Sh’mini Atzeret/Simhat Torah/V’zot Ha-b’rakhah (5780 – 2019)
Deuteronomy 33:1–34:12
The beginning of the new year is marked with so many holy days. Now we are reaching their end, the end of the beginning. The annual cycle of Torah portions, begun last year also comes to an end, not at the end of the last year, but at the beginning of this new year. And then we begin once more. We are meant to pay attention to endings and beginnings and to consider how each may also be its opposite.
The Torah ends with three final verses devoted to declaring the unique greatness of Moses. But their order seems a bit anticlimactic. The first verse tells us that only Moses, alone among all the prophets, merited having absolute intimacy with God. The second verse celebrates the great miracles he wrought in Egypt so as to liberate us from that house of bondage. Somehow, though, these great miracles don’t quite seem to attain to the heights of the first verse. The third and final verse seems even more disappointing. It seems to move into vague generalities and ends there – “and for all the strong hand and for all the great awe that Moses performed before the eyes of all Israel.” (Deut. 34:12) To what mighty and awesome acts is the Torah referring? Can they really speak to Moses’ uniqueness? Can they really serve to bring the Torah to a fitting end?
Rashi, quotes an astounding midrash: This verse saves the best for last. The greatest thing we should recall about Moses is “that his heart inspired him to break the Tablets before their [Israel’s] eyes […] and the Holy Blessed One ’s Mind agreed with his.” Thus, Moses greatest act, the one chosen by the Torah as its final word about him, was his audacious decision to smash the Tablets given to him by God on Mount Sinai, smashing them after the Israelites sinned by dancing before the Golden Calf. At the moment, when the relationship between God and Israel had apparently come to an end, Moses’ violent act made it possible for the covenant to start again. The Torah ends with an awestruck remembrance of its own public destruction by the “mighty hand” – not of God in Egypt, but – of Moses at the foot of Mount Sinai. It is this act that gives the Torah her own most fitting sense of an ending, for only such an ending could grant the Torah the possibility of living on, of beginning once again.
In Egypt Moses performed the wonders assigned to him by God. But when Moses smashed the Tablets he performed a wonder that was impossible for God alone to perform. One early Hasidic master explained that, by this act of breaking the Tablets, Moses “introduced the quality of brokenness into the Torah.” (Or Yitzhaq, Ki Tissa, R. Yitzhaq of Radvil, c. 1744 – 1835) Moses was unique to the extent that not even God could do what Moses did, for God could not put brokenness into the Torah. Only a human being could do that, one whose unique intimacy with the Divine was perfect and complete. Only that human being could have the courage to introduce brokenness into the Torah,
It is only because the Holy Blessed One accepted changing the Torah from one of unsustainable perfection to one of accessible brokenness that we, in our finitude and guaranteed fallibility, are able to start anew. It is only because Moses was furiously inspired to throw down the Torah that we are now able to dance with her and hold her tightly to our breakable hearts.
Shabbat Shalom v’Hag Same`ah,
Rabbi David Greenstein
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Image(s): Courtesy “Women of the Wall”
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