Why We Still Use Torah Scrolls

stumbling onto a great symbol

Religion is full of things. Fancy people call this “material culture.” This is what it says on my CV, though I find the phrase annoying because it’s obscure without being helpful. I study material culture, but what I find interesting is…stuff. Objects. Things.

Objects make their way into religion in many different ways. Sometimes the Bible or Talmud says that they’re important. Sometimes they’re borrowed from other cultures, or they just become important because they’ve been in use for a very long time. The route to meaning that I like the most, however, is the one where an ordinary object becomes important because everyone else stopped using it except for us. I called this “meaning through attrition,” and it happens more often than you’d think.

In Judaism, the most important example of meaning through attrition is the Torah scroll. Once upon a time, books were scrolls; later, they were bound sheets. We don’t know why Jews kept their Bible in a scroll; we don’t know if they made a choice at all. We do know that Christians were early adopters of the codex, and it is Christians, not Jews, who first remarked on the Jewish predilection for scrolls (for more on this, read David Stern’s book). Today, the scroll is one of Judaism’s most recognizable symbols—and yet it became so by simply staying still while others moved on.

Decisions like this are fascinating because they never feel like a big deal at the time, if they’re even decisions at all. When rabbis originally ruled that Hanukkah candles should not be electric, they had no idea that Christian lawns would soon be blanketed with Christmas lights, while Jews—whose holiday is all about publicizing a miraculous event—would make due with a few dinky flames. When Jews decided to keep using ratchets to make noise on Purim while everyone else moved on to whistles and airhorns, they didn’t intend to turn the grogger into an icon. It just happened.

Over time, of course, the gap between the old and the new gains its own significance. As the scroll becomes more and more antiquated, its symbolism actually grows, and this symbolism is powerful enough not just to sustain the scribes who still write out every Torah scroll by hand on parchment with a quill or reed, but also fend off attempts to speed up the process through the use of silkscreening or other rapid printing techniques. (Notably, the process for checking finished scrolls for errors has been sped up through the use of computer text recognition.) This isn’t just a Jewish process; there’s a great article about how bayonets stayed in use long after they had stopped being useful weapons.

OK, end of thought.

I’m sharing all of this with you now for a couple of reasons. First, we just passed Simchat Torah, a holiday which really celebrates the physicality of the Torah scroll: people dance with them, even if they’re not in great condition, and synagogues will circulate basically all of their scrolls at once, rather than the typical one per week. Some synagogues even unroll the entire scroll for kids to examine, a custom which is neat in theory but always makes me very nervous that someone will drop it.

Second, more selfishly, the publishing house I run just announced a new kids book, about how a Torah scroll is made. It was written by Jen Taylor Friedman, the first woman to have ever completed a Torah scroll (as far as we know) and a major force behind egalitarian scribal networks. It was illustrated by Mat Tonti, who is now working on a graphic novel based on a famous diary, one of the only firsthand accounts of early modern life written from a Jewish woman’s perspective. Basically, two powerhouses. Here’s the cover:

/end of sales pitch. Thanks for reading, see you next week.