the written word is a relic

Welcome to a new year of Friday emails. Everything is possible again. Thank you for reading these reflections, for writing back on occasion and for choosing to search with me for the undertow of goodness. 

Ironically, I am choosing to begin this year with my newfound understanding of the limitations of the written word. 

Almost exactly a year ago we printed P’tach Libi, our new prayerbook for Shabbat and festival mornings. It was an enormous undertaking that required the labor of dozens of contributors, editors, artists and lawyers. We spent five years dreaming, scheming, editing, revising, designing and finalizing the text. And then we finally went to print.

The final product is so beautiful. There is not a single shabbat that I am not grateful to pray from its pages. 

I knew when it was done it would be imperfect. I was prepared to find mistakes and I had decided in advance to let them go. I did not want perfect to be the enemy of the good. 

But what I had not anticipated was that as soon as it was done, I would have the desire to update it. And not just because of little typos, though they exist. But because there were things that were missing or misplaced in ways that affect its usage. For example, I can’t believe we don’t have any songs by Aly or Koach. Why didn’t we put “kol Yishmael” in every Kaddish, not just Kaddish Shalem? Why is the little gray box in mourner’s kaddish misaligned with the column? The third line of the priestly blessing for lifecycles is translated the same as the second line, whoops! 

It is likely you may never have noticed the errors and omissions, but as the person who proofed and approved every single page, I can’t help myself. 

I didn’t want it to be perfect, but also, I did. I mean, who wouldn’t want that much work to feel as close to perfect as possible. Spending a year praying with our new siddur, in all its glory and imperfection, has taught me that is just not how the written word works. 

Every single book has typos. 
The nature of printing is that it is finite, fixed in time, fallible. 
The written word is a relic. 

And then I realized the project was never going to be complete. I was merely taking a shabbes from working on it.  This helped me understand the words we will chant tomorrow and sing every Friday night in kiddush, 

וַיְכֻלּ֛וּ הַשָּׁמַ֥יִם וְהָאָ֖רֶץ וְכׇל־צְבָאָֽם׃

​Thus were finished the heavens and the earth, with all of their array (Genesis 2:1).

Creation wasn’t perfect, it was just going to print for the first time.

And this insight returned to me on Tuesday night at Simchat Torah as we unrolled the Torah scroll, what the rabbis refer to as Torah sh’bikhtav, the written Torah. It's an awesome sight to behold. The black fire on white fire. More than 300,000 Hebrew letters, inked by hand onto parchment. 

I am the first person to ogle at the sight of the large bet in Bereishit and the tiny aleph in Vayikra. The white columns in the Song of the Sea and the mysterious backwards nuns in Numbers. 

As awesome as the physical Torah is, as a ritual object that requires care and devotion, the rabbis understood it was also totally imperfect, even insufficient. So too with every book, printed or scribed, including our new siddur. The ink itself makes a lasting impression. It puts us all on the same literal page, but as a result, it doesn’t lend itself to change. 

Which is why we are ultimately students of Torah sh’be’al’peh, the oral torah, the white fire. precisely because it is alive and changing. The nature of the written word is to be perfect, preserved and static, which renders it ultimately inadequate, imperfect.

As we chanted the last words of Devarim, recalling Moses’ final breath, a people bereft, a future uncertain and then in one breath returned to the beginning, to the world of Bereishit, where everything is possible, a world of light and creation, I realized that we read from the scroll but Torah lives through us. 

This is what it means to cling to the Tree of Life, eitz chayim hi. 

May this year bring us renewed energy to study, interpret and reclaim Torah so that all her paths lead to peace. ​