When the Torah is Missing
Rabbi Ariana Katz
Rosh HaShanah morning 5785
October 3, 2024 | 1 Tishrei 5785
Some of you may remember how we opened Kol Nidre last year.
Let me paint the scene for you. Kol Nidre, 5784. We’re assembled in our Yom Kippur whites, the room has filled up. It always feels like the service starts so suddenly, right with candles and then into the Kol Nidre prayer. I turn to open the ark, pull out our Torah so we can perform the ritual of annuling all our vows, our preconceived notions, the burdens, grudges, and disappointments we are ready to put down.
The room is anticipatory, waiting, the air is thick. We can already feel the words of the Kol Nidre echoing in our throats. I open the doors to the ark. Then spin around, empty handed.
“I forgot the Torah.”
Well, you see, it was a busy morning. The entire building was set up, transformed from Quaker meeting house to synagogue. The service started smooth, ready to go, except for…a somewhat key element of the entire service.
So the room erupts in laughter, and I run upstairs to grab the Torah, which was patiently (and did I sense a touch of bemusement?) sitting on the table under a tallit.
I head back downstairs, and return to you in this sanctuary to this congregation singing, chuckling, and waiting for the Torah to return you.
Because the Torah always comes back.
And we got on with it.
When the Torah is missing
See, the visual of opening an ark and the Torah not being there, it is a thing of terror. The reverence for this scroll is baked into our bodies, our tradition has us fast if it is dropped, we have memories we never experienced of stolen scrolls or worse. It represents our collective tradition, our cultural inheritance, generational links, connection to the Divine, and ethical compass.
It has felt for me this year, that in so many ways, the Torah has disappeared. That is, the source of our lineages, wisdom, comfort, and compass, has disappeared. Since the end of the last High Holy Days, the world has watched a horrifying scene play out in Israel and in Palestine.
On October 7 on Simchat Torah, 1,200 Israelis were killed in just a single day of gruesome violence by Hamas. Elders, adults, children. 251 hostages were captured 1. 72 hostages have been killed, and more than 60 hostages are assumed alive still in captivity. We have witnessed parents begging their government to act to save their children’s lives, and witnessed parents reciting the mourner’s kaddish for those children.
And in the last year since October 7, over 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by the Israeli military–some estimate the total could actually be closer to 186,000 human souls 2. More than 14,000 children have been killed, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in May. UNICEF estimates that 17,000 children are unaccompanied or separated from their families. Save the Children reports that five Palestinian children have been killed or injured on average every day in the West Bank since October 3. And because these numbers are sometimes impossible for our brains to imagine, one summary helped me understand the magnitude, on a list of names, like our Torah loves to make of lineages of the living:
The Ministry of Health in Gaza has just published a 649-page document with the name, age, gender, ID number of every Palestinian killed in Gaza from October 7 to August 31 that it has info for (over 34k out of 40k). The 1st 14 pages the age is listed as…under 1 year old 4.
Just yesterday we saw Iran shoot rockets into Israel, over Tel Aviv. The Israeli government promises retaliation. Another front emerges.
I wonder about the other ways this time will be narrated across the Jewish world today. And wondering if the death tolls of Palestinians would be wept over or even acknowledged alongside Israeli dead–or just referred to as a tragic casualty of war, collateral damage. For too many Jews, there is no number of Palestinian deaths that can be equal to, or sufficient, to the number of Israeli deaths. There is no knowing to the bottom of this vengeance. This is not Torah values.
And I have seen leftists in organizing community say that any Israeli murdered on October 7 is a combatant, not a citizen. And I have watched our Jewish institutions, neighbors, family, schools, employers, newspapers, community leaders all declare that anything besides a full throated call for what results in mass Palestinian death as anti-Semetic, and the only authentic expression of Judaism is through fear and a connection to Zionism. I have seen people in our own community fear asking questions, or talking about Israeli family impacted by this violence, for fear of being responded to as the enemy when their hearts are breaking. I have watched people in our community lose jobs, family, local places of worship, because of their demand for ceasefire. I have watched organizers in our community long for loving conversation with people to their right, but not be sure how to build enough trust to do so. How can we bear all this death, all this disbelief at our fellow Jew, as the year begins again?
