The Torah Danced at Creation and Ended Up in Sackcloth

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The Sixth Day Ended With a Wedding

God looked over everything He had made on the sixth day and called it very good (Genesis 1:31), and while the words were still in the air the Torah came out to dance.

Not a scroll. A woman, crowned, ornaments and rings moving with her as she circled in front of the Throne, singing while she went. Praise came out of her mouth in a language that had not been given to anyone yet.

"Show Me your face," God said.

She lifted the veil. The brightness that came off her filled the whole height of heaven, and the angels standing in their ranks lost their place in the song.

"Let Me hear your voice."

She sang. A voice answered her from somewhere above the singing: "The teaching of the Lord is perfect, renewing life" (Psalm 19:8).

God Reached Under the Throne and Lifted Out a Soul

He showed her the Throne of Glory next, so she would know the house she was marrying into. Then He brought the souls out to meet her.

Abraham first. Isaac and Jacob behind him. Behind those three, the whole unborn crowd of Israel, every soul that would one day stand and take her, filing past the bride thousands of years before any of them had a body.

Last, God put His hand beneath the Throne and lifted out the soul of Moses.

"Rejoice, daughter. Here is your bridegroom. He will take you, and love you, and open you in front of the multitudes at Mount Sinai."

She looked at the small soul held up in front of her. "How long until the day of my rejoicing?"

"From the day I made you until a thousand generations are finished."

So she waited. Sinai came, and the mountain smoked, and Moses carried her down into the camp exactly as promised, and after that the generations kept arriving and nobody thought to ask whether the bride had finished rejoicing.

Sealed With Aleph and Ayin Against the Wrong Hands

Her deepest secrets went into a book. Riddles, hints, whole rooms of the Torah locked behind letters that stand for other letters, concealed and sealed with Aleph-Ayin, so that the words of the King of the World could not be handled by men with no holy spirit in them to handle those words with.

They handled them anyway.

Sinners walked into that book and stumbled inside it. Pure stones went impure under their fingers, and the same stones turned into stones of plague for the stubborn ones chasing vanity. They lowered a bucket into a bitter well, carried the water up, and called it sweet. They cut a sharp sword out of cedar wood and went out with it to bring the cedars down. Ruin reached Zion along that road.

The loudest of them wore a crown. Sabbatai Zevi stood up in the seventeenth century and let the crowds call him messiah, a false priest with a bold face and a mouth full of prophecy nobody in heaven had given him, an evil shepherd. He rebelled against the whole world from a foreign land, a mighty hunter who kept his followers even after he broke, and they went on quoting him to each other in rooms where the Zohar lay open on the table.

The Bride Came Back Dressed for a Funeral

In Altona, more than a lifetime later, Jacob Emden sat up at night with that same book open and saw her again.

The assembly of Israel sat between two forces pressing in from either side, all of it built on her, all of it made out of her children. And she stood in the middle of it in sackcloth. The rough cloth of a woman in mourning, a widow's clothing, her face covered so that nothing of it showed.

The men who came to her did not come the way a bridegroom comes.

They approached her in ways that are not fitting, the way men approach a woman of the streets, and then they went over her inch by inch as though she were a bride at her unveiling and they had been appointed to inspect her. They lifted the cloth to find fault. They found it. They set her down among the household servants, a maidservant in disgrace, taking orders from the slaves of deception.

The veil that had once filled heaven with light stayed where it was. Nobody in the room asked her to lift it.

The Cup They Held Steady at His Mouth

Emden pushed back from the table. "Why should I go on grieving and mourning, mixing myself in among strangers?"

He had swallowed enough by then. Mockery from the arrogant, scorn from the jeering, years of it, and his soul had gone bitter from the swallowing. They had put a cup in his hands and held it firm there so that he would drink, and what was in it was wine pressed from the venom of serpents. He went through his days like a man drunk on that wine, carrying it past wicked men who despised him and swallowed him whole as he passed.

Four words at the end of it, and he set them down like a verdict: they have rejected knowledge.

Not misread. Refused, the way a man refuses to look at a face he has already decided is worth nothing.

The candle went on burning in Altona. Somewhere behind the sackcloth, the bride who had once been asked to sing kept her face covered, and the thousand generations went on running out.