Tulsa World
Rabbi Yehuda Weg claps during a procession celebrating a new Torah scroll.

Oklahoma Jews Welcome New Torah Scroll

Rabbi Yehuda Weg, founder and leader of Tulsa’s Chabad community, leans forward in his chair and his eyes brighten when he talks about the Torah.

The Chabad congregation received a new Torah scroll Sunday, March 9th, with singing, dancing, clapping and a procession down 71st Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

“The Torah is God’s little diary that he was kind enough to share with us,” Weg said in a Tuesday interview at the Chabad center. In it, he said, God has revealed his thoughts, his aspirations and plans for the world, and why he created mankind.

Weg said the Torah consists of the five books of Moses, dictated word for word by God to Moses and meticulously copied and handed down from generation to generation, and exactly 304,805 Hebrew letters.

“The most critical fact about the Torah is that we have it in an unbroken chain,” he said.

“We know when it was given to us. We know the day of the week, the time of day. We know the names of the people who were there. And it was transmitted from that generation to the next generation. We know the names of those people. We can list the names of the leaders of each generation that transmitted the Torah, from the day it was given until today.

“It meets all requirements of documented history.”

As a result, he said, the exact time of the creation — 5,774 years ago — and other key biblical dates are all known.

Weg said to question the validity of the Torah makes as much sense as questioning the existence of George Washington. He said the entire Jewish scripture is considered inspired by God, but the first five books are different, containing all 613 commandments of God, relevant at all times and in all places.

He said some of the commandments cannot be practiced today because they apply to temple worship, and the temple no longer exists. But those commandments are still valid, Weg said, and will be observed again when the temple is rebuilt.

The Jewish temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the invading Romans in 70 A.D., and Orthodox Jews believe it will be rebuilt. To believe that the Messiah is coming is “basic Judaism,” he said. “We consider it imminent — actually overdue.”

While every word of the Torah in Hebrew is God-dictated, its translations into other languages are not similarly inspired, Weg said. “Some translations are good. Some are not.” He said translations tend to be either idiomatic, conveying the ideas of the original text, or literal, more word for word. “I prefer the idiomatic because we’re trying to understand what the text is saying,” he said.

Jews around the world read the same section of the Torah every week, completing all five books in a year. Those who can read Hebrew read the Torah in its original language.

Many Jews are taught Hebrew as children, when language skills are much easier to learn, he said, but a growing number of adults are learning Hebrew.

His children, he said, could read Hebrew by the age of 4 and translate it pretty well by the age of 10. They all are fluent in four languages: English, Hebrew, Yiddish and Aramaic, another biblical language.

Weg said Chabad is the largest and fastest-growing Jewish movement in the world. It was started in the late 1700s by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi in Belarus.

It was, and is, an intellectual movement, a way of thinking and living Judaism that emphasizes study, emotional involvement and practical deeds, and living by the law of the Torah, he said.

Weg was born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., in a family that had been involved in the Chabad movement for generations. He studied in Chabad schools in Brooklyn, where the movement is now based.

He was ordained a rabbi at age 24. A year later he married Etel, who is from an aristocratic family in Manchester, England.

The head of the movement asked the young couple to come to Oklahoma to start a Chabad community. “We happily agreed to come,” he said.

Chabad started in Tulsa in 1987 and expanded to Oklahoma City in 1996.

The organization sponsors a variety of courses and programs, many of them held at the Jewish Community Center.

Weg said Chabad in Tulsa draws Jews from the other synagogues for education programs, and also is a synagogue itself for some Jews who are looking for a more traditional Jewish service.

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