Dropping a Torah

 

The Times of Israel reports on the visceral reactions of congregants to accidentally dropping Torah scrolls on the floor in two New York synagogues. They also detail the rabbis efforts at ritual rectification, including recommending that the congregants fast and give extra to charity.

These stories show again how ritualizing the iconic dimension of a scripture resonates particularly with lay people who feel that religious legitimacy is at stake (see How and Why Books Matter 15-23, 31-70, 83-98). They also illustrate how the ritual rules for iconic texts that are promulgated by leaders are usually generated in response to lay people's anxiety and questions (thus creating the genre of responsa).

From Scrolls to Scrolling Sacred Texts, Materiality, and Dynamic Media Cultures

New open access book edited by Bradford A. Anderson, From Scrolls to Scrolling: Sacred Texts, Materiality, and Dynamic Media Cultures (De Gruyter, 2020).



Contents:

• Bradford A. Anderson, "Introduction: Materiality, Liminality, and the Digital Turn: The Sacred Texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in Material Perspective" 1

I Sacred Texts and Material Contexts

• Anna Krauß and Friederike Schücking-Jungblut, "Stichographic Layout in the Dead Sea Psalms Scrolls: Observations on its  Development and its Potential" 13
• Dan Batovici, "Reading Aids in Early Christian Papyri" 35
• Asma Hilali, "Writing the Qur’ān Between the Lines: Marginal and Interlinear Notes in Selected Qur’ān Fragments from the Museum of Islamic Art, Qatar" 51
• Ben Outhwaite, "The Sefer Torah and Jewish Orthodoxy in the Islamic Middle Ages" 63
• Javier del Barco, "From Scroll to Codex: Dynamics of Text Layout Transformation in the Hebrew Bible" 91
• Eyal Poleg, "Memory, Performance, and Change: The Psalms’ Layout in Late Medieval and Early Modern Bibles" 119
• Amanda Dillon, "Be Your Own Scribe: Bible Journalling and the New Illuminators of the Densely-Printed Page" 151

II Sacred Texts and the Digital Turn

• Garrick V. Allen, "Monks, Manuscripts, Muhammad, and Digital Editions of the New Testament" 181
• Alba Fedeli, "The Qur’ānic Text from Manuscript to Digital Form: Metalinguistic Markup of Scribes and Editors" 213
• Joshua L. Mann, "Paratexts and the Hermeneutics of Digital Bibles" 247
• Natalia Suit, "Virtual Qur’ān: Authenticity, Authority, and Ayat in Bytes" 263
• Bradford A. Anderson, "Sacred Texts in a Digital Age: Materiality, Digital Culture, and the Functional Dimensions of Scriptures in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam" 281

Responding to Trump's Bible Pose

Since Donald Trump violently expelled protestors in order to pose with a Bible in front of a church, media and social media has overflown with outrage and ridicule. All this talk will likely prove ineffective, because it is just talk. Trump took symbolic action. The only way to counter ritual action is with other symbolic action.

Bad rituals can only be corrected by good rituals. That is true whether you believe that the rituals have real effects or that they are only symbols. Either way, they have visceral effects on participants and observers. So commentary by supporters and critics has little do with whether or not the picture of Trump holding the Bible will have its desired effect.

What would counter rituals look like? Well, protestors could hold bibles while they march, and claim this powerful symbol of the Christian religion for their cause. Their signs could quote bible verses like “Let my people go!” (Exodus 5:1), “You must love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18), “You must love the immigrant as yourself” (Leviticus 19:34), “Let justice and righteousness flow like a river” (Amos 5:24), and “Blessed are the poor … but woe to  the rich” (Luke 6:20, 24).

Better yet: people holding up bibles could march side-by-side with people holding up qur’ans (Muslims) and torahs (Jews) and gitas (Hindus) and sutras (Buddhists) and Adi Granths (Sikhs) and wampum belts (Native Americans of the northeast) and other sacred symbols of different religious and cultural traditions that each community would choose as appropriate for these protests.

A picture of that protest would counter Trump’s pose with a Bible more effectively than all the words on media and social media put together. That picture would reclaim religious and cultural symbols for proclaiming the priority of justice and compassion for all.

