Torah Study Blog

High Holiday services were very different this year. In prior years, some of us would have attended services in person where we might shake hands with, or hug, our friends. We would sit together closely and sing meaningfully.

This year has required changes to the standard format of High Holiday services. Change is often hard for people, but human beings are inherently creative – when we are handed lemons, we make lemonade! Software programs like Zoom have helped us to stay in touch with each other. And Temple Israel has used this unprecedented time to offer new and fascinating programs, led by both clergy and lay people, that many of our members have enjoyed.

While it is true that change is hard, it is also true that change is inevitable. Guest leader Rabbi Janet Roberts led us through some passages in our Bible that tell of the cataclysmic occurrences that happened to the Israelite people and, eventually, led to the Judaism we practice today.

The Bible tells us that in roughly 1400 BCE (using a biblical literalist time line) Moses freed the Israelites from bondage to Egypt and led them to Mt Sinai, where Moses climbed the mountain, communed with God, and then came down from the mountain having been told all of the Laws, or Teachings, of God. Moses then instructed his priests that every seventh year the Teachings will be read aloud to all men, women, children and strangers in the community. This ritual was a reaffirmation ritual. The Israelites would come together as one cohesive group to reaffirm the commitment between God and the Jewish people.

But the cohesive group did not last. Other books in the Bible, tell us that in roughly the 10th century BCE the Israelite people divided into the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah. Serious Bible scholars are in agreement that this cataclysmic occurrence actually happened. This division naturally led to the people who lived in the north developing a set of traditions that had differences from the people who lived in the south.

Then in the 8th century BCE, the Assyrians destroyed the Northern Kingdom, which resulted in the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Some of the people who lived in the North migrated south to Judah and brough their traditions with them. For more than 100 years, the traditions mingled. Then the next cataclysm occurred in the 6th century BCE: the Babylonian invasion, and subsequent Babylonian Exile.

During the Babylonian Exile the leaders of the Jewish community were forced to leave their homeland. It was a horrible time for the Jewish people, and it left a great mark on the Jewish psyche. But it is through this horrific cataclysm that much of what eventually became the Jewish religion emerged.

There was a belief that the god of each community lived in the land where that god’s followers lived. These 6th century Jews would have believed that their god, Yahweh, dwelled in the Temple that they had erected to him. This was where the priests would have made sacrifices to Yahweh, in hopes that he would protect the people.

When the Babylonians invaded Jerusalem, they destroyed the Temple. The Jews could have said, “Our Temple is gone, our god has abandoned us, we have to live in exile, we are done as a people.” And that would have meant the end of the line for Judaism.

But that did not happen! There were people who wanted to maintain their separate community as Jews. They brought their traditions and stories with them into Exile. Many scholars believe that it was at this time that the Torah of Moses was created. These stories gave the Jews something to cling to as a separate people, and it gave them an ability to survive as Jews.

The Temple was no longer the sacred center for worship of Yahweh. Now the words in the Torah provided a way to worship Yahweh – and those words could be cherished no matter where Jews lived.

The Babylonians were defeated by the Persians by the end of the 6th century BCE and Jews were invited to return to Jerusalem. The Bible books of Ezra and Nehemiah are dated to the 5th century BCE and they tell us what happened when some of the Jews returned. The Temple was

rebuilt, and animal sacrifices began again. But there was something else: public reading of the Torah.

Ezra and Nehemiah were not prophets. They were officials in the Persian bureaucracy. Nehemiah 8 tells us that in the seventh month of the year all the “men and women and all who could listen with understanding” gathered at the Water Gate to listen to Ezra read the Teaching of Moses. This reading did not take place at the Temple as an event led by priests; it happened in a big public square as an event led by scholars, or rabbis, for the benefit of the entire community. The Torah itself became a symbol of consolidating the community.

By the 3rd century BCE, Judaism had become more community based and removed from the priests. The religion was in the hands of the people, not just the priests. At some point, the Sh’ma - the clarion call of the Jewish people to “Hear!” - already existed. By the time the Temple was destroyed for a second time, in the 1st century CE, the rabbis had already creatively emphasized that prayers will take the place of the sacrifices that used to happen.

Through a human effort, and by using creativity in the time of crises, the ancient Rabbis created something new and meaningful and lasting. Rabbi Roberts asked if, during this pandemic that has been so destructive, we might have found something meaningful that we would consider incorporating into our High Holiday traditions going forward. We hope that, however you observed your High Holidays, they were meaningful to you.

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misquotes or misunderstandings in what Rabbi Roberts taught us are the responsibility of Tara Keiter