prismatic-bell:if-i-am-not-for-me:janothar:geekandmisandry:huzzahitsthedoctor:I was looking through
prismatic-bell:if-i-am-not-for-me:janothar:geekandmisandry:huzzahitsthedoctor:I was looking through the app store, idly looking up Sefer Torah, because I wanted to see if there was a respectful way in which I could look more closely, and ran across this, which absolutely broke my heart.And as I looked more into it, just got simultaneously more heartbroken and enraged. (And yes, in that top right photo, those are goyim touching the Torah with their bare hands in an evangelical church). It is so disrespectful.Just touch it with your bare hands. Why not??For anyone who doesn’t know, we just…don’t do that. We use a special tool called a yad (pointer, but I believe yad is literally hand) to keep our place when reading from the scroll itself. I believe the only time it is permissible to actually directly touch a Torah scroll is when actively repairing it.One of the first things I learned as a little Jewish preschooler was “we never touch the Sefer Torah because it is too precious. Our hands can also hurt the Sefer just with a small touch.” It makes me physically ill to see people, especially goyim, touching such a precious, sacred object. And object isn’t even the right word, we dress the Torah, we crown the Torah. The Torah is more than a book, more than words, and far more than these goyim could ever comprehend it to be.Even taking the sacredness of the Torah out of the question, Sefer Torot are written with a specific kind of ink, on parchment. As a result, the natural oils in your fingers can damage the scroll by causing chemical reactions that will eventually break down the parchment and/or ink, rendering the scroll physically unreadable and fragile.At my Temple on Simchat Torah we unroll a scroll and surround the sanctuary with it so our oldest member and most recent b’nei mitzvah can read the last and first sections side by side. This requires us to hold it up with our hands. Many members bring gloves, and for those who don’t or can’t we hand out paper towels so your fingers never touch the parchment. And, of course, we use a specific Torah for this—we’d never dream of doing it with our fragile Holocaust Torah or the one in our collection that recently passed 100 years old.Take all sanctity out of it, and this idiot is still ensuring that a rare and priceless cultural artifact will be completely destroyed within a decade. -- source link