Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum, wearing kippah and tallis in front of the Torah, stands with members of the Kavana Cooperative as they admire the scroll they had just purchased on Ebay.
Looking for a gift to surprise the rabbi who has everything? Do what Stacy Lawson, one of the founding members of the Kavana Cooperative did: buy her a Torah.
“How much could we function in the ways that we wanted to function without a Torah?” Lawson said.
Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum, spiritual leader of the nascent Seattle-based Jewish community, hadn’t expected to attempt to obtain a scroll until around the High Holidays at the earliest, but she said she was thrilled to have had a member so excited about obtaining the Torah.
What makes the story interesting, however, is how Lawson found the Torah: she bought it on Ebay. A conversation with a friend at Congregation Beth Shalom who had researched buying Torahs online spurred her into action.
“All I had to hear was that you didn’t have to buy a Torah new, that she looked on the Internet, and I was off and running,” Lawson said.
Following a few months of occasional perusing, a short bidding war, and some anxiety about the scroll’s condition, Lawson purchased a Torah from a seller in Israel.
Kavana’s Torah has a history, though the details are a bit murky. It is believed to have been written sometime in the 1930s in Eastern Europe — a plus for Lawson, who collects Kiddush cups from the region.
“What [the sellers] said was it started out in Poland before [World War II], and that it made its way to Israel before the war,” Rabbi Nussbaum said.
A plaque on one of the etzei chaim, Hebrew for “tree of life” and the name of the dowels that hold the parchment containing the Torah’s sacred text, states it was commissioned for use in Ramat Gan, Israel, in 1951. The Torah presumably stayed in Israel, if not its congregation, until its posting on the popular auction site.
Lawson and Rabbi Nussbaum declined to state what they paid, but other Torahs sold on the site have been auctioned from anywhere between $700 and $2,500, depending upon quality and age. A new, commissioned Torah can cost a congregation between $20,000 and $60,000, though the Seattle area has no sofrim, or scribes, of its own, according to Albert Maimon at the Va’ad HaRabanim of Greater Seattle.
One question that inevitably pops up with a sight-unseen purchase of any used object over the Internet, whether a Torah, a classic car, or an Ipod, is if the product advertised is the product the buyer receives.
In the event of such an important ritual object, Maimon said, “the qualification is that they get the standard that they are expecting the Torah to have.”
Ebay uses a communal rating tool that encourages feedback on transactions which can make trusting the seller easier in most cases. Though the sellers listed the Torah as kosher, “maybe a day before the auction was going to be over, I got a letter from the sender,” Lawson said.
One side of the parchment — the unwritten side, Lawson found out — was meshuach, meaning a covering had been added to make it easier for the scribe to write. If the side the scribe writes on is meshuach, however, there comes an increased possibility that letters could peel or fall off, rendering the Torah unkosher.
“It didn’t bother any of the other rabbis that I consulted, from Conservative to Reform to Orthodox,” Lawson said.
Still, she and Nussbaum had the Torah verified — and repaired, in some cases — by a third party in Israel, and Nussbaum checked it again when the Torah arrived.
“I’m definitely not a sofer,” Nussbaum said, but “I know what to look for when I’m looking inside a Torah…. I’m able to look inside at the text, I’m able to look for letters that are missing.”
She had to check particularly closely because of a major problem that occurred during shipping: the Torah was poorly packed and sent overseas in a cardboard box, badly damaging the etzei chaim.
“We actually scrolled through the whole thing, because I had this nightmare there would be Crayola crayon or something,” Lawson said.
But from what Nussbaum saw, the condition of the parchment and text convinced her the Torah was indeed kosher.
“I wouldn’t use it otherwise,” she said. “We all ended up learning a lot about what goes into creating and repairing a Torah, in the process of evaluating whether this Torah was going to work.”
The Torah was used at Kavana’s first Shabbat morning service in mid-February, and community members — the first to read from it on these shores — felt satisfied with the purchase.
“The lettering was clear and beautiful, and the Torah readers commented afterward that it was a pleasure to read from that Torah,” Nussbaum said.
Lawson didn’t think twice about going straight to an online source for her community’s Torah.
“That’s my world. I’m very comfortable on Ebay,” she said, though for an anxiety-ridden process like a used, kosher Torah, “I wouldn’t encourage people to do it unless they have good halachic advisors…. Unless they have a good idea of what they’re looking for, they need to know what the pitfalls can be.”
Nussbaum has since gone back to the Internet to purchase a new Megillat Esther for Purim. Suzan LeVine, Kavana’s board president, said that her organization’s use of technology to research and purchase such items is a “no-brainer.”
“For people who are comfortable with technology, of course you would think to use Ebay,” LeVine said. LeVine, a former Expedia executive, said that Kavana has taken advantage of technology to create metrics of attendees and programs since the organization launched in July 2006, and enabled the board to see what has worked and what types of events have brought people back.
Nussbaum said using sites like Ebay expands the global reach of a practice that has taken place on a much more local level for centuries.
“There has always been commerce for ritual items,” she said. “It makes it possible, when a synagogue closes down in one part of the world, for a community that’s starting up in a totally different part of the world, to act as a resource. That actually feels like a powerful tool to me. It expands the scope of what’s possible.”
Having the Torah, at least in the minds of some Kavana members, also gives a feeling of permanence to the young spiritual body.
“We now have the responsibility to care for this precious object, and symbolically it means we are now a community real enough to possess a real Torah,” Rabbi Nussbaum said. “I think there’s something to that — that’s something that’s relatively profound.”
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