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The Torah, a scroll unrolled and read when Jews gather to worship God, contains the story of God's creation of the world and establishment of His relationship with mankind. Torah makes ‘access
to God possible’The sacred Jewish scrolls
are made using traditions
thousands of years oldBy Mary Adamski
Star-BulletinIt contains more than 600 laws for His people to follow, from moral mandates to dietary restrictions.
It's parchment made from the skin of ritually killed animals, written in ink prepared according to a formula thousands of years old, using a quill from a kosher fowl and stored in a cabinet that is the modern equivalent of the Holy Ark carried by the Israelites.
Its stories of Adam and Eve, Joseph and his many-colored coat, Moses and the people he led out of Egypt, reach far beyond the Jewish population. They were assimilated by Christians as the first five books of their Old Testament, and published in translations down through the centuries. The nonreligious know the stories as retold in poetry, music, plays and films.
None of the description truly reflects what the Torah is, said Rabbi Gedaliah Druin, who will speak about the sacred scripture at 7 p.m. tomorrow at Temple Emanu-El. The free lecture is open to the public, part of the temple's "Second Sunday at Seven" culture and arts series."The Torah is alive," said the scholar and scribe, known as a "sofer." He compared the above descriptions to an autopsy report that fails to take into account what the person was when his soul was still in his body.
Druin, formerly of Israel and now living in Rockland County, N.Y., has the rare vocation of copying and repairing the hand-lettered scrolls. While here, he will repair Torah scrolls from Temple Emanu-El, Congregation Sof Ma'arav and the military chaplaincy.
He is a modern man, comparing the Torah to "a spiritual computer ... making access to the Creator possible. If we didn't have access, we wouldn't be Jews."
But his immersion in the ancient tradition is reflected when he cautions a photographer not to make an image of text that includes a name of God.
According to tradition, the text of the Torah given to Moses on Mount Sinai had no vowel signs, and that continues until today, fulfilling a commandment (Deuteronomy 13:1) "thou shalt not add thereunto."
Druin said the Hebrew script used "truly goes back to Mount Sinai. The ABCs are symbols, Hebrew letters ARE. They are something that's alive, something that's real. When you examine anything in the Jewish tradition, the letters themselves are the source."
In the Torah he scrutinizes and repairs. "If there are letters missing, it functions," he said, "... but it doesn't work." He compared himself to a "family doctor who makes house calls."
You'd think something so treasured would be locked away from the masses, but not so. Each Sabbath, people from the congregation step up to read from the opened Torah - using a pointer to protect parchment sometimes hundreds of years old. On Simhat Torah, annual holiday celebrating reaching the end of the scroll and beginning the reading anew, people dance with the scrolls protected in their embroidered mantle.
"When we say it's sacred, it means it's really there, distinct and separate," said Druin. "It is practical as well as spiritual. It is alive, and we want to live with it. It changes our life," said the sofer.
The last of the 613 commandments therein declares that every Jew in his or her lifetime should write one Torah. Several in the Temple Emanu-El congregation fulfilled that command a few years ago. A Torah scroll commissioned by a local family was left unfinished so that each person could add a letter.