The End
Parashat V'Zot HaBerachah
Thank you to everyone for reading Midrashish for this year’s Torah cycle! I am so grateful for your engagement.
Over the next year, I will continue to offer weekly pieces of Midrash (albeit in shorter forms) as well as monthly pieces about a variety of topics. Later this month, I will share my first piece about how we might use a variety of unexpected frameworks in our religious decision making processes.
Please be in touch!
How do we end something? The inverse question of beginnings feels simpler. We see the blank page and throw something to see what lands. Of course, beginnings can feel tortuous when the blank page torments us, and we can’t figure out what goes there. But it is an opening that invites anything.
An ending asks us to stop our movement. To admit that something has reached its logical conclusion (to even assume that a logical conclusion exists). If the beginning offers infinity, the end forces us to stare finitude in its face. Whatever we have started, we will not be able to fit every thought in. And every thought that we have put in, we have to admit that it will never achieve perfection. We cannot tweak it endlessly. We just have to stop.
So now we confront the end of the Torah and the death of Moses. The question of how the Torah ends is settled (the gut punch conclusion that God will let Moses see the Promised Land but not step foot into it), but the question of endings and their meanings looms before us. What sense did the Rabbis make of this ending and how did they think we ought to navigate it?
Simply, the Rabbis reject the very notion of an ending and instead speak about continuity. In the midrash we will look at, they transform every ending into a beginning; thus, at the end of the Torah, they gift us something that does not end but continues: a blessing.
This midrash, like all midrashim in the opening chapters of Dvarim Rabbah, starts with a halachic question: what happens when someone is leading prayers and makes a mistake?
This is a profound place to start. Mistakes sit tenuously between beginnings and endings. When a mistake happens, we can see that mistake as the period to the sentence. The mistake has happened, the action stopped, end of story. We can imagine a world in which a mistake in prayer (especially performed by the leader) would mean a tainted offering. The mistake contaminates the entire prayer— it is worthless.
The alternative view is to perceive a mistake as an invitation to begin anew. The mistake is no period— at best, it is a comma and at worst, a semi-colon. A mistake invites beginnings. This is the route the Rabbis take:
If the person leading prayers makes a mistake, another takes his place. And where does he begin? From the beginning of the prayer where the previous leader had made their mistake. And where do we learn this? From the Patriarchs.
For the Rabbis, a certain retracing happen, but the mistake has not compromised the prayer. Rather, the mistake opens things up for a new beginning. The mistake is just a blip on the long trodden path. There is logic to this: if every mistake in prayer meant a complete return to the beginning and a full erasure of what transpired so far, two consequences would manifest. The first is that no one would ever wish to lead prayers. The responsibility would be too grave and the risk of humiliation too steep. The second is that one could conceivably be stuck in an infinite loop of prayer, where every mistake meant a return to the beginning, a kind of Groundhog’s Day.
But how do the actions of the Patriarchs affirm this idea?
The Rabbis notice an elegance in the construction of the Torah:
For each of them began [his prayer] at the place where his predecessor had left off.
The Rabbis create a chain that binds together the Patriarchs in an unending blessing-conversation:
How? Abraham blessed Isaac. From where do we know this? It is written, “And Abraham gave all that had unto Isaac,” (Genesis 25:5).
When Isaac was about to bless Jacob, he said, “I will begin from the place where my father left off-- my father left off at the word “gave,” I will begin with “give.” From where do we know this? It is written “May God give you,” (Genesis 27:28). And with what did Isaac conclude? With “calling” and it is said, “and Isaac called Jacob and blessed him,” (Genesis 28:1).
When Jacob was about to bless his sons, he said, “I too will begin with “calling,” as it is said, “And Jacob called his sons,” (Genesis 49:1). And with what did he conclude? With “and this is what their father said to them,” (Genesis 49:28).
When Moses was about to bless Israel, he said, “I therefore will begin with “and this is.” And as we read, “and this is the blessing,” (Deuteronomy 33:1). (Dvarim Rabbah 11:1)
The Rabbis see a link from Abraham to Isaac, Isaac to Jacob, Jacob to the tribes, the tribes to Moses.
Each of them offered a blessing to the next generation before death. The Rabbis erase death’s finality and rewrite it as just a chapter that precedes the next one to come.
What do we end with? We receive the blessing from Moses which began with Abraham. As we finish this cycle of reading the Torah, we walk away with a blessing to start over. In a few weeks, we will see the gifting from father to son begin again, and in no time at all, we will be back here where we ended. Our blessing is to be a part of this conversation, to finish the sentences of those who came before us, to quote them, and recreate their words for our own contexts.
Nothing ever really ends.