When A Torah Falls to the Ground

I don’t believe I had ever heard of Rabbi Israel of Brno until earlier this week. Or maybe I had heard of him, but without knowing who he was or having read any of his surviving works. Born around the year 1400 and gone from the world in 1480, his life span covered almost the entire fifteenth century. And he had, to say the least, a tumultuous life, on one occasion being imprisoned by the authorities after someone lodged a blood libel against him by claiming he had kidnapped a Christian youth to make some sort of ritual use of the lad’s blood. (That story actually has a good ending—or at least it did for Rabbi Israel: his accuser eventually recanted and was subsequently executed. But they still only let the rabbi out of jail once he formally renounced any future effort to secure compensation for the injustice done him.) I mention him, though, not because of any of those details, but because he is apparently the earliest authority to suggest that the correct way to respond to seeing a Torah scroll, or even a pair of tefillin, fall to the floor is to take the incident as a sign from Heaven for the community to consider its deeds, to spend time in repentance for known and unknown sins, and to fast as a way of atoning for the misdeeds of individuals in the community and of the community itself.

This was an almost natural development of an earlier idea mentioned in the Talmud, where a well-known text enumerates the specific instances in which, after having rent one’s clothing in grief, the tear may never be sewn up: when mourning the loss of a parent and the loss of one’s primary teacher of Torah, when gazing on the site of the destroyed Temple in Jerusalem, or when expressing one’s sense of deep loss after having witnessed the burning of a Torah scroll. (There are others too.) The commentators focus on each instance separately, in the case of the Torah scroll wondering if the law is different if the scroll is burnt accidentally or intentionally, if one actually sees the incident or is merely present in synagogue when it happens, and if it is completely or only partially destroyed. But Rabbi Israel of Brno (pronounced Bruna by the Jews of the time) was the first to decree that the proper response even just to seeing a Torah scroll fall to the ground, let alone to seeing it burnt to ash, is to fast as an expression of sorrowful repentance and to take the incident neither as happenstance nor accident, but as a word from Heaven to the community that the time has come for it to consider its ways and devote time to asking the most monitory of all self-directed questions for any Jewish community: whether the community itself is worthy of having a Torah scroll in its midst. Not whether they can raise the money to repair or replace the damaged scroll. Not what procedures they should put in place to guarantee that this kind of accident never happen again. Not, and least of all, whom they should blame for the incident having happened in the first place. Instead, Rabbi Israel suggests that a far more disorienting question be asked: whether this incident can successfully inspire the community to look deep within to consider how privileged its members are to own a Torah scroll in the first place, let alone a dozen of them, and to ask what exactly they have done to make themselves worthy of that privilege.

These are not stress-free questions to contemplate. The urge to wave the whole incident away as a mere accident, thus as something to be regretted but not taken all that seriously, is intense. And hiding behind the whole question of how to respond when a Torah falls to the ground is the even deeper, far more anxiety-producing one regarding the way in general that God speaks to the world, to us all, to each of us. Are the circumstances of our lives—the things that happen to us, the successes we celebrate and the setbacks we endure, the accomplishments we achieve and the failures we regret—to what extent is any of these things, let alone all of them, meant to bear meaning beyond the obvious details of the event itself? Shelter Rockers know that I often speak from the bimah about the concept of personal destiny. And that concept too is part of the larger discussion here. Are the big things that happen to us part of God’s plan for our lives? What about the less big things, about the twists and turns along the road of life we all experience? What about individual incidents—arriving at the site of an armed robbery when the robber was already fleeing the scene instead of ten minutes earlier (this happened to me in college), being in a minor airplane accident that led directly to meeting your future spouse in a specific setting and at a specific hour (ditto), having the bus you’re on break down in the middle of nowhere on Erev Yom Kippur thus guaranteeing that you spend Kol Nidre evening in a chilly field of purple flowers instead of in shul (also)—what about incidents like that? Is that how God speaks these days to whomever will listen? (And if so, then why not far more clearly, as in ancient times when prophets wandered the world proclaiming the word of God forcefully and clearly?)

As many readers already know, we had the terrible experience last Shabbat of seeing a Torah scroll fall from the Torah-reading table to the ground, whereupon it rolled down the stairs to the floor of the sanctuary and ripped almost in two. It was, to say the very least, a heart-stopping moment…for me, certainly, but also for everybody present both physically and virtually. I’ve known that Talmudic passage mentioned above about rending our garments in the style of mourners when we see a Torah scroll for decades. (Just for the record, the text is clearly meant to reference an intentional act of desecration.) But I don’t think I ever really understood it until this last Saturday—or rather I understood it intellectually but not emotionally or viscerally.

Of course, the physical thing—the parchment and the ink, the gut used to sew the panels together and the wooden handles—is just the vessel, the pot: the “real” Torah is constituted of the words themselves, how they sound and what they mean. So here too it feels like it should be easy to look past the physical thing and feel secure that the words themselves were safe. But that’s not at all how it felt. I remembered, somehow, that we don’t rend our garments on Shabbat, so I didn’t make that error. (And also that law applies solely to acts of intentional desecration, not accidents.) But it was still a chilling moment, one that no one present is going to forget easily or even possibly at all.

We have been responding, I think, in a positive manner. Each morning we have been adding the 130^th psalm to the worship service, the same psalm we add in between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur as a way of inspiring repentance born jointly of serious introspection and trust in God’s saving power. As soon as Chanukah is over, we will be adding in Avinu Malkeinu as well, the extended supplication recited on fast days and also on the Ten Days of Repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. A week from today, on Friday, December 25, we will be observing the Fast of the Tenth of Tevet—a relatively obscure fast day generally ignored by most but this year to be imbued with the hope of a whole community that through the traditional media of repentance—prayer, fasting, and giving charity to the needy—we achieve a state of atonement for whatever flaws in our personal behavior, or in our communal comportment, that led to this signal being vouchsafed to us all.

The sages of old understood the universe to be an organic whole composed of disparate but intricately interconnected pieces, something of the way the human body consists of many different bits and pieces that are distinct yet intricately interrelated by virtue of being part of the same organism. That being the case, the thought that happenstance be alive with meaning is not that far-fetched. Whether the Creator always speaks through creation seems unlikely. (I broke a glass bowl Sunday when I was emptying the dishwasher and found the incident to be suggestive solely of my own clumsiness.) But that creation—and not solely the physical universe but the universe of deeds, events, and, yes, accidents—that creation can serve as the medium for the Creator’s tweets, that seems entirely reasonable to me.

In the wake of the incident, I received many, many emails offering to help both with repairing the scroll and with interpreting the event. All were heartfelt and helpful, but I would like to quote in closing just from the one written by Stuart Stein. “The Torah scroll,” Stuart wrote, “is ultimately words on parchment wrapped on wooden spindles. The Torah’s message and meaning stay firmly and permanently secure in each of our hearts, thus forming part of who each of us is. And from that perch it simply cannot fall.”  I couldn’t have said it better myself!