How to rescue the Torah

Jewish stories of disaster and salvage

EVA MROCZEK

What does it mean to launch a 21st-century Jewish Studies program in one of Canada’s fastest-growing cities? I take up the Simon and Riva Spatz Chair in Jewish Studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax with two great inspirations: the global diversity of Jewish communities and the tradition’s remarkable ability to adapt and survive in the face of crisis. My religiously and ethnically diverse students have taught me something precious: Jewish texts and history are for everybody because they are a lens for their deepest concerns. How to live well in a society full of difference, and what does meaningful inclusion look like? Where do we belong when our identities have many parts? How to deal with loss and trauma— and what do the traditions have to teach us about them? Where do these traditions come from, and what do we do with them when our world has changed so much?

Jewish Studies is for all: Jewish students who seek to understand their heritage, and everyone interested in the big questions Jewish texts and history address. Dalhousie, one of Canada’s top research universities, and the affiliated King’s College already boast marvellous faculty in Jewish thought and Holocaust Studies. And now our Classics Department expands its reach with two new experts in Bible, Judaism, and the ancient world they come from.

Halifax has always welcomed Jewish students—unlike other universities, Dalhousie has never had a quota on them. Today the city’s growing Jewish community boasts two synagogues, Beth Israel and Shaar Shalom, as well as Chabad and Hillel, and hosts the Atlantic Jewish Film Festival.

I dedicated the Spatz Lecture, excerpted here, to the memory of Simon and Riva Spatz, who met in Germany after the war. Simon escaped a labour camp the day before the Nazis murdered all its occupants, and Riva survived with the resistance in the woods of Poland. They built new lives and a thriving family in Halifax. Their story—of survival and vitality in the face of great loss—is one of those classic Jewish stories that is also for everybody.

We know the story of Moses’s mother saving him from death by sending him down the Nile in a “basket”—the Hebrew word is tevah “ark,” as in Noah’s flood—so he could later save his people and receive the Torah. But much later, Jews told a similar story about the Torah itself, sealed up in an “ark,” sent down a river, and saved from destruction. In the later story, the river was the Rhine, and the threat was not a murderous Pharaoh, but zealous Christian censors who burned the Talmud in the streets of Paris.

Stories about rescuing Jewish books from destruction—by fire, flood, or war—are almost as old as the Torah itself. From ancient Israel and Rome to medieval France and wartime Poland, Jews have long imagined their sacred texts as damaged, lost, or partly destroyed–and in need of preservation and salvage.

What do we make of this connection between the Torah and disaster? And does it have anything to teach us about how we might live in the face of loss and catastrophe today?

“Torah scroll, consumed by fire”

We might start with a recent and familiar example: Nazi book burnings. In the 1930s, Warsaw poet Yisroel Shtern expressed the horror of watching Jewish books go up in flames:

Torah scroll, consumed by fire—ask how it goes for those who survive you, on ash-covered roads, whose eyes were prised open by pain, in amazement before the blaze of your burning parchment….

Oh, Torah, inscribed with fire upon fire— can it be that you have crumbled into cinders –transformed by earthly flames to red-hot embers— while the hand of your foe remained unsinged?

Were you given to us through lightning, Torah, that your life might end in smoke upon a pyre?

- translated by Miriam Leberstein (2006)

Shtern was drawing on a long tradition of Jewish texts from the past to respond to what he saw in his present. The Bible describes the revelation of the Torah on Mt. Sinai accompanied by lightning. Later rabbinic traditions see the original Torah as being made of fire itself: the original tablets are written by God with black fire on white fire and revealed to Moses, who smashes them when he sees the Israelites worshipping the golden calf. The second set of tablets that replaced the fiery divine Torah were just stone, written by the human Moses, and then copied on fragile, flammable parchment. The Torah is given as fire—and destroyed in fire too.

“Is there a new Torah?”

But Shtern’s Yiddish poem was not a new creation. It was a “free translation” into Yiddish of a medieval Hebrew lament, Shaali serufah baeish, by Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg, called Maharam. He was said to have witnessed the burning of the Talmud in 13th century Paris, and his lament is still included in the liturgy for Tisha b’Av, the day of mourning for the destruction of the Temple and all other catastrophes. The Talmud is “Torah” in a broader sense—the entirety of written and oral tradition. Twenty-four wagonloads of its manuscripts— all known copies—went up in flames in the streets. “Is there a new Torah?” Maharam asked, “is that why the scrolls have been burned?”

Maharam (whose books were burned by medieval Christian censors) and his poetic heir Yisroel Shtern (whose books were burned by Nazis) witnessed destruction unique to their times, but they described it in the language of tradition. For centuries, Jews had written powerfully about the loss of sacred texts, and reflecting on the destruction of Jewish books was a poetic way to respond to catastrophe more broadly.