When I was a little girl–honestly, until maybe I was 20 years old, when I heard anything but the Shoah referred to as a genocide, I was livid. You may have heard me talk about the conservative Jewish upbringing I had, the day school environment. Education about the Nazi Holocaust was meant to, of course, honor our ancestors and martyrs, inspire us to act for a more just world, but also to understand the only way safety was really guaranteed was to support the ongoing state of Israel. Perhaps that still feels true for some of you today–or perhaps, that has been turned upside down from the last year.
If you had said to 15 year old Ariana that the Jewish people were being accused of perpetuating a genocide, I would have laughed in your face. Impossible. Improbable. Truly unimaginable. And that disbelief and denial comes from a place of deep despair for the Nazi Holocaust, and I believe the pain from looking at Israel’s actions, and needing words to describe it. But the 1948 UN General Assembly’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide states that a genocide is defined as:
...any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group 5.
And so when I call what is happening in Gaza a genocide, it is not without knowing how deeply world ending a claim of a Jewish perpetuated genocide is–in fact, that is why I insist. So if that’s you, and you’re here, stay with me, because I know how much you are hurting, either from hearing my words, or agreeing with this analysis and facing this reality.
So what do we do when the Torah is missing? What do we do when our moral guideposts have fallen apart or are manipulated for such wickedness? When the faith in how Jews are, how Jews behave, how Jews cling to justice, disappears? When what we inherited seems to crumble into dust in our hands if we grip onto it too hard? When our guiding values seem to disappear, when we open the ark and it is empty? What are we still doing here in shul?
The Ark on the Battlefield
The world has fallen apart many, many times. We have faced turmoil, watching those who claim to speak for us–or speak to God for us, to be behaving in violent and unethical ways. We have seen our Torah disappear already, we have already seen the world fall apart and spin off its axis.
Let’s first set a scene. We’re in Shiloh, one of the sites of temples established in the land, 20 miles north of Jerusalem, around 11th century BCE–the (extremely) late pre-monarchic period. All was not well in the temple in Shiloh: the high priest Eli’s sons were sexually assaulting pilgrims, violating sacrifices, and all Eli was worried about was if God would be mad.
Israel is also at war with the Philistines who are terrifying sea people who can use iron chariots 6! The battle is not going well, so the Israelites demand the Ark of the Covenant–yes, the ark that contains the 10 Commandments, to come to the battlefield. (So–stay with me–contained in the Ark is not the Torah, but predecessor, if you will, to what our Torah in the ark is meant to evoke.) So Eli’s sons bring out the Holy Ark, covered in golden cherubim, with the tablets carved by the finger of God, as a talisman of war.
Despite the Ark’s presence on the battlefield, 30,000 Israelites are killed. And the ark is captured by the Philistines, and the world seems to come unglued.
When a soldier, covered in sackcloth and ashes, runs back to Shiloh, Eli hears the news and falls backwards and dies–it is only hearing about the Ark, not his sons, that does him in.
The story cuts back to the Ark, now in Philistine captivity. First there’s a whole amazing slapstick situation with the Philistine god Dagon’s statue repeatedly shattering in front of the Ark a couple days in a row. Then it turns out wherever the Ark goes, a plague of HEMORRHOIDS AND MICE strike down the people. In Ashdod, then in Gat, then in Ekron. Hemorrhoids (or maybe according to Rashi, the plague?) in each city, for seven months, and then finally they send the ark back.
The priests from another town come to collect the Ark of God and bring it to the priest Aminadav. It stays in that town for 20 years. Meanwhile, Shiloh has been destroyed, and fallen into decay.
So, why is the ark captured? What’s your takeaway? (I love audience participation.)
An ark could easily be captured by an opponent
Shouldn’t the ark of God be protected?
Why can’t God protect the ark?
Why was Eli more upset about the Ark than his children’s deaths?
Eli was more worried about God when his sons were assaulting people, and the ark more than his son’s deaths.
