Meir Y. Soloveichik
Commentary Magazine, March 2023
“Studying both pages, I realized that I was seeing a simple and sublime summation of one of the great works of Jewish thought: Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik’s The Lonely Man of Faith.”
Rabbi Hanina ben Teradyon was executed by the Romans following the fall of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 c.e. As he was burned alive while holding a Torah in his hands, his students asked their teacher what he saw. He responded, Gevilin nisrafin ve-otiyot porchot: The physical parchment is incinerated, but the letters themselves fly unaffected into the air. This is one of the most resonant tales of Jewish eternity, a sublime and succinct summation of the inability of our enemies to destroy us, and the connection between the Jewish faith—embodied by the Hebrew letters—and the miraculous endurance of our people.
I thought about this story when I watched a scene in the PBS documentary Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope about the life and death of Israeli pilot and astronaut Ilan Ramon, who perished when the shuttle exploded upon reentry in 2003 and whose 20th yahrzeit, or Hebrew anniversary of death, is now being marked.
More than two decades before Columbia, Ramon had first become bound up with the miraculous tale of the Jewish people. As a young man, he had served in the daring and essential Osirak operation, destroying Iraq’s nuclear reactor. While preparing for his mission, Ramon trained and worked with an Israeli scientist and Holocaust survivor by the name of Yoachim Yosef. He noticed a miniature Torah scroll on the shelf in Yosef’s office. Later, on a live broadcast while in orbit, Ramon held it up and told his country, “This is a tiny Torah scroll that, 60 years ago, a young boy received from a Dutch rabbi, who taught him for his bar mitzvah; and now, it is with me in space.”
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