Rosh Hashanah Torah Sermon
by Rabbi Elliott Tepperman
Leshanah Tovah!
This year we are going to do something that we have never done before as a congregation-- we are going to write a Torah. Zach Lipner, our past President and the chair of the Torah Writing Committee asked some time back if I might say a few words about this project as part of my Rosh Hashanah sermon. Zach, maybe that was not such a great idea.
While preparing this sermon I have had some serious doubts about whether or not it is worth it to for us to write a Torah. The main thing we use our sifre-Torah for is the Torah service, by which I mean the process of taking the Torah out, giving out aliyot and reading it in Hebrew. And I am not sure if our Torah service really works. Stay with me for a second here - think back to this past Shabbat - so where were you? All right, all right last Shabbat a lot of you couldn’t make it to synagogue. That’s O.K. This isn’t meant to be a reprimand, just think back to the last Saturday you were at synagogue. If you can’t remember the last time you were in synagogue, then think about when the Torah was read today.
Now think about what the Torah service is usually like for you. Are you following carefully along in Hebrew or English? Are you reading the various commentaries below the line? Are you meditating on the commandments? Are you letting the words enter your soul? Or are you finding it hard to listen? Are looking at your watch? Are you talking with your neighbor? Taking the opportunity to stretch your legs? Or maybe just spacing out?
Now I love studying the Torah, but I am a rabbi after all. And I have to admit the practice of reading Torah sometimes even leaves me a little bored. All right, I am being rhetorically provocative, but take a moment and consider what meaning does listening to the Torah being read, whether once a week or once a year, have for you? Is it interesting? Is it mysterious? Is it hard to connect to? Do you not think about it much because it‘s so familiar? Would Shabbat be just as meaningful to you if we skipped reading the Torah and went straight to the devar and discussion? What if we read the parsha out loud with trope in English instead of Hebrew, would that be better? What if we just took the Torah out, sang its praises, kissed it and then returned it to the ark, finished up the service and had a nice Kiddush?
Alright, while my concerns about the need to reinvigorate and reconstruct the Torah service are real (Zach… you can take a breath) – I still think we should write our own Torah this year.
In fact I think it is going to be an amazing thing for us to do together. There is something about a real Torah scroll, made out of lamb skin parchment, sewn together with sinews, and completely hand written by a scribe using a quill carved from a bird’s feather, that inspires awe. I can’t ever remember having a group of adults or children standing around an open scroll without this sense of awe. One of my favorite moments when preparing a bar or bat mitzvah student is when I ask them to practice carrying the Torah for the first time. They are really careful!
When we are near a Torah Scroll, when we look at its letters, when we hold it or lift it or carefully touch its edges – it is clear that we are near something sacred. But it should be equally clear that the holiness of Torah is about more that its construction but also its content.
Mishnah Peah (1:1) teaches:
These are the things that are beyond measure:
Leaving the corners of the field for those who are hungry,
Bringing the first-fruits to the priests,
Participating in Sukkot, Passover and Shavuot,
acts of kindness,
and the study of the Torah.
Then the mishnah adds:
These are things that produce fruits for a person to enjoy in this world,
But which also produce a cornacopia of fruits in the World to Come:
Honoring ones father and mother,
acts of kindness,
and bringing peace between two people.
וְתַלְמוּד תּוֹרָה כְנֶגֶד כֻלָם.
But the study of Torah is equal to all of them.
Our very action-oriented tradition teaches that the study of Torah is equal to honoring one’s parents, acts of kindness and bringing about peace between people.
Some translations suggest it is equal to all of them combined, others that it surpasses all of them combined.
And I want you to know that your own very action-oriented rabbi, agrees.
תַלְמוּד תּוֹרָה כְנֶגֶד כֻלָם Talmud torah keneged kulam
I think that most of us don’t study enough Torah and I think that we and the world would be better off if we studied more Torah!
The things that keep us from Torah study, the small ones – sleeping in, reading the paper, going for walks, - these things are not bad. And the bigger ones – making a living, spending time with our families, feeding the hungry and making peace – these are some of the most important things we can do in life.
But I want to tell you that when we imagine that these things are so important that we do not make regular time for Torah study, we are putting the well-being of our souls in danger.
