From the International President of United Synagogue
I wrote a Torah!
Okay, so I didn’t exactly write a whole Torah, I wrote a word in the Torah, with the able assistance of the sofer, the scribe. One of the mitzvot is for each of us to write a copy of the Torah. Deuteronomy 31:19 teaches: “Therefore, write down this poem and teach it to the people of Israel; put it in their mouths…” Our rabbis taught that this meant that each Jew should write his or her own Torah. Our tradition has evolved to allow that if a person writes but one letter of a Torah, he or she has completed the mitzvah of writing a whole Torah.
I cannot begin to describe fully the strange and awesome sensation that I felt as I held the quill while the sofer brought the letters from a weak outline to the dark powerful statement on the parchment. What a powerful moment it was for me. Not just because I was writing a Torah, but because this siyyum haTorah, this completion of the writing of a Torah, was with and for a USY region, CHUSY, which encompasses metropolitan Chicago. I watched as each regional officer and each representative of the CHUSY congregational chapters participated in writing his or her own Torah. Each held the quill, recited the blessing, and with great purpose and kavod, respect, wrote on the parchment. They wrote both their own and their community’s.
This Torah and its restoration was a gift from a group of people who responded to the call to provide the opportunity for this USY region to write and study from its own Torah. Think of the power given to these students. Not only did they write their sefer Torah but they will be able to put its words in their mouths as they read from it during their tenure in USY.
How unselfish and generous it was for these donors to act as they did, to teach this group of young people a lesson of such spiritual and pragmatic value. This Torah will provide opportunities for study and discourse between the young people who will surround it and between those young people and our tradition as represented by the words of our Torah.
Every day each of us has the opportunity to put the words of Torah in our mouths, and by doing so to demonstrate that we too have great respect for Torah. In performing the simplest of mitzvot we write our own poem, the story of Judaism in our life. Conservative Jews may each have our own poem, each written in a slightly different style, each with a different rhythm and form. We each begin our poem differently. As it develops, as it is written over time, there will be changes, and the poem might be edited. As Conservative Jews our own poem is guided by our inherited poem, the Torah. As we write our personal Torah, as we edit it and live it, we will teach the Torah to others. As we study the poem of others we will learn from them, too. In this way, our own Torah will blend with the Torahs of others to form a communal poem that will demonstrate to others that they too can write a Torah for themselves, that they too can put the words of the Torah in their own mouths.
CJ: Voices of Conservative/Masorti Judaism is an opportunity to begin to write a poem for Conservative Jews. If it were not for the fact that this is the beginning of an enterprise we might hold a siyyum. The publication of this first edition of a Conservative movement magazine is the culmination of a great deal of work. I am proud to have partnered with Rabbi Jerome Epstein, executive vice president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism; the leadership of the Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs, its immediate past president, Dr. Robert Braitman, and its executive director, Rabbi Charles Simon; and the leadership of Women’s League for Conservative Judaism, its president, Cory Schneider, its immediate past president, Gloria Cohen, and its executive director, Bernice Balter, to have put in place the framework that made this dream of our predecessors a reality.
With this publication, we begin to write a Torah for Conservative Jews that is accessible to all. It is my dream that our joint staff – editors Rhonda Jacobs Kahn and Joanne Palmer and advertising director Bonnie Riva Ras – along with the CJ editorial committee, will guide this magazine to becoming the place to share Torah, to share the poems of Conservative Jews, and to put the words of both into our mouths so that we each will be inspired to continue writing our own personal poem, our personal Torah as Conservative Jews.
