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Just as a wedding anniversary may lead you to reflect on the state of your marriage, Simchat Torah makes me think of my relationship with the Sefer Torah. There have been many years where I hardly so much as caught sight of one. A psychiatrist may put this down to boyhood trauma. At my Jewish school, someone once dropped a sefer. It felt like a catastrophe and everyone had to fast for a day. After that I prayed not to be called to do the hagba Torah-lifting job. This remained true until the second day of Rosh Hashanah this year. I was one of few in a tiny shul, most of us not in our first or indeed second youth.
I could see the caller-uppers looking desperately for someone with a strong enough left arm to be trusted (the reading was from Genesis, so it was all left arm). I watched his eye move past me and alight on a fit-looking teenager behind me. Clearly, he thought I was past it. It felt like a pregnant woman offering me her seat on a bus. The only boyhood threat greater than lifting was leyning, actually being fingered to read from the Torah. When the school assembly was being scanned for potential performers it was a time to lie low.
But one day in the early 1970s such snivelling fears were overtaken by a moment of awe. I was taken into a second-floor room of a London synagogue -the Westminster, in Knightsbridge - and was presented with one of the most remarkable sights of my life: rack upon rack of Torah scrolls, more than 1,500 of them.
Has there ever in history been such an assemblage? Some were in excellent condition but most carried the damage of their terrible history. One was held together by a woman's corset, another had bloodstains. Some were beyond repair.
In 1942, with the Nazis in occupation, small Jewish communities throughout Bohemia and Moravia, on the eve of their immolation, sent their scrolls to the Jewish museum in Prague but no museum needs 1,500 scrolls and later they were packed off to a tiny, damp synagogue three miles south of the city which then became a Hussite church. It was from there in 1964 that, thanks to the efforts of a London art dealer with Czech connections and the generosity of a founder of the Westminster synagogue, they were acquired and brought to London.
The Torahs I found were a symbol of our rebirth
Damaged, they made an eloquent monument to a tragic history, but restored they become something altogether more. One providential day, a Chasidic scribe arrived at the door of the synagogue asking if there was any work; 27 years later, he was still working there bringing the scrolls back to the perfection required so they can go out on loan to communities around the world that need a Sefer Torah.
There is a beautiful museum at the synagogue where just 100 scrolls remain, the rest are in use. You can see it as a memorial to tragedy. I prefer to view it as a symbol of Jewish continuity and rebirth.
Were I a preacher, I would say that is the true meaning of Simchat Torah, rejoicing the law.