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