Perhaps, at some point you have had a chance to hold a Torah, or to kiss a Torah, or, to read and bless a Torah, but have you ever smelled a Torah? Now, why, Rabbi Alex, you might ask, as a recent Bat Mitzvah said to me (more accurately she just said, “gross”), would you ever need to smell the Torah?
Well, our olfactory nerve is the best way to get an authentic sense of our seminal text. For the first two thousand years or more of our existence, the Israelite nation was agrarian. So much so that other nations such as the Egyptians looked down upon us for living among the animals.
The image of Moses holding two stone tablets above his head seems not only wrong, but misguided. Stone, papyrus, clay, were all existed at the time of the writing of the Torah, but, all of them were missing a central component – smell.
As much as I love the smell of books and paper, it not the same as an animal hide, taken lovingly from a kosher animal, soaked for nine days, then stretched to dry, and scraped of all its imperfections. In all this time and meticulous preparation the smell of where it came from never fully leaves. It is our tie to nature.
It is our tie to ceremonies like we read in this week’s Torah portion, Acharei Mot, which describes the elaborate rituals of the Yom Kippur sacrifice. Gathered in their in that ancient prayer space were not only the entire Israelite community, but all of their animals as well.
So, next time you are called up to the Torah, pay attention to more than the beautiful calligraphy the sofer used in its creation, but, open up your nostrils and take a whiff. That is our tie to our ancestors, to their elaborate ceremonies, and to their very way of life.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex