Writing a letter for each

There were tears in the eyes of many Temple Bat Yahm members, as congregants of the Newport Beach synagogue gathered this week to write the first letter of the Torah on a piece of parchment with a feather quill.

“There is an expression in the Jewish tradition that the Jewish people without the Torah is like a body without a soul,” said Temple Bat Yahm Rabbi Mark S. Miller. “This is the soul of Judaism that we are creating anew.”

The temple has embarked on a yearlong project to write a new Torah, a religious scroll that contains the holiest texts in Judaism.

Members of the congregation gathered Sunday to write the first letter on the parchment, the Hebrew letter “bet,” the beginning of the words “In the beginning.”

Each member of the congregation will have the chance to write one of the 304,805 letters in the book, fulfilling the religious requirement for all Jews to write a Torah. The requirement is fulfilled if a Jew writes just one letter of the sacred text.

“It will be wonderful for every family to get the feeling of what it’s like to come back 10 or 20 years from now and say ‘I helped write that Torah,’” said Temple Bat Yahm member Debbe Katz, who is helping to organize the Torah writing project.

Many from the congregation will dedicate their letter to a loved one, or invite friends and family for the momentous occasion.

Ronda Kushner plans to have her two college-age sons, husband, mother and great niece from Arizona all come to write a letter in the Torah with her.

“It’s going to be an amazing thing to have the generations be there together for this to all fulfill their commitment,” said Kushner, who is also helping to organize the Torah writing project for the temple.

Once completed, the Torah will be placed in the ark in a new chapel Temple Bat Yahm is building on its campus just off Jamboree Road near Upper Newport Bay.

The new Torah will be read on the Sabbath or Jewish festival days. It is being written by a man known as a sofer, who in the Jewish tradition has been taught how to painstakingly write a new Torah by hand.

“We’re so far removed from the source of everything in our society these days — we think that the bread appears miraculously, we’re so far removed from planting and the nurturing and the sowing of the grain,” Miller said. “One could think the Torah miraculously appears in the ark, but it’s a labor of love. It doesn’t just happen.”

The sofer who is writing Temple Bat Yahm’s new Torah lives in Miami, and will fly to Newport Beach several times throughout the year with sheets of parchment from the Torah to give each of the congregation’s members a chance to write a letter of the holy text. The sofer cannot write from memory, but must copy the letters from another text. The sofer also cannot work on the Sabbath or Jewish holidays. The ink and parchment the sofer uses to write the Torah must come from ritually clean or Kosher animals.

“If just one letter of the Torah is missing, the entire Torah is not fit to be read during services,” Miller said. “Since we believe every Jewish person is like a letter of the Torah, if one member of our congregation is left out, it diminishes the entire enterprise.”

Did You Know?

 The Torah consists of the Five Books of Moses, also called the Pentateuch.

 The names of the five books are Bereshith, Shemot, Vayikra, Bemidbar and Devarim, or Genesis, Exodus Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.

 The Torah contains 613 mitzvot, or commandments.

 A sefer Torah is a hand-written copy of the five books on parchment using a quill dipped in ink.

 Producing a sefer Torah is one of the 613 mitzvot.