Sensing Sacred Texts

The 2017 special edition in Postscripts has now been published as an independent volume, Sensing Sacred Texts, ed. J. W. Watts; Sheffield: Equinox, 2018:

All the human senses become engaged in ritualizing sacred texts. These essays focus especially on ritualizing the iconic dimension of texts through the senses of sight, touch, kiss, and taste, both directly and in the imagination.

Ritualized display of books engages the sense of sight very differently than does reading. Touching gets associated with reading scriptures, but touching also enables using the scripture as an amulet. Eating and consuming texts is a ubiquitous analogy for internalizing the contents of texts by reading and memorization.

The idea of textual consumption reflects a widespread tendency to equate humans and written texts by their interiority and exteriority: books and people both have material bodies, yet both seem to contain immaterial ideas. Books thus physically incarnate cultural and religious values, doctrines, beliefs, and ideas.

These essays bring theories of comparative scriptures and affect theory to bear on the topic as well as rich ethnographic descriptions of scriptural practices with Jewish, Sikh, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist and modern art and historical accounts of changing practices with sacred texts in ancient and medieval China and Korea, and in ancient Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cultures.

Understanding the Pentateuch as A Scripture

Understanding the Pentateuch as a Scripture (Wiley Blackwell, 2017) applies my research on iconic books and comparative scriptures to the study of the Pentateuch/Torah, the first five books of Jewish and Christian scriptures.

Contents:

1. RITUALIZED TEXT: The Pentateuch as a Scripture

2. TEXTUAL RHETORIC: The Persuasive Shaping of the Pentateuch

3. SCROLL, TABLET, AND CODEX: Ritualizing the Pentateuch’s Iconic Dimension

4. READING, PERFORMANCE, AND ART: Ritualizing the Pentateuch’s Performative Dimension

5. TEXTUAL INTERPRETATION: Ritualizing the Pentateuch’s Semantic Dimension

6. SCRIPTURES: From Torah to Bible

Postscripts issue on Sensing Sacred Texts

Postscripts: the Journal of Sacred Texts and Contemporary Worlds has published a special issue on Sensing Sacred Texts. The contents are:

"What the Book Arts Can Teach Us About Sacred Texts: The Aesthetic Dimension of Scripture"
        by S. Brent Plate

"How the Bible Feels: The Christian Bible as Effective and Affective Object"
        by Dorina Miller Parmenter

"Engaging All the Senses: On Multi-sensory Stimulation in the Process of Making and Inaugurating a Torah Scroll"
by Marianne Schleicher

"On Instant Scripture and Proximal Texts: Some Insights into the Sensual Materiality of Texts and their Ritual Roles in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond"
by Christian Frevel

"Touching Books, Touching Art: Tactile Dimensions of Sacred Books in the Medieval West"
by David Ganz

"Infusions and Fumigations: Literacy Ideologies and Therapeutic Aspects of the Qurʾan"
        by Katharina Wilkens

"Seeing, Touching, Holding, and Swallowing Tibetan Buddhist Texts"
by Cathy Cantwell

"Neo-Confucian Sensory Readings of Scriptures: The Reading Methods of Chu Hsi and Yi Hwang"
        by Yohan Yoo

"Scriptures' Indexical Touch"
by James W. Watts

New articles: Religions & Books, and Iconic Scriptures

The new issue of Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture is devoted to the theme of "Livre et religion / Religion and the Book." The articles focus on various aspects of the multifarious interactions between religions and books. I particularly recommend the introduction by the guest editor, Scott McLaren, who draws together the theme and the articles in a broad theoretical overview:

• McLaren, Scott. "The End of Religion and the Death of the Book," Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture 6/2 (2015), online at DOI: 10.7202/1032705ar. 

 My own article uses the example of the Jewish Torah to emphasize that ritualizing the semantic dimension of texts does not necessarily take historical priority over ritualizing the iconic and performative dimensions.

• Watts, James W. "Iconic Scriptures from Decalogue to Bible." Mémoires du livre / Studies in Book Culture 6/2 (2015), online at DOI: 10.7202/1032712ar.

