by Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman

June 12, 2008

The beauty of a traditional service is the davening. I grew up with it, memorized the Hebrew, and loved the melody. As the Torah left the ark, I could close my siddur and sing out happily, Vay’hi binso’a ha’aron, vayomer Moshe…. Yes, the beauty of the traditional service is the davening.

But davening is a problem too, because in memorizing the Hebrew, I could pay no attention to what it meant. Years later, I located the line in this week’s parsha (Numbers 10:35), part of the description of Israel’s travels through the desert. Here is the translation: “Whenever the ark started moving, Moses said, ‘Arise, Adonai, let your enemies be scattered. Let those who hate You flee before You.’”

Who would have guessed that my beloved Torah melody announced a God of war!

A friend I had back then went to church and sang his own song. “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war/with the cross of Jesus going on before.” If Jews had fought in the Crusades, would we have carried the ark as a symbol of battle?

That was apparently what the biblical verse intended, but when the rabbis chose it for the prayer book, they juxtaposed it with the words, ki mitzion teitsei Torah, “Out of Zion shall go forth Torah.” Just like that, the verse was transformed into a celebration of Torah. No longer military, the ark for us is just a holder of the important thing, the Torah.

Delightfully complicating matters, however, is the talmudic dispute over how many arks there were. This is bad news for Indiana Jones fans who think finding just one ark is enough to worry about, because according to Rabbi Yehudah bar Ila’i, there were two! One contained the Torah, all right, but another held the broken tablets of the Ten Commandments. Obviously, it is the ark with the Torah that we use nowadays, not an ark with broken shards of stone.

The verse in question (Numbers 10:35) is followed by another (10:36) that we say as we replace the Torah scroll in the ark. Scribes who write scrolls bracket the two verses with an inverted Hebrew letter (a nun), as if marking them off for special attention. Indeed, the Talmud calls the verses “a book unto themselves.” Knowing that, it is hard to remove the Torah scroll from the ark without pausing to wonder….

I wonder what happened to the other ark, the one with the broken tablets. Not that I should care, perhaps, because the Ten Commandments that the tablets once contained are part of Torah, after all. Forget the shards.

But then why was there an ark for the shards? Why deposit broken tablets in one ark when what they said is already contained unbroken in another one? What do the broken tablets have that the Ten Commandments as given, unbroken, in Torah do not?

The only possible thing is brokenness itself, precisely what our Torah cannot display, since Halacha demands that a Torah scroll be perfect. Yet life is not perfect. As often as not, it is in pieces, like the shards. For many in the congregation every week, life is so broken that the Hebrew melody accompanying the Torah chanting is drowned in silent tears.

The Torah is clear that the entire point of the ark is the presence of God, which accompanies whatever the ark contains — in our case, the Torah, which we carry around the sanctuary. But what would it have been like if we had chosen to keep the ark with the shards? Surely God would have been present there as well, since according to the legend, God accompanied both arks, not just one of them. Even in the unbridled joy of Shabbat, then, when we clap and sing as the Torah is carried around, we should remember that God accompanies brokenness also.

For many, the highlight of this Shabbat will be the reading of Torah. Others, too broken to absorb the reading, might think of that other ark, the one with brokenness inside. God is present in Torah, but also in shards. We don’t need to carry broken shards around, the way we do Torah, because people in pain already have them: not the original shards of the commandments, but the shards of lives in disarray.

The God of battle becomes a God of Torah: That is the rabbinic premise. But also, a God of brokenness, for the rabbis say that God’s presence sits with us in exile, and when we are broken, exile is most surely where we are.

Every Shabbat morning, God’s presence leaves the ark and accompanies the Torah throughout our midst. But I am not sure it gets all the way back to the reader’s table. God sometimes remains behind in the congregation, attending to human shards.

Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, cofounder of Synagogue 3000, is the Barbara and Stephen Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship, and Ritual at the Hebrew Union College in New York. He is the coeditor, with David Arnow, of My People’s Passover Haggadah: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries (Jewish Lights).