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Torah Cleaning at Temple Beth David yesterday. Me, a bag of cleaning tools, and about eighty willing congregants, cleaning their Torahs with sponges, erasers, sandpaper, and vodka.
Continuing the metaphor of Torah repair for Life, I think cleaning a Torah gives people an interesting extra perspective - it shows that Torahs are, as it were, only human. Admitting that Torahs need cleaning just like anything else, and furthermore having ordinary people help with the cleaning, I think helps people own holiness. It's easy to get used to thinking of holiness as something which gets trotted out in shul once a week, and Judaism along with it - something which happens for a couple of hours on a Saturday morning. Performing an everyday task on a holy object is a powerful demonstration of the less familiar concept of mixing sacred and mundane. Reversing the details, we can transfer the concept: mix mundane and sacred. Judaism is structured so that one can bring tastes of the sacred into more or less any part of one's daily activities: bringing cleaning to Torah shows us that we can bring Torah to cleaning - awareness of the Divine Awesomeness out of those two hours in temple on Shabbat morning, and into the rest of the week.
At least, I hope that's what they got out of it :)
Continuing the metaphor of Torah repair for Life, I think cleaning a Torah gives people an interesting extra perspective - it shows that Torahs are, as it were, only human. Admitting that Torahs need cleaning just like anything else, and furthermore having ordinary people help with the cleaning, I think helps people own holiness. It's easy to get used to thinking of holiness as something which gets trotted out in shul once a week, and Judaism along with it - something which happens for a couple of hours on a Saturday morning. Performing an everyday task on a holy object is a powerful demonstration of the less familiar concept of mixing sacred and mundane. Reversing the details, we can transfer the concept: mix mundane and sacred. Judaism is structured so that one can bring tastes of the sacred into more or less any part of one's daily activities: bringing cleaning to Torah shows us that we can bring Torah to cleaning - awareness of the Divine Awesomeness out of those two hours in temple on Shabbat morning, and into the rest of the week.
At least, I hope that's what they got out of it :)
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