SCRIPT at SHARP in Antwerp

SCRIPT sponsored nine papers in three panels at the of SHARP annual meeting in Antwerp, Belgium on September 18-20, 2014.

On the first panel, "Canonizing and Scripturalizing Iconic Books," I introduced the Iconic Books Project. My paper, “Iconic Scriptures from Decalogue to Bible,” described the iconic motivations that generated the Ten Commandments and the scroll of Torah in ancient Israel. Michael Como (Columbia University) explored the religious, social and environmental effects of bringing Buddhist scribal bureaucracy to Japan in “Canon, Ethnicity and Kingship in Ancient Japan." Kristina Myrvold (Linnaeus University) described how Sikhs narrate the early history of the Guru Granth Sahib in “Entextualization of Sikh Texts in Religious Historiographies and Performances.”

On the second panel, "Literary and Iconic Canons," Jonas Svenson (Linnaeus University) borrowed the concept of contagion avoidance from cognitive psychology to describe Muslim concern to protect the purity of the Qur'an, in “The double Scripture: explaining diversity and conflict in Muslim perceptions and practices in relation to the Qur’an.” Rachel Fell McDermott (Barnard College, Columbia University) then described the life and controversial influence of the Bangladeshi national poet Kazi Nazrul Islam in “When a National Poet is a Heretic: The Collision of Literary and Religious Canons.” Karl Ivan Solibakke (Syracuse University) concluded the panel with by mediating two 20th-century uses of texts and images in “Mimesis and Poesis: Walter Benjamin’s and Vilem Flusser’s Translational Approach to Script.”

In the third panel, "Scriptures as Icons and Talismans," Dorina Miller Parmenter (Spalding University)  advanced theories of iconic books by employing Affect Theory in “Saved by the Book: Exploring the Christian Bible as Effective and Affective Object.” David Ganz (University of Zürich) described medieval Christians' concern to "cover the nakedness" of a book of scripture with decorative bindings in “Clothing Sacred Scripture: Books as Holy Objects in the Western Middle Ages.” Finally, Bradford Anderson (Mater Dei Institute, Dublin) explored the rhetorical and ritual use of Bibles to establish religious and national identity in "'This booke hath bred all the quarrel': The Bible in Seventeenth Century Ireland."

Discussion of each of the papers was lively and continued over several dinners in restaurants on various squares of Antwerp. The SHARP meeting, on the theme "Religions of the Book," provided a venue for many other papers on the impact of book production and book reading on religion, and vice versa. The full program can still be accessed here. 

Growing Diversity of Books for Congressional Oaths

It has become common practice in the U.S. Congress to provide a variety of texts for ritual oaths of office. The Washington Times reported in January, 2013:

As religions have expanded, so have the options for swearing-in ceremonies.
Both House and Senate lawmakers are officially sworn in on their chamber floors, and then have ceremonial swearings-in for keepsake photos afterward. Members are not required to hold any text at all, merely to raise their right hand and swear — but many do hold something, particularly during the ceremonial oath.
The Library of Congress even provides books to House members who don’t bring their own, and lawmakers can pick them off a table when they enter the ornate room for a one-on-one ceremonial oath with Mr. Boehner.
On Thursday they had nine options: Catholic, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox Bibles, the Torah, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, Hindu Vedas, an ornate box holding Buddhist Sutras, and copies of the U.S. Constitution.

Torah to the Moon

The Washington Post reports plans to send a Torah scroll to the moon. "The Torah on the Moon project, based in Tel Aviv, has been courting private firms to deliver a handwritten Jewish scroll called a sefer Torah to the lunar surface. Later flights would carry Hindu scriptures called the Veda and the I Ching, an ancient Chinese philosophical work. Each document would be housed in a capsule designed to protect it from the moon’s harsh radiation and temperature changes for at least 10,000 years." The Post article concludes by noting, "The texts would join a Bible left on the moon in 1971 by Apollo 15 commander David Scott. The red leather Bible sits on the control console of an Apollo moon buggy."

