Sparks from the Torah

Adam G. Fuerstenberg was Professor of English at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, Toronto.

Rabbi Meir Gottesman, a New Jersey-born descendant of the Stretiner Rebbe, one of the dynastic chassidic rabbis who held court in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century, is a unique figure among the Jewish divines of Toronto. He has no pulpit, although he left a thriving orthodox congregation in Teaneck, New Jersey, to settle in Toronto. Nor does he occupy any of the many educational and communal positions available to rabbis without a congregation. Instead, he operates a little Judaica store off Bathurst Street in the heart of Jewish Toronto. There one can find him — amid rare books, mostly religious — always eager to enlighten, or discuss, or show an especially esoteric piece of work.

But his real audience, his “congregation,” is the thousands of readers he has reached through his weekly column in the English-language Canadian Jewish News. The column is entitled “Sparks From The Torah,” and each week the Rabbi examines the particular portion (“Parsha”) of the week’s religious service in the light of traditional folk tales, appropriate stories and sayings, or insights and interpretations. These are derived mainly from chassidic tales and traditions, from the “saints and scholars” who occupy the chassidic pantheon — men like the “Baal Shem Tov,” founder of the movement in the eighteenth century, or the great rabbi-scholar Samson Raphael Hirsh. Through their pithy aphorisms, or humorous stories about them, the portions as well as the festivals are covered. Such a story is the one about the thief who broke into the house of Rabbi Velv of Zabriz. Unable to find any money, he decided to steal a silver candlestick; as he was leaving, the saintly Rabbi urged him to take the second matching one, saying “this way you will be able to light candles for the Holy Sabbath.”

By his own accounting his columns now total more than half a million “words of Torah.” Now he has collected the best of these columns into an attractive little book with the same title. A number of themes permeate the slim volume of anecdotal enlightenments of the portions from the Torah: the need to fulfill the traditional commandments (the “mitzvot”) with joy, unyielding faith in God’s concern for man, and love of “Eretz Yisroel,” the land and people of Israel.

A gentle mixture of humor, religious teachings, and devotion, it is a light and easy introduction to the traditions that form the basis of Jewish orthodox practices.