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Strange and Stranger: Reading Torah’s end and beginning on Simchat Torah

  • October 10, 2024
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On Simchat Torah, we read two of the strangest texts of Torah: its end and its beginning.

We start with the ending. VeZot Habracha, the last Torah portion, begins with Moshe’s final blessing to the Israelites on the steppes of Moab, just across the Jordan River from the land of Canaan. When he finishes this blessing, Moshe climbs to the top of Mount Nebo, where God shows him the land of Canaan across the river. Then Moshe dies, and Israel mourns his passing.

View from the top of Mount Nebo
View from the top of Mount Nebo

In some ways, this is a conventional text. We have other deathbed stories that recount a hero’s final words and death, elsewhere in Torah and Tanakh. If the Torah were structured as the story of Moshe’s life, this ending would be literarily familiar. However, that is not the story of Torah. Beginning in Genesis 12, YHWH makes a series of promises to Avram/Abraham — promises of land, progeny and national flourishing — that launch Torah’s narrative trajectory.

Elements of this promise are reiterated throughout Torah (Genesis 12:2-3; Genesis 15:5-7; Exodus 3:7-10; Deuteronomy 1:6-9) and much of Torah’s narrative is structured as successive stages in the journey to the land of Canaan. In ancient literature, stories that begin with promise end with fulfillment. Stories structured as quests end with finding and stories structured as journeys end with arrival. The Torah boldly defies this pattern. Even as it structures our national story as one of promise, quest and journey, it ends without resolving any of those plots. Torah does not end, as we would expect, with arrival in Canaan. Rather, it ends on just the other side of the border. This highly unconventional and possibly transgressive ending prompted many 20th-century biblical scholars to posit that the original form of the Torah had six books, not five. Meaning it was not a Pentateuch but a Hexateuch, which also included the book of Joshua. While there is no material evidence for such a composition, the Hexateuch hypothesis testifies to the singularity of Torah’s ending. It is so odd that scholars hypothesized that it can’t be the original version.

One of the tenets of a Reconstructionist approach to Torah is that historical context matters. While we can’t date the composition of any text of Torah precisely, most scholars now agree that the period of the Babylonian exile and its aftermath were key periods for the development of texts of Torah. If we imagine communal leaders living in exile or in the decades following it, we can understand why they ended the Torah where they did. By ending Torah outside the land of Canaan, they made it their story — a story that reflected their own experience of living outside the land of Israel. Yes, our ancestors preserved the rest of the story. Tales of conquest, settlement, the establishment (and demise) of kingdoms are all ultimately included in the Tanakh. However, they do not become part of Torah, the sacred story that we retell each year.

A Torah scroll partially unrolled, with a yad (pointer) highlighting text on the page.

The choice to end the Torah prematurely has proved to be a gift to Jews over millennia. The ending not only resonated with the experience of exilic and post-exilic authors, it also resonates with many of our own experiences of endings. While in literature the unspoken rule says that most promises end in fulfillment, quests end in finding and journeys end with arrival, this rule does not hold true in our lives. It is just, if not more likely that our own quests and journeys end, as the Torah’s does, in rich and messy circumstances that contain a mix of anticipation, accomplishment, grief and regret.

Talking about the beginning of Torah, Genesis 1:1-2:3 is also unconventional within its historical context. Most of the other creation stories from the cultures surrounding ancient Israel and Judah are very messy. In the Enuma Elish, which was composed in Babylonia probably in the mid-second millennium BCE, the world is created through a battle between the male god Marduk (the patron god of the Babylonian city-state) and the female god, Tiamat. Marduk wins the battle and creates the world by stabbing Tiamat in the belly and splitting her body to create the firmament and the Earth. The Tanakh bears witness to the presence of this kind of story in Ancient Israel and Judah as well (Psalms 89:9-11). In contrast to these cosmic battles, the creation story in Genesis 1 is remarkably calm and bloodless. In it, YHWH’s power is uncontested. YHWH has the incredible ability to bring the perfectly ordered world into being through speech alone.

In ancient literature, stories that begin with promise end with fulfillment. Stories structured as quests end with finding and stories structured as journeys end with arrival. The Torah boldly defies this pattern.

Again, historical context helps us understand this outlier creation story. During the period in which the texts of Torah were likely composed, most national gods were understood to have dominion over their territories and their peoples. If an army came and conquered a land and demolished the national shrine, this would have meant that the conquerors’ gods had defeated those of the conquered. After the defeat of Judah by the Babylonians and the destruction of YHWH’s temple in Jerusalem, some radical Judean thinkers asserted a new idea. YHWH was not only Judah’s national God. YHWH was also the God who created the entire universe and was the only God. The creation story at the start of Genesis reflects the bold contention that YHWH, as sole deity, has never been challenged by any other power.

Unlike the end of Deuteronomy, the beginning of Genesis defies both literary convention and human experience. Anyone who has ever witnessed a birth or wrestled a piece of art into being can testify to the messiness of that creation. In our experiences and in most of the cultural stories we tell, the birth of living creatures, works of art and nations are all messy stories involving blood, pain, conflicts and do-overs. The rest of the primordial stories in Genesis (Genesis 2:3-11:9) also fits this pattern. In those stories, YHWH creates the first human from mud and pulls the second from his rib, destroys much of creation in the flood and then begins again with Noah’s family. 

Hands shaping clay on a pottery wheel, crafting a pot.

Similarly, the biblical stories of the birth of the Israelite people in Egypt, and of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, are stories of conflict, intrigue and violence. Even within Torah and Tanakh, the elegant and ordered creation in Genesis 1 is an outlier.

Simchat Torah is among the few times when we read Genesis 1 without continuing on to those messier stories (the first of the triennial portions for Bereishit ends at 2:3 as well). The Simchat Torah ritual ensures that we will never be done with (or even take a break from) Torah. However, it offers us another gift as well. As we exit the potentially transformative tumultuousness of the holidays of Tishrei and prepare to enter the more mundane messiness of our regular lives, we linger in Genesis 1, and imagine and experience our ancestors’ dream of a world born in and marked by only peaceful order and goodness.

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