HOLOCAUST TORAH PROCESSION
Torah-A Tree of Life*
Our Torah is the great symbol of Jewish life today, as it has been for more than two thousand years.
At first there was the menorah, the ark of the Covenant, and then the Temple.
But before the second Temple was built, the reading of Torah became the great symbolic act of Jewish unity.
Medieval Jews honored the Torah with a rich cover and a crown, as they had learned to honor royalty.
Modern Jews, like our ancestors, stand in its presence and treat it with awe, a holy object.
It is a tree of life, we say, therefore identifying it with the seven-branched menorah that stood in the Tabernacle and the Temple.
It contains the Law of Moses, we say, identifying it with the Temple, the center of Jewish life in the past, and proclaiming it the center of Jewish life today for ourselves and our people.
We stand in awe of these scrolls, for they have preserved us as we have preserved them. They are potent and they are dangerous:
Dangerous if we treat them like icons, keep the scrolls rolled and look at the jeweled embroidery, kiss the mantle and forget the words,
Dangerous even if we read the words and accept them as written without understanding, without interpretation, without love,
Manny Saks, reading
Potent to make us seek eternal values in our temporary
lives;
potent to set our minds and souls on the search for
God.
This is our Torah.
In it is the God-seeking of our people.
Let us use it with wisdom.