It seems just yesterday that we were eating honey cake and fruits and wishing each other a sweet new year – or maybe we were calling out to the Divine on our Day of Atonement, pouring out our hearts? Perhaps we were looking up at the purple glow of the light-polluted London nighttime in a makeshift hut with our loved ones, or dancing with the Torah. It’s always difficult to keep things in order around this time of year. In any case we can all agree it has been a pretty packed few weeks, and if that wasn’t enough we’ve got to start reading it all again.
The parashah this week is B’reishit, “when [God] began to [create]”. It’s the beginning of the Torah, the start of our liturgical year. If we were lucky we’ve already heard both the end of Torah and the beginning of it read together. It’s quite a strange way to read a book. Rabbi Eiran Davis, who I had the privilege of learning from, says that our society reads stories linearly with a beginning and a middle and an end. Sometimes, if a book is particularly formally radical, the beginning could be somewhere near the end and so on. Yet, it still ends when we read the last page. Our socially conditioned linearity informs the way we read all text, and this is to the detriment of texts which were not formed in such a society. The Torah is one such text. It breaks this learnt linearity. Instead of finishing, we stitch the end and the start together. There is literally no end to the story. We keep spinning and circling around and around. It is a scroll, after all.
Our endless cycle of reading interrupts our understanding of text. It breaks through our usual framework, and leaves us open to something new. What happens after Moshe is buried? Well, I just heard in synagogue that the Creator begins creation:
“…and never again arose a mouthpiece like Moshe, who CAUSE knew face-to-face; for all the signals and signs that CAUSE sent him to do in the land of Egypt against Pharaoh and his servants and his whole country, and for all the firm power and for all the great awesomeness that Moshe did before the eyes of all Israel. When God began to create the heavens and the earth…” (Deut. 34:10-12, Gen. 1:1)
This form of reading is not a mistake. It is an invitation to start a new relationship with our tradition. We do not need to do as Rabbi Zeira did, fasting for one hundred days to forget, so that his knowledge of the Torah of Eretz Yisrael would be fresh and untainted with past knowledge (Bava Metzia 85a). In fact, we start our relationship by dancing. We are given a chance to jump right in to a new story, which is also a very old story, and which may not be the same story as before. In this new story, anything can happen. It’s not just our story, it’s the story of everything: and what a blessing it is to have a part in starting that story before we were even created. As we speak the words that were spoken to form the essence of everything, we ourselves are both party to and part of that act of creation.
This Jewish type of reading is most certainly not a re-reading of a text we’ve read before. It is a continuous unfurling of meaning, reflecting what our Sages teach us in Sh’mot Rabba 28:6 that “each one [all the Jews who were not present at Sinai] receives [the Torah that] is for them.”. As we read through our sacred text, we encounter our ancestors for the first time. We feel the weight of their decisions, we wonder what will happen next. What will become of Ya’akov and his twin, Eisav? How does Sarah feel as her son goes off to a mountain with his father? Will Yosef survive in the dungeon of the Pharaoh? How will we apply these laws Moshe keeps handing down to us? Our new encounter changes the way we view and understand our text. Things we may have considered trivial before become central to our understanding. A phrase, a word, or even a letter, unlocks a whole new vista of meaning. What will happen next? Let us read on and see.
It’s been pointed out by people, often on Tik Tok, that the Hebrew could well be translated as “in a beginning”: the vowel mark underneath the bet is a shewa and not a patach, as it would be if the word was definite. They have a point, it’s a difficult phrase to translate from the Hebrew. Even Rashi felt the need to tell us that “this verse here cries out to be drashed!” (Rashi on B’reishit 1:1). Perhaps the reason for this linguistic ambiguity at the very ‘start’ of our Torah is a key to how we learn to read it. On Simchat Torah we stitch the end and the beginning together. In this way, we have never re-read the Torah at all. We’ve simply continued reading it. In a beginning, we open the scroll for the first and last time and continue reading… until next year!
Shamaya Carvajal, LBC rabbinical student
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.