The Talmud tells of the time Rabbi Chananya ben Tradyon went to visit Rabbi Yosi ben Kisma when he had taken sick. Rabbi Kisma said, “Chanaya my brother, don’t you know that this nation [the Roman Empire] has been empowered by Heaven, allowed to destroy His House, burn his Sanctuary, kill His pious ones. They will burn you and the sifrei Torah together…”
Indeed, the Roman Empire wreaked destruction upon the Jewish Community, sparing no one. Certainly not Rabbi Chananya ben Tradyon. True to Rabbi Kisma’s vision, Rabbi Cananya was burned at the stake, wrapped in the blessed Torah scroll. The Romans had placed moist cotton over his heart to prolong the process of his death, increasing his pain and agony.
As the tzadik was burning with the sefer Torah, the Romans mocked him by deriding him with the obvious. “Oh, teacher. Do you see the flames consuming you?”
His disciples came close, feeling the heat from the fire as they drew closer still. “Rabbi, what do you see?”
Incredibly, a smile flickered across the rabbi’s lips. “I see the parchment being consumed by the flames,” he said. “But the letters… the letters I see flying off. They remain.”
The evil guard at Auschwitz saw only the smoke coming from the smokestacks of the crematoria. He saw the flesh being consumed.
He did not have eyes to see the children flying heavenward, forever to remain.
* * *
I held Clary’s hand that day as we looked across Keren Hayesod at the stained glass windows and I said, “We will write a sefer Torah to be placed in that shul!”
She looked at me, the tears continuing to well up in her eyes.
“This is our home,” I said to her. “This is ours. We are here to stay.”
* * *
Each letter, precious. Each letter, holy. Within each, the entirety of Torah. Within the entirety of Torah, each letter.
Each child, precious. Each child, holy. Within each, the entirety of creation. Within the entirety of creation, each child.
* * *
The final mitzvah of the Torah rings with hope and joy, Veata kisvu lachem es ha’shira hazos, “So now write this song for yourselves.”
What an awesome command! To write a sefer Torah; to commit to the scroll each and every letter. We know that there are six hundred thousand letters in the Torah. This number is, of course, significant in and of itself. For it not only alludes to the name of our People and nation, but also to the number of Jewish souls counted in the first census in the desert after we had been freed from our slavery. Six hundred thousand, the number representative of all klal Yisrael.
The Pnei Yehoshua explains, based on the Shloh, that every Jew has within his soul one particular mitzva that is attached to one particular letter in the Torah. All the souls of klal Yisrael are inherent in the letters of Torah, letters each and every Jew claims rights to!
The Ari z’l taught that the soul of each and every Jew is rooted in a letter in the Torah, that each letter has a spiritual power to them because each originates at the Heavenly throne, the same place where all souls originate; and thus each is linked to a letter.
It is because of this truth that hachnossas sefer torah is such an incredible and astonishing simcha. Not simply because another sefer Torah is added to the aron hakodesh in Ohel Yitzchak, the shul that received our Torah, and not simply because another sefer Torah was added to the thousands all over Eretz Yisrael. No, this incredible simcha is not the consequence of an accrual but quite the opposite. It is astonishing in the uniqueness and singularity of the mitzvah.
