Torah Scroll Quotes

My heart can take on any form: A meadow for gazelles, A cloister for monks, For the idols, sacred ground, Ka'ba for the circling pilgrim, The tables of the Torah, The scrolls of the Quran. My creed is Love; Wherever its caravan turns along the way, That is my belief, My faith.

Getting my shit kicked in by a clan of Jewish boarding school kids for referring to the Torah as "The Elder Scroll".

Scholars call it [the Torah] the Masoretic text. The Masoretes were Hebrew scribes of the first centuries of the present era. They fixed the wording and spelling of the Bible; since then it has not changed. It has long been a matter of critical controversy as to just how accurate the Masoretes were; for one thing, did they have a true text from ancient sources, or did they invent and corrupt? Opinion has swayed back and forth on this point. The excitement over the Dead Sea Scrolls came in part from their substantial authentication of the Masoretic Isaiah.

I saw Jews raising Torah scrolls, which contain the injunction to remember that we were strangers in Egypt and so we must treat the stranger fairly, dancing in the streets emptied of their Palestinian neighbors. The insistence on empathy with the stranger appears with greater frequency in the Torah than any other verse—including commandments to observe the Sabbath and keep kosher.

Several hundred men filled the main chamber. Women’s voices could be heard from beyond the cloth screens running down the eastern wall. The gathering quieted for the service, which followed the same pattern as in Judea: a song and then a Scripture reading from the Torah scrolls, followed by a prayer from the Psalms. Some men departed to begin their day, but most remained. Jacob stayed where he was, repeating silently the Psalms that resonated with the emotions filling his heart. How precious, O God, is your constant love. You let us drink from the river of your goodness. You are the source of all life.

From antiquity onward, Torah scrolls were treated as objects of veneration, and imagined to have (for example) health-giving properties. This Jewish idea that the book embodied the divinity of its sacred subject matter shaped the formation of the Christian Bible and the Qur’an. From antiquity onward, the idea of a material book as the ultimate source of truth has persisted. The Roman emperor Justinian passed a law in AD 530 requiring the presence of “holy scriptures” in court throughout proceedings; in the United Kingdom, as recently as 2013 the Magistrates’ Association reaffirmed the need for witnesses to swear on sacred texts.

I am interested in the literature and religion of ancient Israel. I focus on biblical law in its ancient Near Eastern context and on the way that biblical law was later reinterpreted in the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Second Temple literature. I have also explored the relation of the Bible to later western intellectual history. In my latest book, A More Perfect Torah: At the Intersection of Philology and Hermeneutics in Deuteronomy and the Temple Scroll, I explore the relationship between biblical composition history and its reception history at Qumran and in rabbinic literature. At the University of Minnesota, I have department affiliations with the Center for Jewish Studies and the Program in Religious Studies and am also an affiliated faculty member of the Law School.

The Torah, then, was compact, transferable history, law, wisdom, poetic chant, prophecy, consolation and self-strengthening counsel. Just as the sanctuary could be erected in safety and dismantled in crisis, the speaking scroll was designed to survive even incineration, because the scribes who had composed and edited it had memorised its oral traditions and its texts as part of their basic education.

Third, there is no description of the powers of the king – his role, his task, his mission. Instead there is a series of restrictions. He must not accumulate horses, wives, or wealth (Deut. 17:17). He is to have his personal Torah scroll that he is to read “all the days of his life” (17:18–19) and not deviate from its teachings “to the right or to the left” (17:20). He must be humble and “not consider himself better than his fellow Israelites” (17:20).

today’s Jews, Armenians and Georgians claim with some measure of justice that they are the offspring of ancient Middle Eastern peoples. Yet these are only exceptions that prove the rule, and even these claims are somewhat exaggerated. It goes without saying that the political, economic and social practices of modern Jews, for example, owe far more to the empires under which they lived during the past two millennia than to the traditions of the ancient kingdom of Judaea. If King David were to show up in an ultra-Orthodox synagogue in present-day Jerusalem, he would be utterly bewildered to find people dressed in East European clothes, speaking in a German dialect (Yiddish) and having endless arguments about the meaning of a Babylonian text (the Talmud). There were neither synagogues, volumes of Talmud, nor even Torah scrolls in ancient Judaea.

