Christian Bibles are available in hotel rooms, or by missionaries going door to door. But if you want a copy of the Torah while you’re traveling you have to bring one with you or find a local synagogue. Soon, though, there’ll be one place you’ll always be able to find a copy of the Five Books of Moses: the moon.
An Israeli organization called, appropriately, “Torah on the Moon” is raising money to send up a kosher Torah scroll in an airtight case, designed to last up to 10,000 years. The project is intended to “celebrate the ancient book’s innumerable contributions to morality, justice, education, culture, art and sciences.”
In 1971 Apollo 15 Commander David Scott left a copy of the Christian Bible in the lunar rover. In 2003 Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon brought a miniature Torah scroll that had survived the horrors of the Holocaust with him to space, but Ramon did not go to the moon, and neither the Torah scroll nor Ramon survived the crash at the end of his mission.
“Torah on the Moon” is the first chance for a Torah scroll to go to the lunar landscape. The next challenge is putting together a minyan.
