Q&A: Reading from Parchment
Reading from Parchment
Question
A woman asked me what the point is of reading the Megillah from the hide of a slaughtered animal. She suggested reading the Megillah from a printed book, or just listening to a recording. After thinking about it, I realized that the Megillah is compared to a Torah scroll, which in turn is compared to tefillin, regarding which the Sages expounded: “so that the Torah of the Lord may be in your mouth” [said about tefillin] — “from that which is permitted to your mouth” (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 28a).
And I thought that this derivation implies that the Torah is not conceived merely as a vehicle for transmitting information, but as an additional medium that passes through the mouth like food, and therefore requires the purity of the parchment (perhaps similar to your column on the connection between poetry and Torah). And I wondered how far I can take this before it turns into mere homiletics, and how much I can in fact make a reasonable, intelligible claim here.
I would appreciate your thoughts.
Answer
In my view, you understood this exactly right. The sanctity of a sacred scroll depends on several completely technical elements, and it contains something beyond the sanctity of the content. This is essentially the difference between the sanctity of the Written Torah, which is the sanctity of the scroll and the object itself, and the sanctity of the Oral Torah, which is the sanctity of the content. From here too comes the sanctity of the blank spaces (between the lines and in the margins). However, I do not know how to give positive content to this assertion — that is, what there is in the scroll itself (the object) beyond its content — but the inference itself is entirely reasonable.
By the way, this is the view of Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik and Rabbi Yitzchok Zev Soloveitchik in the Talmudic passage about ruled lines, where the Talmud states that a Megillah requires ruled lines “like the truth of the Torah.” They explained there (and see their proofs) that the intent is that the ruled lines are a law pertaining to the content, not to the scroll.