself changed! The way the letters were written was once much more relaxed. Any place where Jewish law dictated open space, like inside the letter pei or above the letter lamed, scribes were free to draw their own designs! But, Rabbi Ginsburgh explained, scribes do not do this anymore; the rules have become much stricter as we come closer to the final redemption with Mashiach. Just as most of the work to bring the redemption has been completed and elevating the final sparks requires a much more specific focus, so has the writing of the letters in the scroll become more restricted. This is similar to how the norms of how observant people are expected to dress and behave in public have become more strict in recent generations even if the Torah ideas have become more powerful and personal and engrossing. Viewed in this light, the rigidness we see in the external aspects of the observant community is not a bad thing at all, but really a sign that the Torah is alive, something dynamic. At first this notion was hard to accept, but if my rabbi said it, it had to be true.
So here was my chance to actually see those letters! But as I looked over his shoulder, all there was, was the “same old, same old”. They all looked like the letters we usually see in Torah scrolls. My disappointment was so great that I actually sighed. He looked at me and in his broken English asked what was wrong? It took a couple of minutes but I explained my problem. He smiled and rolled the big scroll one folio forward. And there it was, totally amazing. A psychedelic Torah scroll.
He then told me, “Sorry, I forgot to mention. One of my jobs is to scrape away all the extra ink…. We can’t send out scrolls written with letters like those to all these young new communities.”
Sivan is the month in which the Torah was given. Friends, don’t forget, you can’t judge a book by its cover.
Chag Sameach, Shaul