Why Tyrants Burn Books — And Why the Torah Survives - Rabbi Yaakov Asher Sinclair

A hallmark of all repressive regimes is book burning. In May 1933, the Nazi party decreed that any book which acts subversively on our future or strikes at the root of German thought, the German home, and the driving forces of our people was to be burnt. One of the books that the Nazis burnt was written by Heinrich Heine. A hundred years before the Nazis burnt his books, Heine wrote, "Where one burns books, one will in the end burn people." One of the five disasters that we mourn by fasting on the 17th of Tammuz was another book burning. The burning of our holy Torah. The historian Josephus Flavius records that 16 years before the great Jewish revolt against the Romans, robbers attacked and plundered a procession of a Roman official called Stephanus or Apostomus on the royal road near Beit Horon. Cumanus, the proconsul at the time, sent troops to arrest the local villagers. He held them responsible for not [music] intervening. Now, during the arrest of the villagers, one of the Roman soldiers seized the scroll of the holy Torah, tore it into pieces, and set it ablaze. The fury of the Jews knew no bounds. The 17th of Tammuz marks the first recorded book burning in Jewish history, but it certainly wasn't the last. In the year 1242, under Louis the 9th of France, 10,000 copies of the Talmud, carried [music] in 24 wagon loads, were burnt at the stake before the eyes of grieving Parisian Jews. It's difficult for us to conceive the >> [music] >> the immensity of this loss. There was no printing in those days. Every one of those Gemarot was handwritten. [music] Those fires consumed almost all of Jewish knowledge in Europe. Jewish communities all over the world mourned. During the Musaf service of Yom Kippur, there's a section that describes the death of the 10 martyrs at the hands of the Romans. One of those 10 was Rabbi Chanina ben Chardian. The Midrash, the oral law, teaches that he was executed on the charge of teaching Torah publicly, a capital offense under the Romans. The Romans wrapped him in the Torah scroll that he always kept with him, >> [music] >> and they set him and the scroll afire. To prolong his agony, they packed the space between his chest and the Torah scroll with wool soaked in water. [music] Rabbi Chanina said, "The parchment is consumed, but the letters fly up in the air. The Torah is fire, and fire cannot consume fire." The body of a Jew is like the parchment on which the Torah of his soul is [music] written. When the parchment is burned, the letters fly up to return to [music] their source. One of the other five tragedies that we commemorate on the 17th of Tammuz also involves the letters of the Torah flying into the air. When Moshe Rabbeinu, when Moses came down from Sinai, from Mount Sinai, with the first tablets of the law, he saw the people dancing around the golden [music] calf. As a result of that sin, the Jewish people were no longer worthy to receive the tablets. The letters took leave of the stone and flew up into the sky. [music] Without the words of the Torah engraved on those tablets, they became too heavy for Moshe to carry. They fell from his hands and smashed to the ground. The mystical sources teach that [music] 2,000 years before the creation, the Torah existed in its primordial form >> [music] >> as black fire on white fire. You cannot burn fire with fire. You cannot burn an idea. The Torah is the idea of God. It is unburnable.