8th Day of Pesach: Meriting to Read from a Damaged Scroll

Are we allowed to read Torah from a damaged scroll? If you're a traditionalist, the answer is clearly "no." For a Torah scroll to be "Kosher" (in this case meaning "fit for use"... not "edible"), every letter

needs to be legible, clear, and free of smudges. Let me remind you, Torah scrolls are written BY HAND, in ink, using a quill, and many of them are 75 to 150 years old, so yes, smudging, cracking, and clouding IS a common problem. Letters fade and ink separates. And if even a single letter is erased, the entire scroll needs to be put away until a scribe can come and fix it. So again, the easy answer for many Jews is, "no, you cannot read from a damaged Torah scroll." But sometimes we might waver in our staunch positions, and the issue - like our fragile letters - can seem a little hazy.

Here at Ohev Shalom, we have a scroll that survived the Holocaust. Many people refer to it as our Holocaust Torah Scroll, though lately we've been trying to rename it the Loštice Torah, because it came to us from the town of Loštice in

Czechoslovakia. This weekend, we will be celebrating the origins of our scroll; talking about the town of Loštice, the Jews of that region of Moravia, and learning about some of the history and the practices of this lost Jewish community. If you're in the area, I hope you'll be able to join us on Saturday morning. When I first began preparing for this special Shabbat, I honestly never really much considered whether we could actually READ from the Loštice Torah; it was unimaginable!

It never occurred to me, quite honestly, because the scroll was in such bad shape. Where other damaged scrolls might sometimes require up to $5,000 worth of repairs, the Loštice Torah was evaluated closer to $20,000! It's well beyond our means, so I simply assumed we could never read from it. Except then I made contact with Rabbi Bruce Elder, whose congregation, Hakafa, in Glencoe, IL, also cares for a scroll from the same town in Czechoslovakia. And in Rabbi Elder's (Reform)

congregation, they DO read from it! I was surprised... and intrigued. It's more complicated for us, as a Conservative synagogue, but would it really be impossible? I wrestled with this issue for a while, and then ultimately decided on a little compromise. We will read the regular Torah reading on Saturday morning from ANOTHER Torah scroll, a Kosher one. And then, after our eight aliyot, honors, are done, we will read a SEPARATE section from the Loštice Torah. It doesn't constitute a violation of Jewish law, because we've already fulfilled our obligation to read from a Kosher scroll. At the same time, it will feel incredibly powerful and meaningful to bring this, in essence, Holocaust survivor back into our community. It has surely seen an incredible amount of things in its more than 150 years of existence! How could we say that it does not deserve to be opened and read from, here in Wallingford, PA, in the year 2016??

Like many things in Judaism, it isn't a simple question, and it certainly does not have an obvious answer. Jewish law tells us "no," we cannot read from it. But our hearts

and souls tell us we must. And so, as good Conservative Jews, we find a nifty compromise. Some day, I pray we will be able to fix all its damaged letters and sew up its broken seams - physically and spiritually - and read from it proudly as a repaired, whole, and Kosher Torah. But until then, we wholeheartedly accept it as is, with all its fire damage, water stains, discolorations, and faded letters. We welcome it into our community, and we celebrate the people of Loštice, whose story and legacy are now a part of us. May their memories always be for a blessing.

Amen.

Photos in this blog post:

1. CC image courtesy of Rotatebot onWikimedia Commons

2. Image of the synagogue of Loštice courtesy of respectandtolerance.com

3. Image of congregants from Hakafa in Glencoe, IL, reading from the Torah IN Loštice, during a congrational trip to the Czech Republic, courtesy of Congregation Hakafa

4. Image of the Ark in our Main Sanctuary, with the Loštice Torah (and its black Torah mantle) in the center.