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Afterthoughts
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207 Afterthoughts Each of the 54 portions, from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Deuteronomy, is a precious and exquisite pearl. Each of them has its place on the necklace to which it belongs. How many necklaces are there? Five? One? It doesn’t matter. The necklaces or the necklace is the Torah—which, in its totality, adorns the body of Israel. Each time we read a parashah we string another pearl onto its necklace . One by one we read them, week by week, from the time of the first frost through the dead of winter into the budding of spring and over the flowering of summer.1 We fill up the necklace(s). Question: Are we proceeding in a linear fashion? Or in a circular one? The answer is: both. Consider the strange fate of the last parashah in the Torah, Ve-zo’t ha-berakhah, which details the final blessing and the death of Moses. We never read it in its entirety on a Shabbat as we do the other 53 (though in some years the first verses are read on the previous Monday and Thursday). Only on the morning of Simchat Torah do we read this portion through to the end of Deuteronomy , and then, as soon as we have done so, we roll right back to the beginning of Genesis. All year we had been moving in a straight line, or so we thought, from one parashah to the next, and it turns out that all along we were going in a circle. This manner of reading, our stringing the pearls, reflects a distinctly Jewish worldview. In this worldview the shape of human history and of the whole human experience is linear—but only apparently. Man was expelled from mythic Eden into the travails 208 AFTERTHOUGHTS of this material world, and since then human history has moved—and continues to move—forward, year by year, progressing , however imperceptibly, from the imperfection of the present toward a Redemption in the future. But, Judaism holds, one day history as we know it will end, and we will enter—or return to—a postmessianic Eden. What we think is a straight line is in reality a circle.2 If this perspective on time is overly speculative and “man” is an abstraction, consider then the individual human experience. Each of us at birth is cast out of the bliss of the womb, thrown into the arena of human endeavor, with all its challenges, struggles, and glories. Year by year we live until such time as we return to the womb of earth and pass into a reality of which no one on this side of it can rightfully or meaningfully speak. So, too, goes our life in community. Congregations, havurot, study groups—societies—all show the same trajectory. They begin with vision and aspiration, actualize them as they develop, decline as energy and enthusiasm are depleted—and then gird up to renew themselves. What feels linear is in fact circular. This is how we read the Torah, and, maybe, why we read it this way. Within the inexorable linearity of the progression of the years of our lives, there is the recurring cycle of the weekly portions . That moment when we finish Deuteronomy and immediately begin reading Genesis, again, is one of the most extraordinary moments in the Jewish calendar. In my view it is right up there with Yom Kippur and the Passover seder. Indeed, I see it as the culmination of the holiday sequence that begins with Rosh Hashanah, inaugurating the Jewish new year, and continues with Yom Kippur, on which we reboot our selves, so to speak. Simchat Torah marks off the beginning of the new cycle within which our renewed lives will unfold. This means that with each passing year, as we string the pearls again and again, we should be reading and understanding Torah on a deeper and deeper level. ————— [3.144.102.239] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 20:28 GMT) 209 AFTERTHOUGHTS The very last thing Moses instructs all the people is: Therefore, write down this poem and teach it to the people of Israel; put it in their mouths, in order that this poem may be My witness . . . since it will never be lost from the mouth of their offspring. . . . (Deut. 31:19, 21) Moses is referring to the great poem in parashat Ha’azinu. But the Rabbis understand his words to mean something more farreaching : Rabbah said: Even though...