In Shtern’s time, the Gestapo searched for books to burn. Then they searched for human beings. Historians point out that book destruction often precedes genocide, and those of us who read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in school know that a burning book is a powerful symbol for the destruction of culture and of life. Bradbury himself said that human beings and books are “one and the same flesh”: articulated like this, his equivalence is grotesque, but some early Jewish writers also saw a symbolic equivalence between written texts and human beings. Rabbinic sources, for example, relate that the 2nd century Rabbi Hanina ben Teradion was burned to death by the Romans wrapped in the Torah scroll from which he had taught—blurring the boundaries between his person and his Torah. The community and its ancestral writings, closely linked, share the same fate.

Always back up your data

But the oldest Jewish traditions about rescuing texts from disaster are not about fire, but water. Ancient Jewish writers believed that, long before Sinai, books had already been revealed to ancient heroes, like Adam and Enoch, who lived before the great flood. How could their knowledge have survived such a mass catastrophe? The historian Josephus (1st c. CE) wrote that Adam himself knew of a planned “destruction of the universe, at one time by a violent fire and at another by a mighty deluge of water.” To ensure that the knowledge of the pre-flood generations would survive either way, Josephus and other ancient Jewish and Christian writers suggested it was copied on two different tablets: one of stone and one of clay. A stone tablet could be damaged by fire but would survive a flood. A clay tablet would dissolve in water, but would be hardened by fire, like pottery in a kiln.

By the first few centuries of the Common Era, backing up your data--copying texts in two different formats, to prepare for two different catastrophes--was a wellknown idea. For Jews (and Christians too), it was not a given that the memory of God’s acts or other inspired writing would survive a major catastrophe, when generational transmission from teacher to teacher was broken. Divine wisdom exists as fragile matter, and people have to deliberately protect it, even from God’s own acts!

Saving the Torah from the Babylonians

Fast forward to a later, historical disaster— the Babylonian Exile, which began in 586 BCE. We know that the Babylonians burned Jerusalem to the ground and destroyed the Temple, but ancient Jewish writers also worried about another kind of loss: was the Torah itself destroyed as well? How could it survive the fires of war?

Many Jewish texts imagine that the Torah was temporarily lost or damaged when the Babylonians burned down Jerusalem. They speculate about slapdash attempts to hide and save sacred books–or new revelations to restore them. One example is the Fourth Book of Ezra, an apocalyptic text from about 100 CE. Fourth Ezra was written after the Romans destroyed the second temple in 70 CE, but is set during the first destruction, with Ezra, the hero of the biblical books of Ezra-Nehemiah, as its protagonist. This reimagined Ezra cries alone in his bed over the destroyed city–and the lost Torah: “the holy Torah of our fathers was nullified, and the written covenants are no more…” “the Torah has been burned!” But the story solves the problem: the missing Torah is revealed to Ezra once again. He is a second Moses, dictating to scribes for 40 days and nights, eventually writing not just a new Torah, but 94 books: 24 for the public, and 70 for a wise elite.

In other sources, Ezra is a more downto-earth figure, doing the work of salvage and scribal reconstruction. This motif was a widespread aspect of premodern knowledge about the Torah. Premodern Jews and Christians both suspected that sacred texts did not come down from antiquity intact, but were damaged by marauding armies, barely rescued or hidden, and perhaps not fully restored.

One variety of this tradition comes from Timothy I, a Christian bishop in Baghdad in 800 CE. Timothy describes a second-hand report about biblical and non-biblical Hebrew scrolls found in a cave near Jericho by an Arab hunter and his dog. The letter has become famous among scholars because it’s so similar to the story of how the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in caves in the 1940s by a shepherd and his goat—but over a millennium earlier. We don’t know anything else about this alleged discovery, but Timothy tells us how he thinks these manuscripts, which he believes are the most original copies of the Bible, ended up in the cave: the prophet Jeremiah, he believes, “hid the manuscripts among the mountains and in caves and concealed them so that they would not be consumed by fire nor pillaged by despoilers.”

Timothy was probably inspired by 2 Maccabees (ca. 2nd c. BCE), where Jeremiah hides precious ritual objects—including the Ark of the Covenant, where the tablets of the Torah were kept—rescued from the Babylonians. There, Jeremiah hides them for safekeeping in a cave on the very mountain where Moses had died, like Moses in reverse: if Moses brought the Torah down from a mountain, Jeremiah stashed it back inside one.

Forgetting the Torah—and finding it again

Stories about the Torah hidden away in a dark cave reoccur across Jewish history. We find another example in the so-called “Khazar correspondence,” which presents itself as an exchange of Hebrew letters between Hasdai, a Jewish dignitary in 10th century Spain, and the allegedly Jewish king of Khazaria.

Khazaria was a central Asian kingdom best known from Yehuda Halevi’s Kuzari, a treatise he framed as a disputation between Jews, Christians, and Muslims, ending with the conversion of the kingdom to Judaism. It is unlikely that much about the Khazars is historically accurate, and the story has been deployed in some disturbing ways—for example, claims that Ashkenazi Jews are genetically descended from central Asian peoples, a debunked conspiracy theory championed by antisemites. Yet some of these texts are nevertheless fascinating medieval Jewish cultural products: lore about a faraway, powerful Jewish kingdom would appeal deeply to minority communities in medieval Europe.

