EJ Torah scroll

The EJ Torah scroll is the sacred text of the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism, a small congregation meeting in a converted brownstone parlor on the Upper West Side of New York City. It is no ordinary Torah: its edges are charred, and it is one of the scrolls recovered from the Holocaust. This physical scar makes the scroll not merely a ritual object but a direct material link between the congregation's radical theological experiment and the twentieth century's greatest catastrophe. When Sarah Blumenthal stands behind the reader's desk with the scroll before her, valanced in a simple prayer shawl, or tallith, the burned Torah becomes the silent witness to everything the Evolutionary Judaism movement is trying to recover—a pre-Scriptural state of unmediated awe that the Holocaust itself seems to have made both more urgent and more impossible to reach.

The Scroll in the Life of the Congregation

The EJ Torah scroll lies at the physical and spiritual center of the synagogue's weekly Sabbath service. The congregation meets on Friday evening, with the Saturday morning service more or less a replay, and every service has a traditional liturgical beginning and ending in English, but an extended effort of examination as its middle. This middle is not a sermon by the rabbi but a rabbinically directed seminar discussion. The scroll rests on the table before Sarah as she leads these discussions, its presence grounding the intellectual inquiry in the tangible reality of the tradition being examined. The congregation is small—on one Friday night the room was jammed with perhaps thirty people—and its members include a professor of Comparative Religion at Columbia, a judge of the State Supreme Court, a young woman studying at the Actors Studio, a married couple of physicians, a Barnard junior, and an elderly white-haired man whose son carries him up the brownstone stairs and retrieves him at the end of the evening. The scroll is the one constant in this diverse gathering, the object around which the seminar coheres.

The scroll's charred state is never far from the surface of the congregation's discussions. Sarah has seen it scrolled open, its edges charred, and she brushes the silken tallith with her fingers as she speaks, never once looking up. The burned edges are a reminder that this Torah survived the destruction of European Jewry, and that the intellectual freedom the congregation exercises—the freedom to question, to separate the inessential from the crucial—was purchased at an unimaginable price. The scroll thus embodies the paradox at the heart of Evolutionary Judaism: the tradition must be subjected to irreverent examination, but the very act of examination is itself a form of reverence, a way of honoring what was nearly lost forever.

The Seminar and the Documentary Hypothesis

The scroll is the focal point of the congregation's most sustained intellectual project: the application of the documentary hypothesis to the Torah. Over several weeks, the seminar examines the first five books of the Bible as the collected texts of different historical sources, designated J, E, P, and D. A doctoral candidate from Harvard discusses the work of his eminent teacher J. L. Kugel, who has attended in detail to the distinction between the original texts and the interpretive commentary that sprang up in the three hundred years before and a hundred years into the Common Era, creating the Bible read today under the illusion that it is the original Scripture. The biblical texts, the seminar learns, were enigmatic from the beginning, written in a language without vowels or punctuation, and since they were supposed to be divine in source and therefore of supernatural perfection, the scholars, priests, and sages of antiquity felt called upon to explain contradictions, un-God-like sentiments, and unsavory passages by interpreting them metaphorically, symbolically, or allegorically, or by changing their meaning through added punctuation, syntactical emphases, or other reimaginings. The EJ approach, as Sarah explains, is to take the various aspects of Jewish teaching and practice, consider their historic sources and theological rationale, and hold them up to modern scholarship, separating what is inessential, intellectually untenable, or blindly customary from what is truly crucial and defining. The charred scroll before them is the very text being dissected, and its survival makes the intellectual project feel like a continuation of the archival resistance that preserved Jewish memory through the Holocaust.

The seminar's method extends to the codes of conduct. On one Friday evening, the subject is the mitzvoth, of which there are some six hundred thirteen. A well-dressed middle-aged woman argues that though Reform Judaism has dispensed with many of the ritual laws, the ethical commandments remain binding. The discussion becomes a debate about the meaning of tradition itself. Sarah argues that tradition characterizes the Jewish people, not God—it is their longing, their obsessing, their poetry, the epic of their people. An elderly man stands up to object, insisting that epic is for the Greeks, and that there are some things that must not be questioned, such as the Torah being given by the Creator and the acceptance of the yoke of the Kingdom of Heaven. Without this, he insists, it is no religion, nothing. The moment crystallizes the tension at the heart of the EJ project: the scroll is both the object of radical critique and the anchor of communal identity, and the congregation must hold both together.

The Scroll and the Holocaust

The charred edges of the EJ Torah scroll connect the congregation's theological experiments to the Holocaust in a way that no abstract discussion could. The novel's treatment of the Holocaust centers on the testimony of Josef Barbanel, whose ghetto diary records everything that happened in the Kovno Ghetto—the execution orders, the deaths, the minutes of council meetings, the orders signed by the infamous Commandant Schmitz. Barbanel wrote in a neat Yiddish, like stitches sewn into the page, the characters very small, the words flying off his pen line after line in his passion to record each day, each moment, of the captives' lives. His writing was illegal; the Germans had confiscated all cameras and forbade unauthorized writings or photographs. But as chief aide to Dr. Koenig, Barbanel had always to be writing something, and it was relatively easy for him to enfold his diary within his formal duties. The EJ Torah scroll, recovered from the Holocaust, is the material counterpart to Barbanel's diary: both are objects that survived the destruction, both are records of what was nearly erased, and both testify to the human determination to preserve meaning against annihilation. The scroll's presence in the synagogue makes the congregation's intellectual freedom a continuation of Barbanel's archival resistance—the refusal to let the catastrophe be forgotten, and the insistence on carrying the tradition forward.

