A book by Rabbi Della Rocca “Walking through time”
The new book written by Rav Roberto Della Rocca, director of UCEI’s “Culture and Education” area, continues and elaborates some of the reflections published during the years in “Pagine Ebraiche” and on www.moked.it, the portal of Italian Judaism. Titled “Camminare nel tempo” (Walking through time), published by Giuntina, consists of a collection of thoughts that intertwine nowadays issues with the millennial lecture of the Torah.The reading offers a number of ideas and also a starting point to carry on with the study “each in his own way, based on his own intellectual and spiritual abilities”.
The ability to walk through time consciously, recalls the Rav, “sets the pace for the Jewish life, where every impulse, every spiritual leap expressed by Jewish people, every feeling, whether it is toward the people or traditions, is expressed within temporal barriers, distributing different moments of spiritual life as the days go by”. In this perspective the holiness of Shabbat, the most important day of the week, is central. It is the symbol of the right to rest, but even more “of the need to protect human freedom and dignity”.
Bereshit
In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth. (Gn. 1.1)
Why does the Torah begin with letter bet? According to the interpretations given by the masters of the Kabbalah, letters live a life of their own, and in their graphic forms there are one or more meanings.
In the case of letter bet (ב)we notice that it is open of the front and closed on the other three sides: this is to teach that humankind has to look ahead, not above, under, or behind. Humankind has to worry about real problems of this world and not abstract matters.
Form and content of this interpretation seem to well enlighten the identity and the attitude of Jewish people. Every letter of the Jewish alphabet can be interpreted and has its own identity. In the Jewish culture the alphabet has always been something more than a conventional list of signs.
Mysticism has built a lot on this concept. It believes that every letter, with its own numeric and symbolic value, is a key to try to decipher the secrets of creation.
This bet, which has the numeric value of two, first letter of the first word of a book as Torah, raises many questions. The alef(א), whose numeric value is one, would have given a too axiomatic character to the world, placing aprioristically the accent on the uniqueness (of the Eternal, of the world, of the text itself). With the letter bet instead, the Jewish culture uses as a founding principle a dialectic model, which denies dogmatism and integralism, affirming the pluralist and dialogic dimension.
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Rashì’s monumental commentary to the Torah, written in the 11th century, begins with these words: “Rabbi Yitzchak (probably Rashì’s father) said: The Torah should have commenced with the verse (Ex. 12.2) “This month shall be unto you the first of the months” which is the first commandment given to Israel. What is the reason, then, that it commences with the account of the Creation? For should the peoples of the world say to Israel, “You are robbers, because you took by force the lands of the seven nations of Canaan”, Israel may reply to them, “All the earth belongs to the Holy One, blessed be He; He created it and gave it to whom He pleased. When He willed, He gave it to them, and when He willed, He took it from them and gave it to us…”.
This commentary has been written at the time of the first crusade, where Muslims and Christians claimed their right of property over the holy places in the Land of Israel, ignoring the Jewish roots while perpetrating campaigns of violence against Jewish people and sacking entire European communities. Apart from the political connotations of this commentary, Rashì transcends his present anticipating what will be the problem of all generations: how to justify our claim on the Land of Israel. Our right to inhabit Eretz Israel is to be traced back not to some sort of national justice, but to a Universal Justice instead. While the crusaders of yesterday and today proclaim the abuse and the lies, Rashì, Noach and us, who start again with him the study of Torah, continue to celebrate faith in knowledge and memory.
And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived (Gn. 4.1)
In the first section of the Torah the couple’s relationship is defined by the term “knowledge”. The verb iadà, “knowing intimately”, is the one used to refer to the sexual act. There aren’t any mythological images or imaginative descriptions such as eagles or storks.
We are confronted with a direct and at the same time profound language. Adam iadà Eve; the Torah uses this word for the sexual act that recalls an intellectual dimension without which the sexuality would be reduced to a mere instinctual act. We have to wait for the marriage of Isaac and Rebecca to meet the verb ahav “loved” (Gn 24,67). As if to teach us that in a couple you can’t talk about true love if this is not based on mutual knowledge, intimate and profound. The knowledge is a beginning, love is a coronation, an enhancement.
Translated by Laura Cattani and revised by Valentina Megera, students at the Advanced School for Interpreters and Translators of the University of Trieste, interns at the newspaper office of the Union of the Italian Jewish Communities – Pagine Ebraiche.