An obscure fast date: Erev Shabbat parashat Chukat

For the Jewish world of today this Shabbat is actually a Shabbat Achdut – a unity Shabbat. Because Shavuot this year fell on Friday and Shabbat for us in the Diaspora while in Israel it was only one day (Friday), the services and Torah reading in Israel on that Shabbat differed from those elsewhere being the ordinary Shabbat services including a regular Torah reading (that week it was Naso). Diaspora Jews read the portion always read on the extra day of a festival coinciding with Shabbat – “Aser t’aser”, (Devarim 14:12-16:17)

As a result, from Shavuot until this week Israel was one parashah ahead of the Diaspora. Finally, this week we will read a double parasha – Chukat-Balak, while in Israel where they are already up to Balak that is the only one they will read. From the coming week unity will prevail as we will again all be the same.

However, albeit many may not realise it, there is another significance to this weekend – specifically to the Friday, Erev Shabbat Parashat Chukat. Commentator on the Shulchan Aruch, the Magen Avraham, (1635–82) explains that it is “worthwhile for every Jew to cry for the burning of the Torah”. He then proceeds to tell of a customary annual fast specifically for this purpose, on Erev Shabbat Parashat Chukat. On that day, in the year 1242, 24 wagonloads filled with Gemarot and other Talmudic literature were burned in Paris by agents of the Church and King Louis IX. The pretext was the outcome of an antisemitically inspired public debate between an apostate monk who had falsely convinced church authorities of anti-christian content in the Talmud and four of the most eminent rabbinical authorities in France including the famed Rabbi Yechiel miParis. The official verdict against them was a foregone conclusion.

The impact and importance of this loss was tremendous; this occurred over 200 years before the printing press was invented, and each volume was a priceless, handwritten manuscript. There was now barely a Talmud to be found across France and much of western Europe, seriously impacting Torah study in a region once the jewel of the European Torah world. In fact, this was considered such an enormous loss that the famed Rabbi Meir (Maharam) M’Rothenburg, an eye witness to the disaster and a student of Rabbi Yechiel, composed an elegy “Sha’ali Serufa Ba’Aish” (“Inquiry consumed by fire…”), incorporated into the Kinot recited every Tisha b’Av.

Contemporary great rabbis inquired of Heaven by means of a dream (a technique known as a “she’elat chalom”) to discover the source of this decree. The Heavenly reply was a succinct three words “Da Gezeirat Orayta”. This is the Aramaic translation (see Targum Onkelus) of the opening verse to Parashat Chukat, “Zot Chukat HaTorah – This is the decree of the Torah” (Bamidbar 19: 2). They inferred from this cryptic reply that the burning of the Talmud was indeed Heavenly decreed. Therefore, and as opposed to every other fast in the Jewish calendar, instead of a specific day established as a commemorative fast day, this one, designated a fast for individuals, was set annually on the Erev Shabbat preceding Parashat Chukat.

While in the post-Crusader period there was nothing new to church-based persecution of Jewish communities, there was a particularly sad background to this event which actually set the pattern for subsequent debates. After the Rambam’s passing (in 1204), many great scholars who did not agree with his philosophical observations in his “Moreh Nevuchim” (Guide to the Perplexed) banned his writings. A tremendous controversy erupted throughout the Torah world. Eventually, a number of his detractors went so far as to submit copies of his work to the monks of the Dominican Order to determine whether the Rambam’s works contained heretical ideas. The Dominican Friars, naturally, summarily concluded that the Rambam’s writings were not only false, but blasphemous. In 1234, in Montpelier, France, they publicly collected and burned all copies they found of “Moreh Nevuchim” and other writings. Similarly, in 1242,  fanatics burned many of the Rambam’s writings in Paris. Less than 40 days later, at the exact same site, the 24 wagonloads of the Talmudic works were burned, on Erev Shabbat Parashat Chukat.

Eyewitness Rav Hillel of Verona wrote a famous letter in which he considered the burning of the Talmud as a clear sign of Divine anger and retribution for the burning of the works of the Rambam. One of his students, the famed Rabbeinu Yonah of Geronda who had also opposed the Rambam’s philosophy, similarly took the Talmud burning as a Divine sign, and now publicly and vociferously recanted his former position and opposition against the Rambam’s writings.

Instead he emphatically famously concluded “Moshe emes v’Toraso emes, v’kulanu bada’m – Moshe and his Torah are true while we all are liars”. (This statement is originally attributed to those swallowed by the earth after the dispute led by Korach, the subject of last week’s parashah, but was now adapted to refer to Moses Maimonides,  the Rambam.)

Some suggest that this tragic incident was the catalyst of Rabbeinu Yonah’s writing what came to be known as his magnum opus: “Shaarei Teshuvah – The Gates of Repentance”, effectively a manual on teshuvah now studied in mussar (ethical study) oriented yeshivot. But the last two centuries have witnessed many more book burnings. Nineteenth century writer and philosopher Heinrich Heine, born Jewish (1797) who unfortunately converted to Christianity aged 25, witnessed nationalistic excesses in Germany including book burnings after the Napoleonic wars.

Amongst his most famous sayings was a prescient prophecy: “Wherever they burn books they will also in the end burn people.”

In an event that my late mother distinctly recalled, on May 10, 1933, students across Germany burned over 25,000 books. The works of Jewish authors like Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud and others whose backgrounds and philosophies were at odds with Nazism went up in flames. In Berlin, 40,000 people gathered in Berlin’s open square to hear Joseph Goebbels declare: “The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end …The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you. … And thus you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past.” Now engraved in the Berlin pavement where that occurred is Heine’s prophetic statement.

It has been believed that after the German takeover of Poland the books of the great library of Yeshivat Chachmei Lublin, the greatest Polish yeshivah of the era, were thrown into the street and publicly burnt in a massive fire. Though a not impossible scenario, recent research suggests that at the very least not all the library was destroyed and that there is reason to doubt the oft cited lurid description of the supposed event. Nevertheless that the Nazis wantonly destroyed books and artefacts from institutions and homes in occupied territories is an indisputable fact.

I conclude with reference to the 2024 Adass Israel synagogue burning in Melbourne. For the ceremony of burial of damaged books, a pamphlet prepared for participants highlighted the above mentioned kinah by Rabbi Meir of Rothenberg. Yes, history repeats itself but may we never again experience such events.

Shabbat shalom,

Yossi Yossi

Yossi Aron OAM is The AJN’s religious affairs editor.