Wrapping Torah Scroll around Preacher

A remarkable video shows a Messianic Jewish rabbi and charismatic preacher, Ralph Messer, wrapping Bishop Eddie Long in a Torah scroll as a ritual of enthronement and new birth:



The video prompted a storm of controversy. Messianic Jews have repudiated Messer, and Bishop Long has apologized. But Messer has done such things before, as this video proves:

Aside from being ritually unprecedented in either Judaism or Christianity, Messer’s explanation of the ceremony is full of falsehoods. He claims that the Torah was a “constitution of God” given to every ancient Israelite king and wrapped around the king at his inauguration. There are no such accounts in the Bible. This is the first I’ve ever heard of a Torah scroll being wrapped around anyone. Messer also recounts some Jewish practices accurately, such as using a pointer so as not to touch the scroll with bare hands, while simultaneously breaking that practice himself.  Brent Strawn of Emory University did a good job of pointing out the mistakes and problems on CNN.

Messer’s actions at New Birth Baptist Church are interesting both as an example of how ritual innovation gets justified and as an example of the ritual use of an iconic book. Ritual innovation is usually disguised as ritual restoration: rather than starting new practices, an old practice is being revived. So Messer claims to be reproducing an ancient Jewish royal. His attempt differs from many other ritual innovations only in how obviously implausible they are.

Messer’s actions are also a remarkable example of the common practice of manipulating an iconic book to invoke its authority while ignoring, even contradicting, its contents. Ritualizing the iconic dimensions of texts typically functions to convey legitimacy to the people manipulating or receiving them. That’s exactly what Messer does for Bishop Long: by wrapping the Torah around Bishop Long, he proclaims his coronation and his “new birth”—claiming the legitimacy of the scripture for a religious leader embattled by scandal.

(My thanks for Bradford Anderson for bringing this to my attention.)

Relic Torah

The problem with relics has always been verifying their authenticity. This is no less true of relic texts. The New York Times reports that once questions were raised about the whether a particular Torah scroll survived the Holocaust or not, the donor felt constrained to provide another with a better attested Holocaust lineage:

... after The New York Times published an article about the Torah and the Maryland rabbi, Menachem Youlus, questions surfaced about how it came to be discovered.

As a result, David M. Rubenstein — a billionaire financier who had bought the Torah from Rabbi Youlus and donated it to Central Synagogue — sought to confirm the scroll’s authenticity. Mr. Rubinstein ... hired Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust historian and former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Research Institute.

“What I found is the claim for the origin of the Torah could not be verified,” Dr. Berenbaum said last week.

... Dr. Berenbaum had him find a Torah “whose Holocaust provenance is not in question” — it was the one placed in the ark on Monday. That Torah had remained in the Romanian Jewish community through the Holocaust and was later taken to Israel.

The significance of using a genuine Holocaust torah scroll was expressed by both the donor and the synagogue's rabbi:

Mr. Rubenstein said he had donated the Torah to Central Synagogue “so its congregants could have the sacred experience of reading Scripture from a scroll that had survived the Holocaust.”

“As one who has gone to the camps and assimilates into my being the horror of the Holocaust,” Rabbi Rubinstein said at the time, “this gives meaning to Jewish survival.”

UPDATE:

The Washington Post reported on October 11, 2012, that Rabbi Menachem Youlus pleaded guilty and was convicted of selling fake Holocaust scrolls and defrauding investors.

Youlus, the self-proclaimed “Jewish Indiana Jones” ... spun cloak-and-dagger tales of “rescuing” sacred Torah scrolls lost during the Holocaust, but those tales were lies. ... Despite Youlus’s claims that he found holy relics at concentration camps, in monasteries and in mass graves, passport records show he never traveled to Europe. ... More than 50 of his purported Holocaust Torahs made their way to congregations in the Washington area and beyond. Synagogues held emotional ceremonies to rededicate the scrolls for worship — a symbolic show of Jewish triumph over Hitler.

Youlus was sentenced to 51 months in prison and ordered to pay $990,366.05 in restitution.

Writing Torah and the Power of Prayer

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports on the ceremonial restoration of a Torah scroll.

While inking ceremonies are a tradition when a synagogue gets a new scroll, the honor of lettering in the last words typically goes to the rabbi or congregation president.

