Shabbat Shalom--April 1-2, 2011

TAZRIAH, 1997
People Of The Disk
Rabbi Ed Feinstein


Why do we read the Torah from a scroll? A hand-written, parchment scroll, no less.

There have been at least three "information revolutions" since the tradition of reading the Torah began. In the eleventh century, a German monk stacked the pages of a scroll one atop the other and drove a staple through the side, creating the "codex" form of books we use to this day. This codex form allows one to turn pages quickly, to jump from one page to another, and to read in two places at once -- by keeping a finger on one spot and turning simultaneously to another. More importantly, a codex book can be indexed -- allowing the reader to search for information all over the book at once. The codex broke the linear arrangement of the scroll -- allowing information to be delivered in a much more complex way. But despite all these advantages, we still read Torah from a scroll. Slow, linear, one word, one line at a time.

In the fifteenth century, Gutenberg introduced movable type. Once again, the delivery of information was revolutionized. Printing made books widely available and abundant. But not just books -- newspapers, pamphlets, journals, junk mail. Printing filled the world with the written word. And printing standardized texts. Suddenly, we had the "authorized" version -- corrected and approved. But Jews still insist on a scroll. We may follow the text from a printed book, but the real reading is from a scroll written by hand. Slowly. It takes a year to write a Sefer Torah. And carefully. Because the standardization of a Sefer Torah is not a product of a machine, but rather a matter of human will, love and obedience.

In the last decade, we've entered the third revolution. On my desk sits a computer that processes several million "bits" of information per second. Attached to the computer is a CD ROM device. I slip in a disk and instantaneously I have complete access to whole libraries of knowledge. You can get, on one disk, the entire 4000-year history of Jewish wisdom. One disk contains the Bible, the Talmud, all the major collections of Midrash, all the Codes of Jewish Law, the Zohar, and all the major commentaries on these works. A lifetime -- several lifetimes -- of learning, comes up instantaneously on my screen. Ask it to find any word, any concept, any name, and it accomplishes a year's worth of bibliographic research in a matter of seconds.

Will our children look upon books as we look upon a scroll -- a relic, honored by tradition, but of limited efficiency?

Still, we read Torah from a scroll. And we will read from a scroll long after CD ROM is surpassed by the next revolution. Not just out of stubborn adherence to ancient tradition. And not just as a symbol of the authenticity of ancient truths. But precisely because the scroll is so inefficient, so slow, so linear. Only in that way does the word remain real and important. Each word. Written slowly and carefully. Read slowly and carefully. Each information revolution puts us in touch with so many more words so much more quickly; but each compromises the depth of the words we touch. And that's the soul of Torah: to read deeply, and slowly, and reflectively.

When the Rabbis of the Talmud read this week's Torah portion, and its procedures for the treatment of leprosy, they were convinced that more than dermatology was at stake. They came to understand the Torah's metzorah, leprosy, as a more serious malady -- a leprosy of language. As leprosy contaminates and debilitates the body, so too, there are plagues that attack and corrupt our words. As leprosy disfigures the human form, there are plagues that disfigure a culture's soul by stealing the depth and resonance of its words. The Torah is read from a scroll to inoculate us. To keep our words healthy, our language holy, and our souls awake.

Shabbat Shalom