Shabbat Shalom, everyone. I want to share with you a thought and a recent memory, not so much related to this week’s Torah portion, but to what WOULD HAVE been happening at Ohev Shalom this Shabbat. Many of you already knew this, but tomorrow morning, Saturday's service was going to be our annual Lostice Shabbat. This is the day we acknowledge and celebrate a Torah scroll that is in our ark, which is over 200 years old and survived the horrors of the Holocaust, despite the destruction of its home in the small town of Lostice, in Czechoslovakia. This year was going to be a most SPECIAL occasion, because we were recently able to have the entire scroll corrected, so that it is once again "Kosher," meaning usable for Torah reading in services. The Lostice Torah hasn't been used since World War II. It sat for two decades in a warehouse in Prague, followed by another decade-plus in storage in London, then it spent 40 years at Ohev Shalom, waiting to become Kosher once again. But, like everything else these days, the coronavirus dashed our plans.
Of course, we are disappointed. Well-over a hundred congregants came over two Sundays to hold the Sofer, the scribe's hand and thereby "write" a letter and fulfill the 613th commandment of the Torah. We've talked about it for years. We've learned about Lostice and taken on their story as our own. We've said their prayers; we've chanted Kaddish in their memory. This IS disappointing. And yet, I feel this is also a vital metaphor for our lives in quarantine right now, in another most powerful and crucial way. Some things simply do not die. The virus may postpone our plans, and we are genuinely afraid for our lives, our health, and our financial well-being at this time. But we WILL emerge on the other side. Community, ritual, tradition, and memory; these are immortal concepts, and the Lostice Torah embodies these. The correcting has been done. It IS a Kosher scroll. So even while we are disappointed, and won't be chanting from it this weekend, it is only a matter of time before we "leyn" from it again. Even in our disappointment; we can indeed be patient.
And now, my memory: Another group that is pretty disappointed right now is my Adult Bat Mitzvah class. Their celebration wasn't taking place until May 2nd, and will now be held as a Zoom service, but they were also hoping to take the Lostice Scroll out of the ark and include it in our celebration. And now, we cannot. But in those last couple of weeks before COVID-19 separated us all from one another, our Bat Mitzvah class was practicing reading Torah in the Main Sanctuary. And everyone got a chance to do their aliyah from the Lostice Scroll. Even in an empty sanctuary, during a "dry run," it was meaningful to everyone to read from it. Standing on that bimah, crowded together around the Lostice Torah with these amazing women, I didn't just feel THEIR excitement about the Bat Mitzvah and reading from this scroll... I felt ITS excitement too.
I know that sounds ridiculous. The Lostice Scroll doesn't feel emotion, and certainly doesn't express them to me. But nevertheless, I stood there, holding one of its rollers, with a whole group of Jews preparing to chant from this FULLY-Kosher scroll - possibly for the first time in 70 years, and who knows how much longer since it was last checked, cleaned, and corrected?? Someone tried to destroy it once. Someone else neglected it in Prague, then someone else tried to triage its wounds in London, and someone else gave it a place of honor - but isolation - at Ohev. I felt SOMETHING that night. The excitement and sheer joy of a scroll that only ever wanted to be read from, to be holy again. To have people crowd around it, hold its rollers, point (gently...) into it with a yad, and read aloud its ancient text. So yeah, we ALL are disappointed it won't happen tomorrow morning. But you know what? It has waited 70 years for this moment, and even the Lostice Scroll can be a little more patient. Quarantine or no quarantine; it - and we - are still Kosher and eager to get back to celebrating our traditions!
Shabbat Shalom
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