From the intensity of Yom Kippur — I hope it was meaningful for those who observe it — this Shabbat is the final time we read the regular weekly Torah portion without a festival. Here is what I’ll say about that in services tomorrow, a version of my annual ode to this incredible syndicated serial and the people who experience it together. Shabbat Shalom, and soon as Chag Sameach, a joyful Sukkot festival.
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This is the final Shabbat of the weekly cycle of reading Torah. It’s into the new year already, and we have another Shabbat before Simchat Torah but that’s dedicated to Sukkot, and the final parasha of the Torah we don’t actually read on a Shabbat; we read the last chapters of the Torah on Simchat Torah. So this is the last time we have parashat hashuvua before we go back to the beginning.
It is the last regular episode you could say, before the special series finale, in this longest continuously running syndicated performance of any kind of work of literature and drama and music, that I know of!
We don’t know exactly when the practice of doing this in a year was widespread. In the early centuries of the common era it was done in three or three-plus years in Eretz Yisrael, and in a year in Babylonia. We know there was in that period of time among some circles of Sages and some communities a practice of a weekly synagogue reading and then a personal practice known as shnyaim mikra v’echad targum, which means read the text twice and a translation once. That has come to be taken as an at home, on your own time reading of the text twice and a commentary once, like that of Rashi, and I think the second reading is the one with the congregation on Shabbat. My teacher Rabbi Joe Lukinsky z”l thought that we should read and digest one aliyah of the Torah every single day during the week, and see how it struck us. The idea is sort of the opposite of a Dvar Torah, which is to make the Torah relevant to today; the idea Joe taught us was to figure out how to make ourselves relevant to the Torah of the day or of the week.
And I want to linger on this idea, or this kind of idea, which is again different from how we usually study Torah which is up close, lovingly with a single word or phrase, up close with a verse or even a single story.
In the synagogue, together over a year, Torah is other things. It’s is this sweeping story that starts from nothingness or chaos, and ends with a people who are very real, very organized at least in theory, with a road map that’s both geographical and social – the places they are going to live and how they are supposed to live there. In between, we travel the earth, from a garden in perhaps Mesopotamia to a mountain in perhaps Asia Minor, and back again and then to Israel, and then to Egypt and the way back – and this is just our main characters, while we learn of others who head in all directions into the world.
We have this God whose description was brand new in the world when the Torah first was revealed– a divinity who peacefully organizes all the matter and energy into a universe and species, who creates a unique being in the Divine image to parallel the Divine’s own Echad-ness/One-ness, and then has to deal with how a three-dimensional creature can imitate the infinite dimensions of the Divine. A God who, brand new in the world when the Torah first was revealed, takes the side of the weakest, the smallest, the most exiled and oppressed, and makes them the channel through which everything important will emerge into the rest of the world.
And it’s conveyed in, if not infinite ways, a whole lot of idioms, because no one way will do it. We think we have a scroll neatly written and easy to roll up – but actually we have a hard-to-corall bunch of stories and laws, families and kings, wars and resolutions, recipes and humor, music and whispers, dramatic rescues and revelations, disappointments and derailments, death and life, switching off abruptly from one thing to the other.
There is an omniscient narrator, who is not Moshe and who is not God, though the voice seems to know both of them. We know through all of it that God endures. And Moshe, this week we get ready to say goodbye, to the leader who over history has become Moshe Rabbenu, Moshe our teacher. He is the most prominent human character in the Bible, he has the most to convey, and we ponder what it means that he says all he has to say, and he doesn’t reach the promised land, and no one can go visit where he is buried – it is only the Torah itself that is his monument, his memento.
And then there is us. The Torah is the Monopoly board we go around and around, but my description of what we pass each time around only hints at the riches that come from each property, so to speak, each of us finding something in it to own, to build a house on for ourselves or a hotel for hospitality to others. We don’t go around separately, we don’t roll the dice – we each go square by square, and each time around we collect our spiritual $200, we make note how much richer we are as we prepare to begin again. Each time we reach Park Place and Boardwalk and think we have it all, we start again with Mediterranean, how fitting, and Baltic – with what is easier to obtain, the basic foundation and structure – order from chaos, image of God, fitting helper, sustaining garden – easy, and yet we don’t quite ever stay there, we move around before we’re ready, and the Torah is there behind us as we do. As someone said, we go through the Torah, and we hope the Torah goes through us.
So let us bask in this final episode of our weekly serial, and in the fact that we experienced it together – many us read it out, sang it out, all of us talked about it at the water cooler of life. That’s what makes Torah sweet, what makes it not only a map of the world but a map of our souls and the warm blanket around us. As we sing — Yisrael v’oraita, chad hu – the Jewish people and the Torah are one. Thank you for another cycle of Torah, in all these dimensions, and here’s to another time around together.
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