That first night I was a novitiate. Soon, like the others, I would learn about the stars in the heavens by reading the astronomical tables they inscribed on my feet, shins, and fingers. Soon, I would grow to believe that I myself was an actual text, and that my skin without henna was like a holy book without words—a shameful, almost blasphemous, thing. Without henna, I wouldn't know how to read myself. With henna, I was as sacred as a sanctified Torah. With henna, I was the carrier of ancient tales—a living girl-scroll replete with tales of sorrow, joy, and salvation.

On May 31, 1834, a sizable earthquake struck Safad, accompanied by much loss of property, and some weeks later word reached town that the Egyptian army was going to conscript Arab men. Superstitious Arabs concluded that some malign influence was working against them, and the Jews were blamed. The logical solution was to massacre them, which the Arabs started to do. For thirty-three unhampered days the Muslims were allowed to riot, destroying synagogues, killing rabbis and defacing over two hundred scrolls of the Torah, each worth more than a man’s home. The remnants of the great Jewish settlement were driven into the countryside, where for more than a month they lived on grass and slaughtered sheep, after which the government came back, caught the Arab ringleaders and hanged thirteen of them.

The first time I attended an Anglican church, the most surprising part of the service was when they lifted the physical book of the Bible into the air and carried it down the aisle. People turned and bowed their heads as it moved past them. Their reverence for Scripture captivated my imagination. I had taken for granted that I could hold the Bible in my hands at home, fall asleep reading it in bed. Growing up, some of my friends had Bibles decorated with cartoons. But there, the people of God stood for the processon of the Bible. They stood for the reading of the Word. I felt as thought I had been pulled back in time to when Ezra read the law to the returning Israelites, and they all stood to hear it. Going back to Christianity’s Jewish roots, the Torah was carried with worshipers all around it. The people stood for the procession of the sacred word. Jews kissed —and some still kiss—the sacred book when they opened it and closed it. If the scroll of the Torah became unusable, they would bury it like a loved one rather than destroy it. The word of God was central to their worship, their culture, their very identity. (p. 12)

Although no longer gospel, the assumption that multiple sources underlie the Torah can still help clarify many of the text's contradictions. Some version of it existed in 458 BCE, when Ezra, a Jewish priest in the Persian emperor's service, read it to the Yehudites in Jerusalem, but that scroll included less than what exists today.

At every significant point in the four centuries since English settlers laid the foundations for the nation we know—at every significant point—American leaders and the great majority of the American people have explicitly said or acted as though they understood history in terms of this public religion. As King George III’s British troops moved toward New York City in the summer of 1776, Gershom Seixas, leader of the first Jewish synagogue in America, Shearith Israel, led his people into what they called their “exile.” Armed with the Torah scrolls, the congregation linked the ancient story of its forbears with the young country’s, referring to the Revolution as “the sacred cause of America.” Once victory was won, the congregation prayed in thanksgiving: “We cried unto the Lord from our straits and from our troubles He brought us forth.” The Lord delivered Israel; now he had delivered the United States.

There were neither synagogues, volumes of Talmud, nor even Torah scrolls in ancient Judaea.

Keriat haTorah therefore means not reading, but proclaiming the Torah, reading it aloud. The one who reads it has the written word in front of him, but for the rest of the gathering it is an experience not of the eye, but of the ear. The divine word is something heard rather than seen. Indeed, it was only with the spread of manuscripts, and the invention of printing in the fifteenth century, that reading become a visual rather than auditory experience. To this day the primary experience of keriat haTorah involves listening to the reader declaim the words from the Torah scroll, rather than following them in a printed book. We miss some of the most subtle effects of Torah if we think of it as the text seen, rather than the word heard.

We passed by the large chambers and, on the way back, I saw a big curtain at the entrance to the large chambers, a curtain used to cover the Ark containing the Torah Scrolls with the Shield of David on it, and on the curtain there was the inscription: “This is the gate of the Lord, through which the righteous shall enter.