Keneged can also mean “corresponding to” or “in opposition to,” so the phrase Talmud Torah keneged kulam could also be understood as – the study of Torah must be corresponding to, sitting face to face with and bumping up against all that we do.
Rabbi Yochanan, commenting on the line from Proverbs, “Whoever keeps a fig tree shall eat its fruit,” (Prov.27:18) asks: Why is the Torah likened to a fig tree? As with the fig tree, the more one tends it, the more figs one finds on it, so with words of Torah: the more one studies them, the more flavor one finds in them. T. Bavli Eruvin 54a-b
Studying Torah is a process that makes us better people. One way the Torah service does succeed is that it holds a space for Torah and in so doing forces us to reflect. We have an obligation if we are going to write a Torah to consider how to make the most of this space so that it allows for profound reflection. So our engagement with Torah forces us to struggle with the values it presents and compels us to consider our own values.
The late writer and newspaper editor Harry Golden told the story of his father who was an avowed socialist and atheist. Yet every evening Mr. Golden would go to the synagogue to recite the evening prayers. One day his son said to him, “Pa, I don’t understand. You don’t believe in God, you don’t believe in prayer, you don’t believe any of the words that are being said in shul. So why do you go?” And the elder Mr. Golden replied, “You know my friend Ginsburg? Ginsburg goes to shul to talk to God. I go to shul to talk to Ginsburg.”
Professor Louis Finkelstein, a 20th-century Jewish scholar, who was more of a Ginsburg than a Golden said, “When I pray, I speak to God; when I study, God speaks to me.”
Whether you’re a Golden, a Ginsberg or a Finkelstein I think you will be better off if you show up for Torah study.
I believe that regular Torah study increases the chances that we will live lives of reflection, that our actions will be more kind, our efforts to seek justice more inspired and more effective.
I know that it is difficult to commit to a regular practice of studying Torah.
Though studying Torah is part of my job, it is a challenge for me to commit to my own practice of studying Torah for its own sake, not for a class or a devar Torah, but for my soul, for the possibility that God will speak to me.
This summer I began a program for rabbis through the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, designed among other things to support rabbis in the spiritual practice of studying Torah. As part of this program we are required to study, once a week, with another rabbi in the program, and we aren’t supposed to teach the texts that we study for six months as a means of assuring that this study remains one for us as individuals, rather than as rabbis.
This young, tender, spiritual practice has been incredibly important for me. It has felt like an act of compassion for my soul and I am deeply committed to it.
But the framers of this program know that even setting aside one hour a week is not easy. They build into the program four seminars over 18 months, regular check-ins with the facilitators, and they select the texts. They know that we will need support to succeed in our practice of studying Torah for its own sake.
At Bnai Keshet we have been working to build some of our own institutional support for Torah study on Shabbat, the central Jewish time for Torah study, and a moment in the week when many of us have at least a little more room in our schedules. This year we will have more adult education classes than ever on Shabbat. The assumption of our Family Bet Midrash program, our Saturday morning religious school option, is that it will be easier to celebrate Shabbat through Torah study if everyone in the family is doing it. It was important to me as we expanded this program that we all – 3-year olds, 33-year olds and 93-year olds - start off together with a blessing. This moment is meant to be a reminder that we need each other if we are going to be successful in this practice. We will have to rely on each other’s support.
I know that committing to a regular practice of studying Torah is hard. And I want to say publicly now, that as your rabbi, I am committed to working with you to come up with a plan for your own Torah study. And I will work with you to come up with a plan that keeps you accountable to yourself. Even if this means being a nudge!
Last year when I stood here, I spoke about the need for us to understand ourselves as being in covenantal relationship with one another, and this is no small task. But even as we work on crafting some small version of a Brit Bnai Keshet, we should remember that we already have a covenantal document – The Torah. When we come together and study Torah on Shabbat, we are engaging each other in a covenantal dialogue. In so doing we are not only tying ourselves to each other but to klal yisrael – the Jewish people as it exists right now.
More amazingly we are tying our lives to all the Jewish peoples of the past who for thousands of years have come back to this text in their quest to reflect on the lives they are living and in the desire to shape the path for their actions.
