As a
child when I was learning to play the guitar (something I never really
accomplished) one of the songs that I could play was ‘The Windmills of Your
Mind’. This song made famous by the movie The Thomas Crown Affair is a
beautiful piece of music (when I’m not playing it) with great lyrics. The song
begins: ‘Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel. Never
ending or beginning, on an ever spinning reel’.
I
sometimes wonder if the composers were thinking about the Torah when they wrote
this song. On the festival of Simchat
Torah we conclude our Torah reading cycle, reading those final verses about
the death of Moses. And then moments later we begin our Torah reading cycle,
with the words Bereishit bara Elohim et
hashamayim ve’et haaretz – In the beginning God created the Heavens and the
Earth.
Simchat Torah is simultaneously a
festival of endings and beginnings. The move from the end of the book of Devarim (Deuteronomy) immediately to the
beginning of the book of Bereishit
(Genesis) ensures that we are always in the midst of reading Torah. Our reading
of the Torah never ends; as a community, we are always somewhere in the middle
of our people’s story, in that ever spinning reel (or scroll).
What
is striking in the midst of this is the way that our Torah ends. With the final
verses of Devarim we stand on the
brink of the Promised Land. Moses climbs a mountain and can literally see
across the Land of Israel. Our people are poised to finally conclude that
journey away from Egypt and through the wilderness. And then Moses dies, we
mourn for thirty days, Joshua becomes the new leader, and we turn back to the
very beginning and God’s creation of the world.
We
know that the story continues in the Book of Joshua with the full account of
our people’s conquest of the land. But with our return to the beginning at Simchat Torah and in terms of the text
itself we never get there, the story ends with our people outside of the
Promised Land, the journey incomplete. It would be like Dorothy never getting
back to Kansas, Ilsa not getting on the plane with Victor, or ET never going
home and the movie ending. But that is where the Torah ends.
For us,
on a deeper level, there is something so powerful about the fact that we never
reach to the Promised Land. Torah ends with us still in the wilderness, still
waiting to conclude our journey, still yearning for the land that lies ahead.
For
thousands of years this yearning was real for a Jewish people living in exile
and longing to return to the Land of Israel. I am sure that they drew comfort
from the fact that Moses and the Israelites who left Egypt never got to the
Promised Land. For them the Torah spoke to their personal experiences.
For
us, with a Jewish State reborn, we have that option of completing this journey,
which was just a dream for previous generations. But maybe for us the Promised
Land is not so much a geographic destination as a spiritual aspiration. We hope
and pray for a world where there is justice, a world where all are treated
equally, a world where everyone is at peace. And for this Promised Land we
remain on that journey, yearning to make it a reality.
We
cannot reach the Promised Land, but we are always on a journey towards it. We
may (and almost certainly will) end up like Moses and that generation of
Israelites who were unable to get there, but nonetheless they never gave up
hope, they never stopped moving forward. The Torah is incomplete, and it
therefore calls to us to help write those final verses, and to make the
Promised Land a reality.
On Simchat Torah as we end our story, we
will have two options of where to go. In the Torah cycle we will return to the
very beginning of the story and God’s creation of the world, in the Haftarah
reading we will move forward with the Book of Joshua. But for us, we can add a
third option, we can continue the work of not just reaching the Promised Land,
but of making the world into the Promised Land, creating a world which is
finally worthy of this honored title.
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