The scroll also stands in implicit contrast to the novel's other central religious object, the brass cross of St. Timothy's Episcopal Church. The cross is stolen from behind the altar, leaving only a shadow in the unfaded paint, and is later found lying flat on the roof of the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism, its transverse exactly parallel to the front of the building, its upright pressed against the granite pediment. The detective's assessment is blunt: the cross has no street value, it is scrap metal, whereas a Torah, being handwritten and not mass-produced, would bring a minimum of five thousand dollars. The EJ Torah scroll, by contrast, is not stolen or displaced; it remains in its place, the center of the congregation's life. The cross's journey from church to synagogue roof is a mystery that drives the novel's plot, but the scroll's quiet presence is the stable counterpoint—the object that stays, that grounds, that endures.

The Scroll and Pem's Conversion

The EJ Torah scroll is present at the key moments of Thomas Pemberton's journey from Episcopal priest to convert to Judaism. Pem attends the Friday evening seminars, sitting in the first row, and the scroll lies on the table before Sarah as the discussions unfold. His preconversion studies are conducted by a rabbi other than Sarah—he meets weekly with a former colleague of hers at Temple Emanuel—but the seminars at the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism are where he encounters the tradition in its most radical form. Pem, a former divinity student, finds much that is familiar from his days of scholarship, while the narrator, learning things for the first time, is in a different position. The scroll is the physical embodiment of what Pem is moving toward: a tradition that can be questioned, dissected, and rebuilt, yet that retains its power to inspire awe. When the elderly man challenges Sarah, insisting that some things must not be questioned, Pem slumps in his chair and holds his hands to his head—the moment when rationalism hits the wall. The scroll before him is both the object of his intellectual engagement and the symbol of the faith he is seeking, and the tension between the two is the tension of his entire conversion.

Pem's conversion culminates in his final act as a Christian and an ex-Christian priest, a prayer that addresses God in one of the intonative systems of clicks and grunts, glottal stops and trills. The prayer catalogues the monstrously evil mortifiers of humanity, the enslavement and horrible death of tens of millions, the exponential murder of souls, the torture and agony of demolishment in wars and genocides, the masses of the violently dead consigned by their very numbers to anonymous oblivion. They are not resurrectable, Pem insists; they cannot and will not resurrect even in the imagination of the Christian faithful. The prayer refuses to let God off the hook for these catastrophes, declaring that the genocidal cruelties of the age have brought God into disrepute, and that even among those clinging to a love of God there is a risen suspicion that God is part of the problem. The EJ Torah scroll, with its charred edges, is the silent witness to this prayer—the object that survived the catastrophe Pem describes, and that now stands at the center of the faith he has chosen. The scroll does not answer the question of how a supposedly omniscient God could allow such horrors; it simply endures, a burned remnant of a tradition that refuses to be extinguished.

The Scroll as Symbol of Evolutionary Judaism

The EJ Torah scroll is the material symbol of Evolutionary Judaism's central claim: that the tradition must be stripped down to its ground level of simple, unmediated awe. Sarah articulates this vision in the seminar, drawing on her husband Joshua Gruen's words that Reconstruction is only a start. The goal is not merely to make linguistic sense of the tradition, not to cherish beauty or consolation, not to preserve cultural identity for its own sake—that would be a theology in neutral, idling. Instead, the tradition is subjected to irreverence to get back to where it began, back down to the ground level of unmediated awe, the state of reverence, the sharp perception of God's presence in the fact of consciousness, and therefore everywhere and in everyone and everything. The charred scroll embodies this vision: it is a text that has been burned, damaged, and recovered, and its physical scars are a reminder that the tradition itself has survived destruction and transformation. The scroll is not a pristine object of veneration but a working text, rolled on its spindles, opened for examination, its edges charred—a Torah that has lived through history and continues to be questioned, interpreted, and reimagined.

The scroll's presence also marks the synagogue as a place where the sacred and the intellectual meet. The congregation is, ironically, a kind of continuing-ed yeshiva, with reading lists provided by the rabbi and a small but growing library for the use of congregants. The scroll is the anchor of this enterprise, the text that is being studied, and its survival through the Holocaust gives the intellectual project a moral weight it might otherwise lack. The EJ Torah scroll is thus more than a ritual object; it is the physical embodiment of the congregation's commitment to carry the tradition forward through questioning, to honor the dead by keeping their faith alive, and to seek the unmediated awe that lies beneath the accumulated layers of interpretation. It is the burned book that refuses to be closed, the charred text that continues to be read, and the silent witness to both the catastrophe of the Holocaust and the enduring human desire to find meaning in the face of it.