The Prophet Jeremiah talks quite a bit about the destroyed city of Shiloh when prophesying that the first Temple will be destroyed. “This beautiful house of God? It doesn’t matter. We cannot control God’s actions because of control of sacred land, or because of where we position an ark when. God cannot be brought onto a battlefield just because you control an object. God is greater than that.
Because even when the Ark returns to Israelite control, when things “go back to normal,” Shiloh is still destroyed. The people continue to worship idols and exploit the marginalized. The physical Ark means nothing, if we have not repaired the rupture. The Ark might have been returned, but God has not.
When ceasefire comes in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Israel, please God, may it be soon and in our days…
When all prisoners and hostages are returned home, please God, may it be soon and in our days…
When all bereaved have the opportunity to bury their dead, please God, may it be soon and in our days…
The Ark might have been returned, but God has not. We cannot just pray to return to October 6, 2023. We cannot put the Ark back where it came from without ending our idol worship. Our objectification of land, of human life, of bombs. Of 76 years of Nakba–catastrophe, that has meant exile from land, imprisonment, humiliation, and extermination. Of 76 years of fear that the one place of safety for Jews would be lost, of the trauma and harm each Israeli faces. Rupture is not only in the loud unavoidable moments of chaos, but in the slow increase in tolerance for death, hunger, war.
What I am saying here is: the world has already been turned on its head, long before this last year, whether we were able to admit it or not. We cannot simply put the Ark back and hope for normalcy. Our Torah, our ethical framework, disappeared a long time ago. And how dare we objectify Torah into using it as a weapon of war, writing verses of Psalms on destroyed Palestinian homes, davvening Shacharit next to a tank.
So it was never about the ark, it turns out. Torah isn’t in a physical object, no matter how nice, and focusing, and orienting a scroll may be for us. Our ethics, our clarity, our connection to ancestors, descendants, and the Divine is elsewhere.
It turns out–in all the battle for Shiloh, to attack the Philistines, it was never the ark. And ultimately, the answer for “where do we go when we lose our moral compass” was never in that text.
Chana in the Temple
I want to rerun the tape back to Shiloh, before the hemorrhoids, before the battlefield, before the sharp corners of military strategy and conquest.
To a quiet day (I always picture a Sunday afternoon? Unsure why.) Chana is in the temple, and she is weeping. She is tearing at her hair. She is moving her lips without making a sound, she is rocking herself because her arms are empty, her body is empty, there should have been a baby here–maybe there already was a fluttering of a baby that never was. She is in her own world, the quiet, warm womb of the temple. She and God, God and she, bereft together.
But a younger priest Eli bursts in. Seeing Chana, lips moving but no words coming out. Was she following the practice of how to offer up prayer to Gd? Of course not. Was it the right way for Chana to pray as her heart was breaking? Certainly. She is praying in a way foreign to Eli, which must mean wrong.
But God hears her prayer–what a comfort, this story–we are agitated to find ourselves in her lament, and comforted by someone else’s “what could be,” someone else’s blessing.
And Samuel–who’s name recalls her asking–she’alu otav, I asked for him…Samuel arrives, red and squealing and covered in vernix. And Chana and Samuel, together, are ensconced in that warm, quiet embrace again.
Oh Chana.
Elkanah, Samuel’s father, asks if it is time to bring Samuel to Shiloh, but Chana is still full with milk, her son grabs at her robes demanding it, they have too many silly songs to sing and clouds to watch while he nurses. She knows once she brings him to the temple, he must remain there for good. “When he weans, I’ll bring him. Not before. God will understand.
I don’t know if Chana wept right when she said goodbye to Samuel, or if she beamed with joy. I do picture her saying goodbye to him, watching him walk off with Eli the priest for an orientation to the building 7, and before she leaves, going to the altar where she begged for him, where she couldn’t imagine a time he would ever arrive, and where she was promised that what was right, not what was written, would come to her. There, she can finally, again, weep.
So Chana comes back once a year to see Samuel, her toddler, then her big boy, her child, and brings him a new little robe every year 8. My heart breaks imagining her stitching the robe throughout the year, savoring how this act connects her to him with each stitch, not minding as she sews shedding hair into the fabric accidentally, or her tears.