Hasdai’s letter relates a tale he had heard in Spain about Khazaria’s origins: some Jews who had lived near Mt. Seir, in danger from the Babylonian invasion, hid their holy books in a cave. They prayed there daily, even long after everyone had forgotten what made the cave distinctive. Generations later, one man went deeper into the cave to discover it was full of books, and a new era of Torah study began. Another medieval fragment contains a related account, saying that the Jews were “without Torah and Scripture” until the scrolls were recovered from a cave—heralding a mass conversion.

The story of hidden scriptures, protected from invaders, forgotten, and recovered again, becomes a founding legend: you have to lose the Torah to find it again. The idea that Jews are a people whose scrip- tures are threatened, saved, forgotten, and recovered is now so traditional that it’s the way the story of Jewish Khazaria, too, must be told.

Loss, rescue, and Jewish history

I collect these stories because I trained as a scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls: my work depended on an ancient community who once hid a massive corpus of ancient texts, including various versions and types of Torah, in desert caves. The people who used and hid the scrolls perished in the Roman invasion in 70 CE. We might imagine them rushing to hide these texts, the story of Jeremiah concealing sacred objects in a cave to protect them from enemy fire alive in their minds. These texts remained hidden for nearly two thousand years, and now give us precious insight into how Jewish texts and practices developed. Our scholarship, too, starts with a story of catastrophe and concealment for a future time, and real acts of salvage and reconstruction.

What does all this tell us about Judaism and Jewish history—and about living in the face of catastrophe? Nearly 100 years ago, the Jewish historian Salo Baron critiqued “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” Lachrymose means “tearful,” and Baron argued against seeing Jewish history as an unrelenting tale of suffering and woe. Virtually all scholars of Judaism have had to engage this challenge in some way. We have focused on loss and disaster—a “lachrymose” set of stories indeed. But these lost Torah tales are not so much about loss as about preservation, about what can be saved and how. Our writers were resigned to disaster: there was no stemming of the flood waters, no turning back the Babylonian troops—and no convincing the medieval censors who burned the Talmud to change their minds. But some things could be rescued or preserved.

Recently, Jewish philosophers and ethicists have been considering how to respond to the climate crisis from a Jewish perspective. Canadian Jewish philosopher Dustin Atlas moves away from the common idea of stewardship of the earth, which, he says, is inadequate to a crisis that is already here. Instead, he uses the history of interpretation of the flood story–of enclosing animal species in an “ark” to ensure their survival—to highlight elements in Jewish thought that focus on protecting small but important things. God does not build the ark, Atlas notes:

God gives a blueprint (as he is prone to doing), but the building is human… we too are not only going to have to think about spaces that protect relations, but we are also going to have to build them, materially, socially, politically, and religiously. This idea of protection goes beyond the flood story: it implicates the Torah itself. The Torah’s intimate relationship with disaster, its history of human acts of rescue, is baked into Judaism’s oldest and most durable stories about itself. The Torah is born in fire, and destroyed as soon as it’s given. It is continuously lost, hidden, salvaged, reconstructed after flame, flood, and war. Through these myths of a lost Torah across centuries, we see ways that Jewish tradition has lived in relation to disaster—to respond to it through acts of protection and repair.

Another ark, a different river, and a rescued Torah

We began with a Yiddish reprise of a medieval Hebrew lament by Meir of Rothenburg, who saw the Talmud aflame in the streets of Paris. He asked, “Is there a new Torah to replace the scrolls that were burned?” His question received an unexpected answer in a much later folktale, which built on an ancient rabbinic tradition that Moses wrote thirteen Torah scrolls: twelve for the nation, and the thirteenth to keep in the Ark of the Covenant in the Temple. After the Temple’s destruction, this thirteenth Torah was kept in heaven. This tradition is at the heart of a later story about Rabbi Meir’s experience in prison. The angel Gabriel visited him and showed him this thirteenth scroll to copy. He sealed his copy of the celestial Torah in a waterproof container and threw it into the Rhine—a mini-ark, more like Moses’s than Noah’s. It was discovered downriver by some Jewish fishermen and placed in their synagogue. No new Torah has been given—but Maharam could write a spare copy and protect it from harm.

Moses receives the Torah on a mountaintop in thunder and lightning, but centuries of Jewish stories about preserving and salvaging books are more down to earth: make an extra copy; back it up in two ways, on stone and clay; run from the soldiers to stash it in a cave; cobble it back together from fragments; and, here, put a copy in a vessel, toss it out your prison cell, and hope some fishermen will catch it. There is no single heroic act that will turn the tide, but simple and practical acts to protect what’s worth saving. n

Watch the entire lecture at thecjn.ca/spatz

OCTOBER 23-30, 2023