The Burning of the Torah - Seasons of the Moon - The Month of Tammuz

[Music] [Applause] [Music] 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 it's the starter 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 Tammuz one of the five disasters that we mourn by fasting on the 17th of this month of Tammuz 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 go Marat was handwritten those fires consumed almost all of Jewish knowledge in Europe Jewish communities all over the world warmed during the Muslim service of Yom Kippur as a section that describes the death of the ten martyrs of the hands of the Romans one of those ten was rabbi Hanina Ben Cardin 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 was 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 rebecca nina 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 who cannot burn fire with fire you cannot burn an idea the Torah is the idea of God it is inflammable you