Torah pushes us to be awake to the importance of life in the present even as it reminds us of just how narrow and small our own present is. The Torah perpetually turns the Jewish narrative of the past into our narrative for the present. On Passover we thank God not for having freed our ancestors from slavery, but for freeing us from slavery. And on Shavuot we are taught that every Jew who ever lived or will live was at Sinai. We are supposed to remember what it was like to be at Sinai and to receive God’s revelation directly. When Torah study succeeds, the “us” of the present moment and the “them” of Judaism’s spiritual history dissolve.
We learn to write ourselves into Torah’s narrative.
We ask, what did it feel like to cross the Sea of Reeds?
How can I, Sarah, a 75-year old woman, not laugh at the thought of giving birth? What was I thinking as my father Abraham was binding me for sacrifice?
Studying Torah weaves our own life experiences in with our spiritual ancestors as well as our very real parents, grandparents and great-grandparents who, to varying degrees, read the stories of their lives with Torah as its mirror.
And when Torah becomes a mirror for reflecting our own lives it then has the power to tie us together with future generations. A story from the Talmud Yerushalmi, Masechet Shabbat:
Every Friday afternoon Rabbi Joshua used to listen to his grandson recite the Torah he had studied that week. Once while entering the mikveh in preparation for Shabbat he realized he had forgotten to listen to his grandson. He immediately got up from the bath to hear it, and when questioned by a student he said, “…my son, what I am about to do may appear trivial to you. You should understand that listening to one’s grandson recite a portion in Scripture is like listening to it at Mount Sinai, for it is said, “When you make the words of Torah known to your children and children’s children, it is like the day that you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb (Deut. 4:9-10) P. Shab 1:2
As Jews our tradition constantly encourages us to read the stories of our own lives in relationship to the stories of our tradition. There is no holiday, no event, no day of the week in Judaism without its Torah, without its text, and every text is read through an ever-expanding body of interpretation. And there are few interpretations that are not further interpreted.
Now I have been asked, “Rabbi perhaps it is simply the process of interpreting. Might it be just as good if we committed to a practice of regular study of poetry or the Greek tragedies or our favorite children’s stories?”
My answer is no, it would not be just as good. Torah is better.
Let me be clear, I believe that the best literature, especially when studied with others, can be spiritual and life altering, but I think that as a regular spiritual practice the study of Torah surpasses them.
It surpasses them because it is a text that was written with the purpose of helping us to understand God and our relationship to God.
Even if some of us could agree to read another book with this same goal in mind, when we read Torah we are automatically put into relationship with the entire Jewish people. We are in agreement that this is our holy text, love it or hate it, and that this is the text we must fight about to determine the meaning of a Jewish life.
And hopefully over the course of time this fight, leshem shamayim – for the sake of heaven - this struggle, this clever conversation and insightful questioning with each other and hundreds of generations of other Jews, this process, leads us to consider not only the meaning of life in general but also of our own personal lives.
Ultimately, this process of regular engagement with the Torah is internalized and we learn to ask, “If my life were a story in the Torah what would its meaning be?” It teaches us to read our lives not just as stories but as holy stories. We learn to assume that meaning exists in our lives and experiences. Torah study teaches us to look for God’s presence in the world. And finally it turns us into actors, reminding us over and over again that it is our role to bring the text of our lives into accord with the holiness we are studying.
When Torah becomes our story and when we work to assure that Torah will be central to future generations of Jews, we gain a measure of immortality.
Writing a Torah is no small thing. We should remember that it took only seven days to create the world but 40 to write the Torah. There are many Midrash that suggest the world came into being for the sake of Torah. And that were we not to have accepted the Torah at Sinai, the world would have ceased to exist. In writing a Torah we affirm our willingness to receive its wisdom
Yes, we should write a Torah and I pray that in so doing Torah will seep more deeply into our lives. I pray that we will support this project by strengthening our community’s practice of Torah study. May it be that this process will allow us to hear the words of previous generations of Jews. May it be that by writing a Torah we will make the world more whole and may it be that this effort will be received as a gift by future generations.
I invite you to join me in preparation for this new year of Torah study by reciting birkat Torah the blessing for studying Torah.
Blessed are you, The One of Sinai, our God, the sovereign of all worlds, who made us holy with your mitzvot and commanded us to occupy ourselves wit words of Torah!
