I have in my hand a tractate of the Talmud. This is Massechet Beitzah, a volume of the Talmud I grabbed off a shelf in my office and it’s printing tells the story of the Jewish People. These lines are the Mishnah edited in Eretz Yisrael by Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi in the year 200. These lines here are the Gemara which was edited in the 6th century in Babylonia. On the inside margin of these pages are the commentary of Rashi, who lived most of his life in France. On the outside margins of the page are the Tosafot who lived in France and Germany in the generations following Rashi. In the back is the commentary of Rabbi Yitzhak Alfasi who lived in Morocco and on the sides of those pages are the great medieval scholars of Catalonia and Provence, the Ran, the Raavad, and the Ba’al HaMe’or. Rabbi Mordechai ben Hillel who lived in Germany in the 13th century is in back, followed by a bunch of Lithuanians who were added by the publisher, Mrs. Devorah Romm, who was not only one of the most influential Jewish women of the past two hundred years, but one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the history of Jewish publishing.
This triumphant story of the journeys of the Torah is foretold by a detail emphasized by the Torah in Parashat Terumah. The Torah portion we read this morning tells of a command to build a sanctuary that will facilitate God’s presence resting among us: וְעָשׂוּ לִי מִקְדָּשׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָם׃ At the heart of the mishkan, the tabernacle, was the aron ha-brit, the ark of the covenant into which the luchot, the tablets were placed. In this way the heart of the mikdash was a physical representation of the Torah around which our community revolves. The aron, the symbolic home for the Torah itself, had staves upon which it could be carried and these staves too are commanded by the Torah:
וְעָשִׂיתָ בַדֵּי עֲצֵי שִׁטִּים וְצִפִּיתָ אֹתָם זָהָב׃
Make poles of acacia wood and overlay them with gold. then insert the poles into the rings on the side walls of the ark, for carrying the ark.
בְּטַבְּעֹת הָאָרֹן יִהְיוּ הַבַּדִּים לֹא יָסֻרוּ מִמֶּנּוּ׃
The poles shall remain in the rings of the ark: they shall not be removed from it.
And only after the staves for carrying the aron are inserted into the rings, are the luchot placed inside:
וְנָתַתָּ אֶל־הָאָרֹן אֵת הָעֵדֻת אֲשֶׁר אֶתֵּן אֵלֶיךָ׃
And deposit in the Ark [the tablets of] the Pact which I will give you.
The Torah can have no permanent home because the place for Torah is the entire world. Maharal, in his philosophy of Jewish peoplehood (some of us encountered his approach in an essay by Rav Shagar we studied together last summer) explains that Jews are meant to live in every corner of the world because God gave us a Torah that must influence every corner of the world. The aron had staves before the luchot were even placed inside and those staves were never removed. There is no place for Torah that cannot be lifted and carried elsewhere at a moment’s notice until the Torah is spread to every corner of the earth.
But there is another way to tell this story:
The Oral Torah was first organized into the Mishnah because the anti Jewish persecution in Roman Palestine was so violent and so severe that Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi was concerned that the Torah itself would be forgotten. Rashi had to sit helplessly in Troyes as the communities in the Rhineland where he studied in his youth were massacred by the First Crusade. Rabbi Mordechai ben Hillel himself was murdered in the Rhindfleish Massacres of 1298. Numerous scholars and their books from Medieval Ashkenaz are only known to us because Rabbi Mordechai ben Hillel quoted them in his Talmud commentary. The original books themselves, and, often enough their authors, were consigned to destruction. The glorious Jewish community of Spain that produced Rambam and Ibn Ezra and the Ramban and Abarbanel and so many others met its end with expulsion and the inquisition. The very metal plates that Mrs. Romm used to print her Talmud were buried somewhere in the vicinity of Vilna and have never been recovered, one more loss in the destruction of a city that was once known as Lithuania’s Jerusalem.
And so when a wave of antisemitic vandalism and assaults came to Chicago this week it forced a question in my mind. Are we seeing nothing more than the latest iteration of the lachrymose theory of Jewish history? Are we doomed to suffer in exile from one home to the next? Is it only a matter of time before this chapter of Jewish history comes to an end?
Or, are we here in Chicago to spread Torah, and the values that God shared with us in the Torah, among our neighbors and in our community? As a proud Urban Orthodox congregation, I think it behooves us to consider the religious significance of our shul’s location in a major American city. We should always ask how we can be better neighbors and better citizens and we should ask those questions in the context of pride in our Torah and the impact it can have on our community and on the community beyond the walls of this building.
I want to thank Pastor Donovan Price for joining us at the shul this morning. He and I met years ago when we both traveled to Springfield as part of a clergy delegation that the OU had organized to lobby for more state funding for the security of religious institutions. Since that day I’ve admired his work here in Chicago as I’ve read about them in newspapers and in his own words. As a “street pastor” he prays with and for victims of violence in Chicago, and, too often, he grieves alongside surviving friends and family. And in the midst of a calling to minister to our neighbors in their worst moments, he reached out to me, and to us, to show his support and solidarity during a frightening week for the Jewish community of Chicago. It seems to be almost bashert – as if we received a sign of approval from Heaven – that just this week Governor Pritzker included tens of millions of dollars for security grants to religious institutions into his budget proposal for next year, after a years-long delay since Pastor Price and I lobbied for that funding in Springfield.
There is something redemptive when good people stand in solidarity with one another in the face of hatred and violence. That won’t solve problems on their own and we will take every cent we can get from Springfield or from Washington to make our building even safer than it is. But with honorable neighbors like Pastor Price, we can feel assured that we are here in Chicago for a reason and nobody will chase us away. I don’t know what difference it would have made because it didn’t happen – but I still wonder what would have been if Christian clergy had visited Adas Yeshurun, my grandparents’ synagogue in Nuremberg. What would have been if Christian clergy had stood in solidarity with our ancestors in Mainz or Barcelona or Kishniev? We can’t know because it didn’t happen. And because it is happening here, there is a chance that this chapter of Jewish history can still have a happy ending.
And my corresponding pledge to Pastor Price is that he won’t leave this building today without sharing with us, concretely, how we can be partners in his work and how we can stand in solidarity with him and his closest neighbors.
We carried the Torah here in an aron outfitted with golden staves. The Torah has a message for every place and for every time. It is our sacred responsibility to share the Torah here in Chicago. That is a burden we cannot abandon, and a privilege we are honored to carry.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 