LONE TREE — It is brand new and unused, yet ancient and eternal — this Torah is the bond between Moses at Mount Sinai and the shiny new suburbs of south metro Denver.
A newly handwritten Torah scroll’s completion Sunday at the 7-year-old Chabad Jewish Center in Lone Tree was an occasion that bridged millennia here just before the High Holy Days.
The Jewish New Year, a time for introspection, begins at sundown Wednesday.
A specially trained ritual scribe, or sofer, labored for about a year in Jerusalem, using a quill and animal-skin parchment, to make an exact copy of the oldest Torah — the Five Books of Moses — for this fledgling Jewish community.
The scribe left the Torah’s last paragraph to be filled in — and with the oversight of another specially trained but more local scribe, the local congregation finished it.
The congregation provided more than $50,000 to commission its own Torah. It replaces a venerable one, a Holocaust survivor that the rabbi had on loan from a New York family.
“It’s a great honor and blessing for the entire community, and what better time to do it than the Sunday before Rosh Hashanah,” Rabbi Avraham Mintz said of the Torah dedication.
Every word and every one of 304,805 letters in every Torah is holy and critical to the whole, Mintz said. Any letter that is missing or damaged must be painstakingly restored for the sacred scroll to be complete and legitimate.
In this way, he said, the Torah represents every member of the Jewish community, which is not considered whole if even one of its members is missing or lacks for something.
5,000 inscription laws
Rabbi Moshe Liberow, of the Chabad Lubavitch of Southern Colorado in Colorado Springs, is the scribe who helped complete the Lone Tree Torah. To be a sofer means learning the 5,000 laws governing inscription of the Torah in Hebrew.
“The first of the Torahs was completed by Moses,” Liberow said. “Every Torah unites us with the original Torah. Every Torah is a message of our eternal bond and eternal life. The Torah is what keeps all Jewish people united to each other.”
And this community, one of the fastest-growing in Colorado, is celebrating its first anniversary in its new $3 million building on Lone Tree Parkway.
Rabbi Mintz, a 31-year-old Brooklyn, N.Y., native, confesses that his youth “sometimes scares people.” They must have really been scared when he first came in his early 20s with his wife to start this Doug las County outpost in a storefront on County Line Road.
Rabbi Moshe Liberow, of the Chabad Lubavitch of Southern Colorado in Colorado Springs, is the scribe who helped complete the Lone Tree Torah. To be a sofer means learning the 5,000 laws governing inscription of the Torah in Hebrew.
“The first of the Torahs was completed by Moses,” Liberow said. “Every Torah unites us with the original Torah. Every Torah is a message of our eternal bond and eternal life. The Torah is what keeps all Jewish people united to each other.”
And this community, one of the fastest-growing in Colorado, is celebrating its first anniversary in its new $3 million building on Lone Tree Parkway.
Rabbi Mintz, a 31-year-old Brooklyn, N.Y., native, confesses that his youth “sometimes scares people.” They must have really been scared when he first came in his early 20s with his wife to start this Doug las County outpost in a storefront on County Line Road.
“I’m going to be honest. When we first came here, many people thought it would be impossible to pull it off,” Mintz said with his characteristic 100-mph speech. “We were very determined and focused.
“I believe it’s nothing short of a miracle.”
Chabad, or the Chabad- Lubavitch, is a Hasidic movement within Orthodox Judaism, based in Brooklyn.
A tenet of the movement is for secular Jews to become more observant.
However, Mintz said, the goal is to make accessible the richness of Jewish heritage and traditions to every Jew whether one wishes to participate once a day or once a year.
“Orthodox, Conservative or Reform — we’re just Jewish. Labels are for shirts and shoes, not people,” Mintz said. “Everyone is welcome.”
“I’m going to be honest. When we first came here, many people thought it would be impossible to pull it off,” Mintz said with his characteristic 100-mph speech. “We were very determined and focused.
“I believe it’s nothing short of a miracle.”
The center’s Hebrew school now has more than 120 children. And several hundred families, Mintz said, are involved on a regular basis in one or more Chabad programs or in worship.
“Our motto is: ‘We’re happy but not satisfied.’ We want to reach every Jew and let them know they have a home away from home,” Mintz said.
Providing a preview of the new Torah before Sunday’s dedication, Mintz carefully removes the heavy scroll’s protective and decorative mantle. He takes off the belt and unfurls the 21-inch-tall parchment from two wooden spindles, called “trees of life.”
Mintz next unwraps the plastic covering over the Torah’s sterling-silver crown and its breastplate, or shield, for the Torah is as holy as a soul and is dressed like a high priest.
At its dedication, the Torah leads the procession, held aloft under a Chupa, or wedding canopy, because the Torah is the marriage contract between God and the Jewish people, Mintz said.
“The Torah is here to hold our hand and lift us up,” he said.