Leshanah Tovah!
This year we are going to do something that we have never done before as a congregation-- we are going to write a Torah. Zach Lipner, our past President and the chair of the Torah Writing Committee asked some time back if I might say a few words about this project as part of my Rosh Hashanah sermon. Zach, maybe that was not such a great idea.
While preparing this sermon I have had some serious doubts about whether or not it is worth it to for us to write a Torah. The main thing we use our sifre-Torah for is the Torah service, by which I mean the process of taking the Torah out, giving out aliyot and reading it in Hebrew. And I am not sure if our Torah service really works. Stay with me for a second here - think back to this past Shabbat - so where were you? All right, all right last Shabbat a lot of you couldn’t make it to synagogue. That’s O.K. This isn’t meant to be a reprimand, just think back to the last Saturday you were at synagogue. If you can’t remember the last time you were in synagogue, then think about when the Torah was read today.
Now think about what the Torah service is usually like for you. Are you following carefully along in Hebrew or English? Are you reading the various commentaries below the line? Are you meditating on the commandments? Are you letting the words enter your soul? Or are you finding it hard to listen? Are looking at your watch? Are you talking with your neighbor? Taking the opportunity to stretch your legs? Or maybe just spacing out?
Now I love studying the Torah, but I am a rabbi after all. And I have to admit the practice of reading Torah sometimes even leaves me a little bored. All right, I am being rhetorically provocative, but take a moment and consider what meaning does listening to the Torah being read, whether once a week or once a year, have for you? Is it interesting? Is it mysterious? Is it hard to connect to? Do you not think about it much because it‘s so familiar? Would Shabbat be just as meaningful to you if we skipped reading the Torah and went straight to the devar and discussion? What if we read the parsha out loud with trope in English instead of Hebrew, would that be better? What if we just took the Torah out, sang its praises, kissed it and then returned it to the ark, finished up the service and had a nice Kiddush?
Alright, while my concerns about the need to reinvigorate and reconstruct the Torah service are real (Zach… you can take a breath) – I still think we should write our own Torah this year.
In fact I think it is going to be an amazing thing for us to do together. There is something about a real Torah scroll, made out of lamb skin parchment, sewn together with sinews, and completely hand written by a scribe using a quill carved from a bird’s feather, that inspires awe. I can’t ever remember having a group of adults or children standing around an open scroll without this sense of awe. One of my favorite moments when preparing a bar or bat mitzvah student is when I ask them to practice carrying the Torah for the first time. They are really careful!
When we are near a Torah Scroll, when we look at its letters, when we hold it or lift it or carefully touch its edges – it is clear that we are near something sacred. But it should be equally clear that the holiness of Torah is about more that its construction but also its content.
Mishnah Peah (1:1) teaches:
These are the things that are beyond measure:
Leaving the corners of the field for those who are hungry,
Bringing the first-fruits to the priests,
Participating in Sukkot, Passover and Shavuot,
acts of kindness,
and the study of the Torah.
Then the mishnah adds:
These are things that produce fruits for a person to enjoy in this world,
But which also produce a cornacopia of fruits in the World to Come:
Honoring ones father and mother,
acts of kindness,
and bringing peace between two people.
וְתַלְמוּד תּוֹרָה כְנֶגֶד כֻלָם.
But the study of Torah is equal to all of them.
Our very action-oriented tradition teaches that the study of Torah is equal to honoring one’s parents, acts of kindness and bringing about peace between people.
Some translations suggest it is equal to all of them combined, others that it surpasses all of them combined.
And I want you to know that your own very action-oriented rabbi, agrees.
תַלְמוּד תּוֹרָה כְנֶגֶד כֻלָם Talmud torah keneged kulam
I think that most of us don’t study enough Torah and I think that we and the world would be better off if we studied more Torah!
The things that keep us from Torah study, the small ones – sleeping in, reading the paper, going for walks, - these things are not bad. And the bigger ones – making a living, spending time with our families, feeding the hungry and making peace – these are some of the most important things we can do in life.
But I want to tell you that when we imagine that these things are so important that we do not make regular time for Torah study, we are putting the well-being of our souls in danger.
