SOUNDS OF A NEW YEAR

We begin again. Last Shabbat, we opened the Torah scroll revealing its first columns and—with more emotion than when I hear the shofar, more sentiment than when we read the first verses of Genesis amidst the hubbub of Simhat Torah--I am aware of beginning a new year. It is a moment of renewal, the beginning of a new cycle of Jewish life.

“When God began to create heaven and earth—the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from God sweeping over the water--”


I am bound to this ancient, wise document. I never tire of its words, phrases, and sentences, and I never fail to uncover something new that has been hidden. This past Shabbat my husband Michael read Torah at North Suburban Synagogue Beth El. He learned to read Torah from his father, Alexander, who learned from his father, Zundel, who learned from his father, Avraham David, each one pronouncing letters in the scroll as vigilantly as the scribe who had first written them, each one adding meaning to the text and our lives through words he chanted.

Perhaps Michael’s careful attention to every letter and trope drew me to the sounds of the Hebrew words that have captured our attention and told the story for thousands of years. I heard the sounds of creation: the shhhhhhhh of wind flowing over water, bereshit…shamyim, the hollow emptiness preceding creation, ohhh...ooo of pre-existence, tohu v’vohu… t’hom. These sounds blend with the cantillation and continue the infinite pulsing of Torah.


The power of Torah goes beyond the intellectual. Its reading by generations of Jews is as eternal as the revolving earth, the ebb and flow of tides, the beating of our hearts.