Amid rising anti-Semitism, the People of the Book rejoice with the Law

[Valin]

Jeff Jacoby

Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
October 20, 2019

ON OCTOBER 14, 1663, the English civil servant Samuel Pepys decided to pay a visit to the Jewish synagogue in London's Creechurch Lane. Jews were a novelty in Restoration England. They had been expelled from the realm nearly four centuries earlier, and it was only in 1656 that they had once again been permitted to live on English soil. Pepys, knowing nothing of Judaism, wasn't aware that his excursion happened to coincide with the most euphoric day in the Jewish calendar — the festival of Simchat Torah, or "rejoicing with the law."

What he saw bewildered him.

"But, Lord!" he recorded in his famous diary, "to see the disorder, laughing, sporting, and no attention, but confusion in all their service, more like brutes than people knowing the true God, would make a man forswear ever seeing them more and indeed I never did see so much, or could have imagined there had been any religion in the whole world so absurdly performed as this."

What Pepys had unwittingly walked in on was a celebration of the oldest love affair in history — the infatuation of the Jewish people with the Torah. In Judaism, there are no saints to adore or icons to venerate. Rather, there is a book to study and teach: the scroll of the law, the Torah given by God to Moses and the Israelites at Mount Sinai, the essential text with which Jews have engaged intellectually and been sustained emotionally for more than three millennia.

(Snip)

Simchat Torah returns this week amid a rising global tide of antisemitism. One year after the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh and just days after the Yom Kippur shooting in Halle, Germany, Jews increasingly require police protection when they gather in prayer. Nevertheless, synagogues the world over will be filled anew with the same euphoria that so startled Pepys and amazed Wiesel. The People of the Book will once again rejoice with the Law, dancing with the scrolls that have been, for 33 centuries, the ultimate source of their identity and strength.

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PARTY TIME!

 

2 points

1. "I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you."
Genesis 12:3

I don't know about you, but I have more than enough...Issues in my life, that The Last Thing I need is God cursing me. So I think I'll just beg off the whole Antisemitism thing. 

2. For over 3500 years people have been trying to get rid of The Jews. With a notable LACK of success, it should be noted. Take The Hint People!