Keneged can also mean “corresponding to” or “in opposition to,” so the phrase Talmud Torah keneged kulam could also be understood as – the study of Torah must be corresponding to, sitting face to face with and bumping up against all that we do.
Rabbi Yochanan, commenting on the line from Proverbs, “Whoever keeps a fig tree shall eat its fruit,” (Prov.27:18) asks: Why is the Torah likened to a fig tree? As with the fig tree, the more one tends it, the more figs one finds on it, so with words of Torah: the more one studies them, the more flavor one finds in them. T. Bavli Eruvin 54a-b
Studying Torah is a process that makes us better people. One way the Torah service does succeed is that it holds a space for Torah and in so doing forces us to reflect. We have an obligation if we are going to write a Torah to consider how to make the most of this space so that it allows for profound reflection. So our engagement with Torah forces us to struggle with the values it presents and compels us to consider our own values.
The late writer and newspaper editor Harry Golden told the story of his father who was an avowed socialist and atheist. Yet every evening Mr. Golden would go to the synagogue to recite the evening prayers. One day his son said to him, “Pa, I don’t understand. You don’t believe in God, you don’t believe in prayer, you don’t believe any of the words that are being said in shul. So why do you go?” And the elder Mr. Golden replied, “You know my friend Ginsburg? Ginsburg goes to shul to talk to God. I go to shul to talk to Ginsburg.”
Professor Louis Finkelstein, a 20th-century Jewish scholar, who was more of a Ginsburg than a Golden said, “When I pray, I speak to God; when I study, God speaks to me.”
Whether you’re a Golden, a Ginsberg or a Finkelstein I think you will be better off if you show up for Torah study.
I believe that regular Torah study increases the chances that we will live lives of reflection, that our actions will be more kind, our efforts to seek justice more inspired and more effective.
I know that it is difficult to commit to a regular practice of studying Torah.
Though studying Torah is part of my job, it is a challenge for me to commit to my own practice of studying Torah for its own sake, not for a class or a devar Torah, but for my soul, for the possibility that God will speak to me.
This summer I began a program for rabbis through the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, designed among other things to support rabbis in the spiritual practice of studying Torah. As part of this program we are required to study, once a week, with another rabbi in the program, and we aren’t supposed to teach the texts that we study for six months as a means of assuring that this study remains one for us as individuals, rather than as rabbis.
This young, tender, spiritual practice has been incredibly important for me. It has felt like an act of compassion for my soul and I am deeply committed to it.
But the framers of this program know that even setting aside one hour a week is not easy. They build into the program four seminars over 18 months, regular check-ins with the facilitators, and they select the texts. They know that we will need support to succeed in our practice of studying Torah for its own sake.
At Bnai Keshet we have been working to build some of our own institutional support for Torah study on Shabbat, the central Jewish time for Torah study, and a moment in the week when many of us have at least a little more room in our schedules. This year we will have more adult education classes than ever on Shabbat. The assumption of our Family Bet Midrash program, our Saturday morning religious school option, is that it will be easier to celebrate Shabbat through Torah study if everyone in the family is doing it. It was important to me as we expanded this program that we all – 3-year olds, 33-year olds and 93-year olds - start off together with a blessing. This moment is meant to be a reminder that we need each other if we are going to be successful in this practice. We will have to rely on each other’s support.
I know that committing to a regular practice of studying Torah is hard. And I want to say publicly now, that as your rabbi, I am committed to working with you to come up with a plan for your own Torah study. And I will work with you to come up with a plan that keeps you accountable to yourself. Even if this means being a nudge!
Last year when I stood here, I spoke about the need for us to understand ourselves as being in covenantal relationship with one another, and this is no small task. But even as we work on crafting some small version of a Brit Bnai Keshet, we should remember that we already have a covenantal document – The Torah. When we come together and study Torah on Shabbat, we are engaging each other in a covenantal dialogue. In so doing we are not only tying ourselves to each other but to klal yisrael – the Jewish people as it exists right now.
More amazingly we are tying our lives to all the Jewish peoples of the past who for thousands of years have come back to this text in their quest to reflect on the lives they are living and in the desire to shape the path for their actions.
