I love the way that Simchat Torah marks the passage of time, how it marks the transition from the end of the Torah right back to the beginning again. And there’s a beautiful way that the theme of blessing weaves its way through this transition.
As we get closer to the end of the Torah, Moshe warns the people of Israel about their future. He makes sure they are aware of their own shortcomings and the challenges that await them. But the tenor and theme of Moshe’s message changes as he nears his death, at the very end of the Torah. Instead of offering critique, Moshe opens the last parsha of the Torah, what we read on Simchat Torah, with “V’zot Habracha asher berakh Moshe ish haElohim et B’nai Yisrael lifnei moto” (Devarim 33:1) - This is the blessing with which Moses, God’s agent, blessed the Children of Israel before he died. Rashi taught that these words were uttered just moments before his death.
Moshe did want to critique the people, but he also wanted to leave them on a positive note, with love and with compassion, with blessing. He blesses each tribe, uniquely, with a powerful legacy of who they will be for the people of Israel in the future.
And the Torah, just as it ends with blessing, also holds blessing at its beginning, as a part of creation. Moments after we conclude the reading of the Torah, we begin again with Bereshit, with the seven days of Creation. On the fifth day, God created “swarms of living creatures,” birds in the sky and fish in the sea. And after creating them, the Torah says “God blessed them, saying, ‘be fertile and increase, fill the waters in the sea, and let the birds increase on the earth.’”
There is blessing at the very end, and there is blessing at the very beginning. We read them right after one another; blessing is woven throughout the transition as we conclude and start again. My teacher Rabbi Matt Berkowitz wrote, “Moses closes with giving his people hope in the future; and God opens by blessing creation with even more life.” These final moments of the Torah couldn’t have been easy for the people of Israel, and yet we are reminded that they are given hope for the future. The transitions of life can be challenging, inherently, as one chapter concludes. And there is that liminal space, the threshold in between, the space after we have ended something but perhaps before we have begun another. In that gap, the Torah reminds us, there is blessing as a connector. It is woven through.
When we are making our way through transitions, whatever they are, I pray that we, too, are blessed, that we feel the power of blessing, and that we feel a sense of hope in the future, in the next chapter, whatever it may bring.
Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Sarit
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