Shemini 2026–The Sacred and the Profane: The Story of the Yanov Torah

Shemini 2026 | The Sacred and the Profane: The Story of the Yanov Torah
By Rabbi Angela Buchdahl

וּֽלְהַבְדִּ֔יל בֵּ֥ין הַקֹּ֖דֶשׁ וּבֵ֣ין הַחֹ֑ל וּבֵ֥ין הַטָּמֵ֖א וּבֵ֥ין הַטָּהֽוֹר׃

“You must distinguish between the sacred and the profane,  between the impure and the pure,“ says Leviticus 10:10.

Parshat Shemini makes clear that our lives depend on it.

Because just a few verses earlier, Aaron’s sons, Nadav and Abihu, bring an impure offering of eish zarah — alien fire — onto the altar, and for this, they are consumed on the spot by God. Aaron, their father, goes silent.

This dramatic and disturbing story is then followed by kosher laws: which land animals we are allowed to eat –animals with cleft hooves that chew their cud. And which water creatures – those with fins and scales. The pairing of the devastating deaths of Aaron’s sons with dietary rules seems baffling, until you understand that they are both about the importance of distinguishing between what is pure and impure, sacred and profane.

As a religious studies major in college, Mircea Eliade(MEER-cha, e-li-AH-deh’s) book of that name: The Sacred and the Profane, was required reading. Eliade, who essentially founded the academic study of the history of religion at the University of Chicago, argued that human beings fundamentally experience reality in two realms, the sacred – which is elevated, transcendent, special.

And profane – which is ordinary, everyday, sometimes even degraded.

Part of Eliade’s thesis is that sacred reality reveals itself through what he calls hierophanies—a manifestation of the sacred in the world–like a sanctuary or holiday, or even an ordinary object – like a stone, a tree, a meal–which can become sacred or feel charged when it points to something beyond itself. When it gathers identity, memory, and meaning into one spot. Like a loved one’s gravestone. A great-grandfather’s tallis. A Passover seder.

These are all hierophanies – objects or rituals that connect us to primordial time, to something bigger than ourselves, to meaning and purpose.

Judaism’s most recognizable hierophany might be our Torah scroll –which sits in Aharon Ha-Kodesh, literally the “holy” ark. The sacredness of the scroll doesn’t come from some rare ink, or the unusual properties of the parchment. The holiness comes from the meticulous inscription of every letter which matches every other Torah scroll ever made since God first etched its words at Sinai.

It comes from the thousands of hands that will touch it over hundreds of Shabbatot marking the mitzvot and milestones of our people. When a Torah scroll is no longer legible or “kosher,” we treat it with the same care we would a human life and bury it in a cemetery or geniza, rather than destroy it, because we know it is sacred.

We call Torah our “Tree of Life,” and sometimes that is more than metaphor.On this Shabbat before Yom Hashoah, I want to tell you of a scroll that truly was a source of life.

During World War II, in Nazi occupied Poland, Germans descended upon the town of Lvov, and forced all its able-bodied Jews into the Janowska concentration camp.

The SS not only brutally enslaved, beat and ultimately murdered Jews there, they deliberately stripped them of every marker of identity or humanity, every shred of dignity.

They understood the logic of parshat Shemini in reverse – if they could render everything impure, profane – they could shut down souls. Make life meaningless.

But the Jews of Lvov found their own form of resistance. They went to the cemetery where they had buried their old Torah scrolls — carefully separated the parchment at the seams and smuggled the fragments into Janowska – hidden in packages, sewn into shirts, pressed against their skin.

Once in the camp, the inmates hid them beneath thin mattresses and under floorboards, knowing discovery meant death. But at night, in the barracks, they would gather around their holy, broken Torah, and the words of our ancient story, of our ethical laws, of our redeeming God, came alive again.

And the Jewish inmates remembered who they were. Not only was their Torah resurrected — so was their humanity.

The Jews of Lvov understood, in the most desperate circumstances imaginable, how to seek out the sacred amidst the profane. Their holy scroll fortified their spiritual resilience – reminding them that they were part of a story larger than their suffering. That they were not the sum of what was being done to them.

And that the same divine finger that etched those letters, had also inscribed them in the Book of Life.

After the camp’s liberation in 1945, one survivor collected the scattered pieces and assembled them into a single, patched scroll: the Yanov Torah. The handful of survivors who remained in Lvov made a pact: the oldest would safeguard it, handing it to the next in line before each man died.

In 1975, as the last survivor was near death, he entrusted the Yanov Torah and its story to a Jewish refusnik,  Naum Rit, as he fled Russian for America.

Since 2008, the scroll has lived at Hebrew Union College, the Reform seminary, under the mandate that its students and rabbis would share its message widely.

Today, we carry the weight of this Yanov Torah, which bore witness to the Holocaust. I cannot tell you why this scroll survived Janowska, when so many Jews did not. Just as I cannot understand how the fires of the Holocaust consumed 6 million Jews, as we commemorate Yom Hashoah on Monday. Nor can I explain the shocking and devastating deaths of Nadav and Abihu in this week’s Torah portion which reduced even their father to silence.

There are moments when silence is the only honest response to death beyond our comprehension. When the explanations we reach for — there must be a reason, God must have a plan — become their own kind of alien fire.

I am not going to bear this Torah — this scroll that was buried and recovered and smuggled into hell and carried out again — and tell you that their deaths made sense. That there was a reason. Some deaths are not explained. They are only witnessed. This Torah witnessed them.

On this Shabbat before Yom HaShoah, we are honored to carry the Yanov Torah, which tells a story the survivors are no longer here to tell. Like Aaron before us, we stand silent before the enormity and mystery of death.

But we will refuse to let the fire have the last word. We will go on distinguishing between the sacred and the profane — between a world that desecrates life and a tradition that sanctifies it. And by holding fast to what is holy, we insist that even in a world of ashes, that what is sacred will prevail.