Torah pushes us to be awake to the importance of life in the present even as it reminds us of just how narrow and small our own present is. The Torah perpetually turns the Jewish narrative of the past into our narrative for the present. On Passover we thank God not for having freed our ancestors from slavery, but for freeing us from slavery. And on Shavuot we are taught that every Jew who ever lived or will live was at Sinai. We are supposed to remember what it was like to be at Sinai and to receive God’s revelation directly. When Torah study succeeds, the “us” of the present moment and the “them” of Judaism’s spiritual history dissolve.
We learn to write ourselves into Torah’s narrative.
We ask, what did it feel like to cross the Sea of Reeds?
How can I, Sarah, a 75-year old woman, not laugh at the thought of giving birth? What was I thinking as my father Abraham was binding me for sacrifice?
Studying Torah weaves our own life experiences in with our spiritual ancestors as well as our very real parents, grandparents and great-grandparents who, to varying degrees, read the stories of their lives with Torah as its mirror.
And when Torah becomes a mirror for reflecting our own lives it then has the power to tie us together with future generations. A story from the Talmud Yerushalmi, Masechet Shabbat:
Every Friday afternoon Rabbi Joshua used to listen to his grandson recite the Torah he had studied that week. Once while entering the mikveh in preparation for Shabbat he realized he had forgotten to listen to his grandson. He immediately got up from the bath to hear it, and when questioned by a student he said, “…my son, what I am about to do may appear trivial to you. You should understand that listening to one’s grandson recite a portion in Scripture is like listening to it at Mount Sinai, for it is said, “When you make the words of Torah known to your children and children’s children, it is like the day that you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb (Deut. 4:9-10) P. Shab 1:2
As Jews our tradition constantly encourages us to read the stories of our own lives in relationship to the stories of our tradition. There is no holiday, no event, no day of the week in Judaism without its Torah, without its text, and every text is read through an ever-expanding body of interpretation. And there are few interpretations that are not further interpreted.
Now I have been asked, “Rabbi perhaps it is simply the process of interpreting. Might it be just as good if we committed to a practice of regular study of poetry or the Greek tragedies or our favorite children’s stories?”
My answer is no, it would not be just as good. Torah is better.
Let me be clear, I believe that the best literature, especially when studied with others, can be spiritual and life altering, but I think that as a regular spiritual practice the study of Torah surpasses them.
It surpasses them because it is a text that was written with the purpose of helping us to understand God and our relationship to God.
Even if some of us could agree to read another book with this same goal in mind, when we read Torah we are automatically put into relationship with the entire Jewish people. We are in agreement that this is our holy text, love it or hate it, and that this is the text we must fight about to determine the meaning of a Jewish life.
And hopefully over the course of time this fight, leshem shamayim – for the sake of heaven - this struggle, this clever conversation and insightful questioning with each other and hundreds of generations of other Jews, this process, leads us to consider not only the meaning of life in general but also of our own personal lives.
Ultimately, this process of regular engagement with the Torah is internalized and we learn to ask, “If my life were a story in the Torah what would its meaning be?” It teaches us to read our lives not just as stories but as holy stories. We learn to assume that meaning exists in our lives and experiences. Torah study teaches us to look for God’s presence in the world. And finally it turns us into actors, reminding us over and over again that it is our role to bring the text of our lives into accord with the holiness we are studying.
When Torah becomes our story and when we work to assure that Torah will be central to future generations of Jews, we gain a measure of immortality.
Writing a Torah is no small thing. We should remember that it took only seven days to create the world but 40 to write the Torah. There are many Midrash that suggest the world came into being for the sake of Torah. And that were we not to have accepted the Torah at Sinai, the world would have ceased to exist. In writing a Torah we affirm our willingness to receive its wisdom
Yes, we should write a Torah and I pray that in so doing Torah will seep more deeply into our lives. I pray that we will support this project by strengthening our community’s practice of Torah study. May it be that this process will allow us to hear the words of previous generations of Jews. May it be that by writing a Torah we will make the world more whole and may it be that this effort will be received as a gift by future generations.
I invite you to join me in preparation for this new year of Torah study by reciting birkat Torah the blessing for studying Torah.
Blessed are you, The One of Sinai, our God, the sovereign of all worlds, who made us holy with your mitzvot and commanded us to occupy ourselves wit words of Torah!