But like most of the immigrant rowhouse synagogues of a century ago, Shivtei Yeshuron, founded in 1876, does not have its own rabbi. And so it allowed any adult Jew who came through the doors yesterday to step up to the bimah, or Torah platform, and take up Youlus' quill pen.

Participating in such a miqveh "good work" is generally believe to bring blessings, but Torah scribe Menachem Youlus was very specific as he explained the importance of the act:

"This is the highest form of charity. When you fill in your letter you will have God's undivided attention.

"Even with all the six and a half billion people in the world, God will be listening at that moment only to your prayers. And so you can change the world.

"You can ask God for peace in the Middle East," he said. "You can ask for an end to world hunger. And if there is someone you know who is deceased, you can ask God to move that person's soul closer to him."

"This is your one opportunity to change things," Youlus said, grinning broadly. "You get to play God. And there's nothing wrong with playing God."

Many participants were overcome with emotion:

After each inking of a letter with Youlus' help, a member of the congregation recorded in a notebook the precise chapter, verse, line, and letter - an aleph, or lamed, or shin, or resh - that each person filled in.

One of the many women who lettered the Torah also said she felt overwhelmed by the occasion.

"Just being allowed, as a woman, to do something like this was an honor, a thrill," said a woman who gave her name only as Phyllis.

After identifying the exact letter - a tau - she had inked, she pulled open an English translation of her Torah portion and studied it closely.

It was Genesis 1:2. "Now the Earth was unformed and void," she read.

"From now on," she said, "that's going to be my verse."

On Torah Rejoicing and Torah Scroll Balloons

Yesterday was the Jewish holiday of Shemini Atzeret held on the eighth day of the Feast of Tabernacles, better known in contemporary Judaism as Simehat Torah – the Rejoicing of the Torah. This name derives from the Jewish Babylonian custom, which in the Middle Ages became prevalent in all the Jewish world, of concluding the annual Torah reading on Shemini Atzeret.

Since the early Middle Ages special customs evolved in which the synagogue's Torah Scrolls were paraded and danced with on this day. These are known as hakaphot – that is "encirclings" – because the scrolls are carried around the synagogue's bimah.

Here's a short video of hakaphot in a Chasidic synagogue:



Children are encouraged to take part in the hakaphot, but as they cannot be entrusted with the precious Torah Scrolls, they are given other objects to parade with – special flags or small Torah Scroll replicas. A few days ago, while walking down Jerusalem's Mahane Yehuda market, I noticed something I've never seen before:

Torah Scroll balloons for children, to be carried on Simehat Torah. While the production of flags and torah scroll replicas for Simehat Torah is quite commonplace, Torah Scroll balloons are a novelty as far as I know. They are of course similar to the Torah Scroll replicas. But there's also a big difference - the Torah Scroll balloons are instantly made and instantly destroyed. Here's an interesting meeting point between iconic books and pop culture.

Female Torah Scribes

Jen Taylor Friedman, a Jewish woman in the Bronx, has mastered the skills of a Torah scribe and already completed two scrolls, according to the Riverdale Press:

Many consider Ms. Friedman, 29, an important feminist figure, holding her up as a pioneering example to young Jewish women. Other Jews, primarily in the Orthodox community, believe she is out of bounds, doing work meant only for men or — in the case of Tefillin Barbie — simply inappropriate.

Ms. Friedman sold her first two Torahs to synagogues in St. Louis and Michigan.

Now, as she undertakes a third Torah, she is still adjusting to her role as lightning rod in the Jewish community. She’s been named to the Forward’s list of 50 influential Jews and, just last week, to Jewish Week’s list of 30 influential Jews under 30.

What that story does not say is that opposition to women scribes stems, at least in part, from the traditional purification rituals required of Torah scribes. Many believe that women cannot maintain the purity necessary to complete a scroll, a task that usually takes nearly a year. The issue, then, is not about skill and ability, but rather about the sanctity of a Torah scroll itself. However, the positive attention being shown Ms. Friedman also employs the legitimizing function of an iconic scripture, in this case to legitimize efforts for gender equality by putting a scribe among a select group of "influential Jews."

