Lea's Torah

The room which moments earlier had been filled with the sounds of adults talking and children running and laughing was suddenly hushed, profoundly quiet except for the scratching of a quill. The last two lines of the book of Deuteronomy were being inscribed onto a parchment section which would soon be sewn to its predecessors in the completion of a Torah scroll. As the scribe Jamie Shear dipped his quill into ink and then wrote, reciting each word before he did so, we his audience at Temple Emanu-El watched silently the fulfillment of an ancient command to write the words of the covenant for every generation. When he was finished the children and the adults started to dance and to sing, but there was more task to be done before the secular could be called holy, before the skin of an animal and wood and ink transcended the level of commonplace to become the sacred.

Our new Torah at Temple Emanu-El had been paid for by subscription. We’d recently lost a favorite teacher, Lea Eliash. Someone, I don’t know who, proposed that a fitting tribute to a woman who had devoted her life in America to teaching Hebrew to young children and mature adults after surviving the terrors of the Holocaust in Europe, would be to honor her memory with a new Torah scroll, and so was launched the “Lea’s Letters” campaign. And now the last of those letters, the word Yisrael, was being inscribed as permanently as anything in this world can be, to be read by bar and bat mitzvah candidates and their parents and grandparents, and by their children and grandchildren for as along as there is a Temple Emanu-El, and beyond, I imagine. Its rollers and handles (called in Hebrew Atzei Chaim, in English “Trees of Life”) were carved by her grandson out of wood from her dining room table, a place I’ve sat at and enjoyed meals and conviviality as have many in the community. Now it is reduced in size but increased in stature. Lea is gone, we all knew that, but this piece of her home will provide ample reminder of her presence and importance to the community for as long as we remembered where they were from. The collective gasp as this was revealed was almost the sound of a breeze through the tall grasses. In time, I suppose there will be fewer and fewer people who will recall that the wood of the trees of life were from the dining room table of a loving and gentle woman who once lived here, but for a while, at least, we who were there will remember, and when we do, her sweetness and grace will be called to mind.

In my mind scribes are old men in black suits, pot bellies, blackened fingers and shtreimels, or at least black fedoras. Shear does not fit the mold. Rail thin and smiling shyly he covers his head with a knitted kippah and while he has a beard, it’s a stylish goatee (I recently had one like that until my wife pointed out that enough was enough). Born and raised in Montreal, he attended High School and Bar Ilan University in Israel, moving there permanently four years ago. Emanu-El’s is his sixth torah scroll. It has the standard 245 columns, each checked by the scribe and then by two rabbis and then by a computer which scans it and spots errors, if any. At Emanu-El, just as he was about to sew the final stage onto the rollers, he noticed that an aleph, one of the letters he’d just written, was just slightly off. He described an aleph as a vov with two yuds, one above and one below. The upper yud was more of a blob than he felt appropriate and with the audience surrounding him he scraped off the offending digit and replaced it with a better one. Now he was finished and when the last stitch connecting parchment to roller was completed we broke out into a she’hecheyanu prayer—Blessed are you, Lord, who has granted us life, sustained us and enabled us to reach this occasion. Nothing else seemed as appropriate.

Lea Eliash now has a suitable memorial; Jamie Shear now has completed another Torah—but he has another almost done which he’ll deliver to a congregation in Hong Kong next month. And we of Temple Emanu-El have a new torah, light enough to be lifted by thirteen year olds and solid enough to contain the words of our people as they have been laboriously penned by other scribes, again, and again, and again.