We read this story of Chana every year as the haftorah for Rosh HaShanah day I. Chana speaks to the excruciating longing for children, and honors it in public in a season when it feels like fertile people are just everywhere reproducing. Chana weeps even more broadly to the desire for dreams to become realized, when it feels impossible that they ever will. The aching longing we feel, begging Gd, the Universe, our bodies, our luck, our internal fortitude, to make a way appear we just cannot yet find. Chana is our ancestor of creating something where there wasn’t any precedent, any proof, any reason to believe a new way could be possible. She literally invents a new way of prayer.
Actually, Chana is here, standing in the back (can you shift over so she can sit? She’s been around a long time and her feet aren’t what they used to be!) She’s been here waiting, patiently and somewhat bemusedly.
Chana has been here the whole time, waiting for us to ask her, so she can show us the way through. She knows from the world being unglued–the longing for what should be, the brave resolve despite your heart breaking. She turns to it. She names it. She ensures, demands, that it be witnessed: Something is broken here.
Chana has been here the whole time. She prays for change, stays in relationship with that which has let her down, for a future she dreams of, believes is possible.
All of Us in the Temple
That story I told you about the ark? Its a dead end, its actually a straightforward warning about what happens when we turn Torah into weapons of war. Where we land is somewhere else, here, next to Chana, still sitting in the temple for some reason. How hard has it been to be in shul this year, seeing Torah turned into a weapon of war?
Chana craves closeness with God even when she does not have a child, and even after she loses him to the temple.
And we are here, at the very shallow end of a new year, craving closeness with Judaism, after so, so many people have been killed and abandoned in the name of Israel, which claims to be doing so in the name of Judaism. We crave closeness with Torah that has been turned by many into a battle ax this year. We crave closeness with something that has caused harm–and maybe right now we also crave closeness with people who have caused us harm. [Pause]
Divinity is everywhere. Every damn place. Honestly, maybe that is all there actually is, Divinity. And human beings cannot decide who God loves or does not love, what land is sacred or destructible, or who should be protected and who will be decimated. If only we had such power. When the Israelites think they can kill more Philistine children because of possession of some wood, dusty gold, and old rock, they are not craving closeness with God, they are seeking to control God. When we use textual tracts or land tracts to make God like decisions–who will live, and who will die, we are not seeking closeness, we are seeking control.
How can we stand by our ethics and still use the same words and rituals as those who use them for war? The same way Chana did.
She discovered how to weep in the temple, and still be in the temple.
She found a new way to pray.
She stitched little robes for her son.
She accompanies us as we ask the same question, reach for new ways.
We have good Jewish precedent for wanting to live in the temple (all the days of your life) despite the harm it has caused.
But you get to set the rules.
In fact, you must.
Footnotes
1 “Dozens of Hostages Remain in Gaza: What We Know” New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/03/world/middleeast/hostages-in-gaza-hamas.html
2 The accumulative effects of Israel’s war on Gaza could mean the true death toll could reach more than 186,000 people, according to a study published in the journal Lancet. Al Jazeera
5 Kiernan, Ben. "General Editor’s Introduction to the Series: Genocide: Its Causes, Components, Connections and Continuing Challenges". In Kiernan, Lemos & Taylor (2023), pp. 1–30.
6 We first met the Philistines when Avraham buys the Cave of Machpela from Avimelech to bury his wife Sara.
7 “Samuel Dedicated by Hannah” by Frank W.W. Topham
8 I Samuel 2:19: וּמְעִ֤יל קָטֹן֙ תַּעֲשֶׂה־לּ֣וֹ אִמּ֔וֹ וְהַעַלְתָ֥ה ל֖וֹ מִיָּמִ֣ים ׀ יָמִ֑ימָה בַּֽעֲלוֹתָהּ֙ אֶת־אִישָׁ֔הּ לִזְבֹּ֖חַ אֶת־זֶ֥בַח הַיָּמִֽים׃
His mother would also make a little robe for him and bring it up to him every year, when she made the pilgrimage with her husband to offer the annual sacrifice.