Torah Scroll as sign of legitimacy

The AP's report of a Philadelphia synagogue's new Torah scroll emphasizes its significance as a sign of this African-American congregation's Jewish legitimacy:

The jubilation in Temple Beth’El’s packed sanctuary overflowed into the aisles, with members dancing, clapping and singing as they welcomed their first Torah from Israel.

A new sacred scroll, the holiest object in Judaism, is cause for celebration in any synagogue. But for this Philadelphia congregation, it meant much more. It signified a tentative step toward the mainstream of American Jewish life.

“We have been unable to sleep and to eat,” said Debra Bowen, who is the rabbi. “We have Torah fever!”

The article proceeds to tally the signs of links between this congregation and other Philadelphia Jews, which seems to be nation-wide trend.

This story provides a good example of the fact that the social function of the iconic dimension of scriptures is to convey legitimacy, whether religious or political.

Burying Ukrainian Torahs

The government of Ukraine is returning old Torah scrolls to local synagogues, according to Radio Free Europe:

The Central State Historical Archive in the Ukrainian city of Lviv have returned 14 Torah fragments to a local Jewish congregation, RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service reports.

Mordehai Shlomo Bold, the chief rabbi of Lviv, told RFE/RL that the Torah fragments he received from the archive will be buried, in accordance with Jewish customs. Bold said Jewish tradition requires them to bury the holy book pieces in the same way a human is buried because it is considered "dead," or impossible to restore.

Four other Ukrainian cities are planning to give very old copies or portions of a Torah to Jewish communities based on a presidential decree signed in 2007.

Who owns Torah scrolls?

A dispute over ownership of four Torah scrolls has spilled out of the confidential confines of Jewish courts into Los Angeles District court, reports the Jewish Journal. The case pits a rabbi's widow, who claims the scrolls belong to her, against the rabbi who succeeded her husband who claims the scrolls belong to his congregation.

The case raises interesting questions regarding the Torah's iconic status as something more and different than just another book. The congregation's current rabbi,

Ohana disputes the very notion that the scrolls belong to Pauker, questioning whether they ever were family scrolls. Besides, he said, Torahs are owned by a community, not by a rabbi, a donor or anyone else. 'Sifrei Torah are not like money to change hands'.
(picture of Ohana from the LA Times)

He is refusing to accept the decision of a rabbinical court which disagreed with him and decided the case in favor of Mrs. Pauker. This pitting of community interests versus private ownership is reminiscent of the struggle to gather the fragments of the Aleppo Codex that remain in private hands.

April 9, 2009: The LA Superior Court judge reversed the rabbinical court's ruling and has awarded the scrolls to Rabbi Ohana and his congregation, according to the LA Times.

Funeral for Torah Scrolls

Thanks to Kevin Edgecomb for his comment pointing out this article in Arutz Sheva on a series of arson fires in Israel that target synagogue arks and their torah scrolls. Destruction of torah scrolls has elicited outrage and concern, and also a ritual response:

A fire in a Bnei Brak synagogue on Wednesday afternoon caused severe damage to the Holy Ark and burned four Torah scrolls beyond repair.

... The rabbis decided that the traditional mourning procession and burial ceremony for the burnt Torah scrolls will be held Friday. The procession will leave the targeted synagogue, HaRishonim, in the morning and traverse the streets of Bnei Brak until reaching the municipal cemetery, where the scrolls will be interred.

Funerals for scriptures are not unique to Jewish tradition: Sikhs and some Muslims have similar rites, and popular Christian concern to bury worn-out Bibles points in the same direction. Kristina Myrvold of the University of Lund is editing a collection of essays on the ritual disposal of scriptures in various traditions. I'm looking forward to reading it!

Torah Scroll at Samaritan Passover

Video of this year's Passover celebration by the Samaritans shows the carrying and display of the Torah scroll, similar to Jewish customs. One difference is that the person holding the scroll is the high priest, an office that fell into disuse in Judaism after 70 CE.



A major difference between Samaritan and Jewish practices that is not displayed here is that the Samaritans read Torah aloud from a codex-bound Pentateuch, rather than from the scroll itself (see Benyamim Tsedaka, “Who are the Samaritans?”).