This was what I had planned for yesterday.

I had a hard time sleeping Tuesday night. I don’t know why, nothing unusual on my mind, but I would have had as much sleep if I had stayed up and watched the House Rules Committee’s meeting, which began at 1 a.m.

Luckily, I didn’t have to run around yesterday, so all was okay. My only scheduled requirement was a Zoom Financial Committee meeting, and I was wide awake for that. In fact, I was wide awake for most of the day, and even covered about 2 miles on my treadmill (walk, don’t run!), so all was okay.

The highlights of the day were two Zooms – the first, sponsored by a group called My Jewish Learning, was about the Jewish community of Japan, and the second, a Haberman Institute event, was about the earliest virtually complete Hebrew bible manuscript, called the Sassoon Codex.

When the program about Japan began, I was disappointed. The presenter was Rabbi Andrew Scheer, the leader of the Jewish Community of Japan. Rabbi Scheer is a young American who, after college in the U.S., went to Japan as an English teacher, returned to the US, went to rabbinical school and was trying to decide, along with his wife, where they wanted to live when he got a call from Japan asking him if he wanted to return there. He has been there ever since and it looks like he plans to stay a while.

The reason I was disappointed is that he began by giving us a tour of the building in Tokyo that serves both as a synagogue and a community center. The building did not look very interesting, and I was almost ready to turn the program off, although Scheer is an appealing young man who speaks very well. But I stuck with it and was glad I did.

Here is some of what I learned. The Jewish community in Japan started in the late 19th century, and is still relatively small. The Jewish Center, which I think is the only synagogue in Tokyo (other than a Chabad House) has only 140 or so family membership units, which would make it a relatively small congregation by American standards. They have a religious school with about 50 students. Their congregation comes from all over. Many of the Americans are in the military. About 40% of the congregation are ethnic Japanese, either married to non-Japanese choose, or children of mixed marriages, or individual converts. They have a significant number of European Jews, a few from Israel and a smattering from other places.

They have six Torahs, two need repair, one has ivory handles. They have three sections of seating in their sanctuary – one for women, one for men, one mixed, and that seems to work out well (apparently, this was at one time not uncommon elsewhere, although it is uncommon now). They have their own prayer book, based on the ArtScroll prayerbook.

There is no kosher restaurant in Japan (there is one New York Jewish-style deli; the rabbi has never been there), and kosher meat is flown in from the United States. They fly in the kosher food for congregants to use at their houses. Chabad hosts meals for tourists, etc., but the Jewish Center does not.

There is no visible antisemitism in Japan, although books like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion can be bought in the history sections of some book stores.

Scheer looked at the yahrzeit wall in the Center and told the story of some of the people on the wall, each of which was quite interesting. When asked to say one thing that Jews outside Japan would not know about Jewish Japan, he thought a minute and then answered: Dave Spector. He said that Spector is the most famous TV personality in Japan and if you walk down the street with him, he will besieged constantly by locals wanting to take a selfie or say hello. He is originally from Chicago and, according to Scheer, no one in Chicago has ever heard of him. I see that Spector does have a Wikipedia page that describes him as a “gaijin torento” and goes on from there. I did not read beyond that opening description.

That was this morning. This evening, Haberman had a terrific program featuring Sharon Liberman Mintz, who is a curator at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York and also has a consultant on Jewish manuscripts for Sotheby’s. The program was on what is known as the Sassoon Codex (named for the early 20th century manuscript collector David Sassoon) and is the oldest existing book on parchment containing all 24 books of the Hebrew bible. It is owned by the ANU Museum in Tel Aviv (formerly known as the Museum of the Diaspora), and was donated to the museum by Washington DC lawyer and philanthropist (and formerly Ambassador to Romania) Alfred Moses, who purchased it at Sotheby’s for something like $39 million.

Mintz, who seemed to know absolutely everything about this manuscript and any other Jewish manuscript you could mention, told the story of this book and put it in historical context, explained how its history can be gleaned from notes and marks contained on its pages, and talked generally about how these books were put together. She also referred to the Aleppo Codex, now I think at the National Library of Israel, which is older and which served as a model for this book, but which – in its current condition – is far from complete. (If you are interested in the Aleppo Codex, you can read the book by the same name by Matti Friedman, which I read several years ago and found fascinating and easy to read. She also talked about the Afghan Quire, which is even older, but is not a bible, but a prayer book, and which is now owned by the Museum of the Bible here in Washington, but will be on display through the summer at the JTS Library in New York.

Mintz’ was a terrific presenter and if you are at all interested in this topic (and why shouldn’t you be?), you will be able to see her presentation as early as tomorrow or Friday either on the Haberman website (www.habermaninstitute.org), or on YouTube (just search Liberman Mintz Haberman Sassoon, or something like that). I high recommend it.

Today I hope will be a quiet day. Daughter Hannah and family are closing on their new house on Kansas Avenue NW this afternoon, we will pick up the kids after school and bring them back here, and will join Hannah and Andrew (and hopefully, daughter realtor Michelle) for a celebratory dinner.