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The Burning of the Torah - Seasons of the Moon - Tammuz
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A hallmark of all repressive regimes is burning books. One of the tragedies that we mourn on the 17th of Tammuz is the burning of the Torah - the ultimate repression of the ultimate "book."
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Torah
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[Music]
[Applause]
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at 450 degrees Fahrenheit paper ignites
spontaneously so rhodes ray bradbury in
his futuristic novel Fahrenheit 451 the
novel's main character is a fireman
called Montag but unlike the firemen
were used to Montag's job is not to put
out fires is to start the Montag's job
is to burn books a hallmark of all
repressive regimes is book burning in
May 1933 the Nazi Party decreed that any
book which acts subversive Leon our
future or strikes of the roots of German
thought the German home and the driving
forces of our people was to be burned
one of the books that the Nazis burnt
was written by Heinrich Heine a hundred
years before the Nazis burned his books
Heine wrote where one burns books one
will in the end burn people the nature
of evil is to want to turn the light of
knowledge into the dark heat of
unbridled passion
heat is the characteristic of the summer
month of Tamils one of the five
disasters that we mourn by fasting on
the 17th of this month of Tamas Shiva
asaba Thomas was another book burning
the burning of our holy Torah the
historian josephus flavius records that
sixteen years before the great jewish
revolt against the romans robbers
attacked and plundered a procession of a
roman official called Stephanus or a
posthumous on the Royal Road near Beit
Quran commonness the proconsul at the
time sent troops to arrest the local
villagers he held them responsible for
not intervening now during the arrest of
the villagers one of the Roman soldiers
seized the scroll of the holy Torah
tore it into pieces and set it ablaze
the fury of the Jews knew no bounds the
17th of thomas marks the first recorded
book burning in Jewish history but it
certainly wasn't the last in the air
12:42 under law in the 9th of France
ten thousand copies of the Talmud
carried in twenty-four wagon loads were
burnt at the stake before the eyes of
grieving Parisian Jews it's difficult
for us to conceive the the immensity of
this loss there was no printing in those
days every one of those gammaroid was
handwritten those fires consumed almost
all of Jewish knowledge in Europe Jewish
communities all over the world mourned
during the Muslim service of Yom Kippur
there's a section that describes the
death of the ten martyrs of the hands of
the Romans
one of those ten was rabbi Hanina been
trodden the madras the oral law teaches
that he was executed on the charge of
teaching torah publicly a capital
offense under the romans the romans
wrapped him in the torah scroll that he
always kept with him and they set him
under scroll of fire to prolong his
agony they packed the space between his
chest and the Torah scroll with wool
soaked in water Rama canina said the
parchment is consumed but the letters
fly up in the air the Torah is fire and
fire cannot consume fire the body of a
Jew was like the parchment on which the
Torah of his soul is written when the
parchment is burned the letters fly up
to return to their source one of the
other five tragedies that we commemorate
on the 17th of Tammuz also involves the
letters of the Torah flying into the air
when Moshe Robina when Moses came down
from Sinai from Mount Sinai with the
first tablets of the law he saw the
people dancing around the Golden Calf as
a result of that sin the Jewish people
were no longer worthy to receive the
tablets the letters took leave of the
stone and flew up into the sky without
the words of the Torah engraved on those
tablets they became too heavy for Moshe
to carry they fell from his hands and
smashed to the ground the mystical
sources teach that 2,000 years before
the creation the Torah existed in its
primordial form as black fire on white
fire
you cannot burn fire with fire you
cannot burn an idea the Torah is the
idea of God it is inflammable