A First Since the Time of Biblical Kings: Israel’s Top Clergy Wears Torah Scroll

October 22, 2019

2 min read

Last month, Breaking Israel News reported on a story during the elections whereby Israel’s most highly revered rabbi, Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, instructed the Ultra-Orthodox party, United Torah Judaism, to break from their longstanding policy of ‘land for peace’ to one that protects the Land of Israel against its enemies who want to control it.

Recently, it was revealed that Rabbi Kanievsky was given a Torah scroll to wear around his neck as seen in the picture below.

Rabbi Kanievsky wears Torah scroll (courtesy: Facebook)

The scroll is the smallest Torah scroll in the world.

Rabbi Kanievsky inspects the worlds smallest kosher Torah scroll

Wearing a Torah scroll hasn’t been practiced by Jewish clergy since the times of the Bible. That’s when the kings of Israel were instructed to keep one with them as written in Deuteronomy:

 When he is seated on his royal throne, he shall have a copy of this Teaching written for him on a scroll by the levitical Kohanim. (Deuteronomy 17:18)

The Gemara (Sanhedrin 28), a component of the Telmud, explains that the Torah must hang from the king himself:

This serves to teach the halakha concerning the two Torah scrolls that the king writes, one that goes out and comes in with him, and one that is placed in his treasury. With regard to the one that goes out and comes in with him, he makes it very small, like an amulet, and he hangs it on his arm. As it is stated by King David: “I have set the Lord always before me; He is at my right hand, that I shall not be moved” (Psalms 16:8).

The ancient Biblical scholar Rabbi Moshe Maimon (Maimonides) explains that the king must have two Torah scrolls in his possession at all times except for places where it is inappropriate to read the Torah like the bathroom. The king is supposed to read from that Torah every day.

 

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