THEY CAN'T TAKE THE TORAH OUT OF US

Nothing else was taken. Silver, fittings, objects worth far more than parchment on any resale market, all of it was left exactly where it sat. The president of the Levallois community said it was the Torah, and only the Torah, that was targeted, by a professional team that worked around the cameras and the alarms, and he called it a spiritual trauma for the Jewish community of France and beyond it. The local prefecture said publicly that this was not a simple theft. Two days before the break-in, French police had detained six people over an alleged plot against a different synagogue in the north of the city.

Four days earlier, on Friday, on the other side of the world, someone walked up to the single wall still standing at the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center in Altadena, California, and sprayed swastikas across it. That wall carries a mural: one large orange California poppy and the words kol Yisrael areivim zeh lazeh, all of Israel is responsible for one another. The campus behind the wall burned down in the Eaton Fire in January 2025, along with much of the surrounding neighbourhood, and the mural was painted on the one major wall the fire left standing. It existed in the first place because that same wall had already been defaced once this year, in January, with an obscenity aimed at Zionism. The mural was painted to cover it. Now it had been covered again. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department opened a hate crime investigation.

Then Shabbos came in, and it happened a third time, in a third country. At around three on Shabbos morning, on Leicester Road and a neighbouring street in Salford, outside Manchester, the windows of parked cars belonging to visibly Jewish families were smashed. It was the second week running that those few streets had been hit, after three members of that community were shot at with a BB gun fired from a moving car on the Monday before.

Tzion Says She Was Forgotten

The haftarah we read this Shabbos is the second of the shiva d'nechemta, the seven haftaros of consolation read on the seven Shabbosos running from Tisha B'Av to Rosh Hashanah. They are read in a deliberate order, one after another, climbing out of the mourning and toward the new year.

Last week's haftarah opened with nachamu, be comforted. This week's opens with the city refusing it: And Tzion said, Hashem has abandoned me, and my Master has forgotten me.

Yeshayahu prophesied in Yerushalayim in the generations before the churban, the destruction, and through these chapters he speaks to the city as if she were a woman: a wife who believes her husband has walked out on her, a mother who has buried her children, Rachmana litzlan. Tzion is that woman. Her walls were breached and left in heaps when Bavel, Babylon, took the city, the Beis HaMikdash was burned, and the people were marched out of it into exile. That is the rubble she is speaking from.

Her word for it is shechachani, He has forgotten me. Not that He has punished me, which would at least mean He was still paying attention. Forgotten is the worse claim, because forgotten means the file is closed. Anyone reading the week's news understands the pull of that word. The scrolls are gone and nobody has been arrested. The wall gets painted and painted again. The same street in Salford, twice in eight days.

Engraved, Not Written

Hashem answers the charge of forgetting two verses later, and not with an argument. With an image: Behold, I have engraved you on My palms; your walls are always before Me.

It could have said written. It says engraved, and that is the whole point. Writing sits on top of a surface, and anything that sits on top of a surface can be lifted off it, scraped, bleached, painted over, carried away. Chakikah, engraving, means the letters are not added to the material at all. They are cut out of it. There is no ink to remove. You cannot take the letters off an engraved hand without destroying the hand.

Rashi reads it as a man who cuts a mark into his own hand so that he cannot forget what it stands for. The Radak reads it plainly, that the palms are the one place a person cannot avoid looking at. Whatever is cut into them he sees constantly, without trying and without needing to be reminded. Tzion said He had forgotten her. The answer is not a promise to remember. It is that forgetting is not possible.

Then the verse names her walls, the ones Bavel broke: your walls are always before Me. The rubble she holds up as proof He stopped looking is the thing He says never leaves His sight.

The Heel That Walks

The parsha opens and it will be, eikev, that you listen. Eikev means heel, and that root names our generation: ikvisa d'Meshicha, the heels of Moshiach, which Rashi explains as the end of the exile, immediately before he comes.

The phrase comes from the last mishnah in Sotah. In the heels of Moshiach, insolence increases, the wisdom of the scribes rots, those who fear sin are held in contempt, truth goes missing, and the face of the generation is like the face of a dog. Then the mishnah asks one question and answers it: on whom is there left to lean? On our Father in Heaven. The era is described that bleakly on purpose, so the conclusion has nowhere else to go.

The heel is the least sensitive part of the body, which fits an era with little open revelation, and it is also the part that walks. The hand the mishnah leaves us to lean on is the same hand the haftarah says we are engraved into, the one surface that cannot be scraped clean.

The Mural Went Back Up on Thursday

On Thursday afternoon, in the heat, the congregation in Altadena held a gathering at their burned campus. Miriam Hellmann, the artist who painted the mural the first time, stood at the wall and finished it a second time while people watched. Neighbours came, including the family who had lived across the street until the fire took their house too, and who were fed by the shul afterward. Clergy from the church that has hosted the congregation for the past year and a half stood up when they were asked to. Officials spoke. What the members kept mentioning afterward was not the officials. It was the neighbours who stood out in that heat next to them.

There is one wall left standing on that lot, which is the only reason there was anything to paint on. We know that arithmetic. The holiest place we have is the Kotel, the piece still standing when everything else came down, and we have been davening at it for two thousand years. A single wall left standing is not what is left over. It is what holds.

The scrolls of Levallois are still missing as this Shabbos comes in, and they should be found and returned. Until they are, that community will read from a borrowed one. Those scrolls matter, which is exactly why their loss is a wound. What no one can carry out of a window is the covenant that keeps putting Torah into parchment, in Levallois and everywhere else. May we see the promise kept, completely and very soon.

Sources: Devarim 7:12 · Yeshayahu 49:14-17, Haftaras Eikev 49:14-51:3, with Rashi and Radak on 49:16 · Mishnah Sotah 9:15; Sotah 49b with Rashi · Shevuos 39a · News: JTA, Times of Israel (Levallois-Perret, July 26-27); The Forward, Algemeiner (Altadena, July 24 and 30); Jewish News (Salford, July 25)