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One of the most telling and amusing scenes in Anglo-Jewish history occurred on October 14, 1663. Only seven years had passed since Oliver Cromwell determined there was no legal barrier to Jews living in England—an event often called the “Return” of 1656. To accommodate the small community, a synagogue had opened on Creechurch Lane in the City of London. It was the modest forerunner to Bevis Marks (1701), which remains the oldest place of Jewish worship in Britain today.
The celebrated diarist Samuel Pepys decided to visit this new "curiosity" to observe how Jews conducted their prayers. What he witnessed both amazed and scandalized his refined English sensibilities. By providence—the day of his visit was Simchas Torah. He described the scene with bewildered disdain:
"And anon their Laws that they take out of the press [the Ark] are carried by several men... and whether it is that every one desires to have the carrying of it, I cannot tell, thus they carried it round about the room while such a service is singing… But, Lord! to see the disorder, laughing, sporting, and no attention, but confusion in all their service, more like brutes than people knowing the true God, would make a man forswear ever seeing them more."
Pepys concluded that he could not have imagined any religion in the world "so absurdly performed as this." This was not the decorous, somber behavior he expected in a house of God.
Law as Love
Pepys’s confusion highlights a unique dimension of the Jewish faith: the relationship between the people and the Torah. We stand in its presence as if it were a king; we dance with it as if it were a bride. We listen to it telling our own story. In our daily prayers, we describe it as “our life and the length of our days.”
There are few lines more poignant than those found in the Neilah service at the conclusion of Yom Kippur: Ein shiyur rak haTorah hazos—"Nothing remains but this Torah." Following the destruction of the Temple and the loss of the land, a book—a scroll—was all that stood between the Jewish people and despair.
What observers often fail to appreciate is that in Judaism, Torah represents "law as love, and love as law." As the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks often noted, Torah is not merely "revealed legislation." It is a testament to God’s faith in a people, entrusting them with the creation of a society that would serve as a home for the Divine Presence.
The Meaning of the Midbar
The key to this relationship is found in the Torah portion of Bamidbar (meaning "In the Wilderness"), which is always read before Shavuot, the festival marking the giving of the Law. The setting is crucial. It was in the midbar—the desert, the no-man’s-land—that the Israelites entered a covenant with God and received their constitution.
This desert setting reveals three fundamental truths about Jewish identity:
1. Law Before Land
In Judaism, the law preceded the land. For every other nation, the reverse is true: first comes the territory, then human settlement, then a political system, and finally a legal code. By receiving the Torah in the desert, the Jewish identity became uniquely portable.
Because the law came before the land, Jews were able to survive—identity intact—even in exile. When they lost their geography, they kept their history. The Torah became the "portable homeland of the Jew." Even without a state, they remained a nation under the sovereignty of God.
2. The Silence of the Word
There is a profound linguistic connection between midbar (wilderness) and davar (word). While other ancient civilizations found their gods in nature—in the rain, the soil, or the fertility of the seasons—Israel discovered God in transcendence. In the desert, there is no nature to distract the senses; there is only emptiness and silence.
It is in this silence that one hears the "unearthly voice" of the Divine. The philosopher Edmond Jabès noted, “The word cannot dwell except in the silence of other words. To speak is, accordingly, to lean on a metaphor of the desert.”
Political scientist Eric Voegelin saw this experience as a revolution in human spirituality. In Israel and Revelation, he wrote:
"When the world has become Desert, man is at last in the solitude in which he can hear thunderingly the voice of the spirit... In the Desert God spoke to the leader and his tribes; by listening to the voice... they had at last reached life and became the people chosen by God."
3. The Wilderness Honeymoon
Finally, the prophets offer a radical reinterpretation of those forty years in the desert. While the Torah records the Israelites as a complaining, rebellious group, the prophets look back on the period as a "honeymoon."
The prophet Jeremiah says in God’s name: “I remember the devotion of your youth, how as a bride you loved Me and followed Me through the wilderness, through a land not sown” (Jer. 2:2). Hosea echoes this, picturing God leading Israel back into the desert to "speak tenderly to her" (Hos. 2:14).
Anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep identified this as a "liminal" state—a threshold. To move from slavery to freedom, Israel had to pass through a no-man's-land where they were stripped of their old identity and refashioned. The desert was a place of yichud—an "alone-togetherness" where God and the people bonded in an intimacy that no tragedy could later break.
A Faith Alive
This "alone-togetherness" explains the "absurdity" that so bothered Samuel Pepys. The Jewish relationship with the Torah is not one of distant, cold obedience, but of passionate, marital love.
When King David brought the Ark into Jerusalem, he famously "leaped and danced" with such abandon that he earned the disapproval of King Saul’s daughter, Michal (2 Sam. 6:16). She saw his behavior as undignified for a king; David saw it as the only appropriate response to God.
Centuries later, the Jews of Creechurch Lane danced for the same reason. They weren't just carrying a book; they were dancing with their "life and the length of their days." As history has shown, when love defeats dignity, faith is alive and well.
