Sol calls the rabbi.
“Rabbi, I’m preparing for the end. I’m looking for the right rabbi to officiate at my funeral and deliver my eulogy. So I’m shopping around. Of course, it all depends on the price.”
Sol was wealthy, stingy, and tough.
“Rabbi, how much would you charge to give my eulogy?”
The rabbi says, “It depends on what you want. For $10,000, you get the deluxe package: a beautiful eulogy—and I cry.”
“$10,000?! That’s too much!”
“For $5,000, you get the standard package. I give a beautiful eulogy, say wonderful things about you—but no tears.”
“Rabbi, that’s still too expensive. What can I get for $500?”
The rabbi looks at him and says:
“For $500, I’ll tell the truth.”
It is one of the most fascinating questions in the Torah: Who wrote the final eight verses?
We know that Moses wrote the Torah. But the Torah ends by describing Moses’ own death:
“And Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there… And no one knows his burial place to this day.”
How could Moses write about his own death while he was still alive?
The Talmud addresses this question in Baba Batra,
Rabbi Yehudah offers a straightforward answer: Moses wrote the Torah until the final eight verses, and Joshua wrote those final verses after Moses died.
But Rabbi Shimon disagrees. How could the Torah be missing even one letter? Moses was commanded to complete the entire Torah.
So Rabbi Shimon gives us one of the most haunting statements in the Talmud:
“Until this point, G-d dictated, and Moses wrote. From this point on, G-d dictated, and Moses wrote with tears.”
Think about that.
Moses’ final act as the leader of the Jewish people was to write the story of his own death.
But what does it mean that he wrote it “with tears”?
The Yad Rameh offers a remarkable interpretation: the Talmud does not mean that Moses merely cried while writing. He wrote with tears instead of ink.
Most of the Torah was written in ink. The final eight verses were written in tears.
A Torah of ink became, at the very end, a Torah of tears.
According to this interpretation, Moses could write those words before his death because tears are not permanent like ink. Moses left the words; Joshua later completed them with ink after Moses' death.
It is a beautiful image: Moses' tears became the final ink of the Torah.
But the question remains.
Even if Moses wrote with tears, how could he truthfully write, “And Moses died there,” when he was still alive?
And that question leads us to something much deeper about Moses, and about what it means to leave behind a legacy.
The Baal Shem Tov offers another interpretation of Rabbi Shimon’s mysterious words: Moses wrote the final verses “with tears” — בדמע.
The Hebrew word דמע can also mean a mixture, something mixed and not yet ordered. In the Mishnah, meduma refers to something mixed and indistinguishable.
According to this interpretation, Moses did not write the final eight verses in the form we read today. G-d gave him the letters, but they were scrambled. Moses wrote them exactly as he received them, but they were not yet arranged into recognizable words and sentences.
Only after Moses died did Joshua arrange those letters into the words:
“And Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there…”
This reveals something profound about the Torah.
The Torah has two dimensions: the revealed Torah, the words, verses, and stories we read today, and a deeper, hidden dimension in which the letters exist beyond the divisions of words and sentences.
Nachmanides writes in his introduction to his Torah commentary that the entire Torah can be understood as a sequence of Divine names. The letters themselves contain dimensions of meaning far beyond the particular word divisions we see on the page.
Think about a five-letter word. Its letters can theoretically be rearranged in 120 different ways. Six letters can be arranged in 720 ways. Eight letters can be arranged in 5,040 ways.
Now imagine 304,805 letters—the letters of the entire Torah.
The possibilities are beyond comprehension.
This idea also helps explain the ancient teaching that the Torah preceded the creation of the world. How could that be, when the Torah tells stories that happened only after Creation?
Because Torah existed first in its hidden, Divine form. Only later was it organized into the readable text we know: the words, verses, chapters, and stories that Moses transmitted to Israel.
And perhaps this is exactly what happened with the final eight verses.
The Baal Shem Tov teaches that Moses received those verses in their pre-organized, concealed form. He wrote them בדמע—mixed, scrambled, beyond ordinary human reading.
Moses therefore did write the final eight verses.
And Joshua did write them.
Both opinions of the Talmud can be true.
Moses wrote the letters. Joshua revealed the words.
Moses left behind the mystery; Joshua gave that mystery its final form.
And perhaps that is the deepest message of all:
Sometimes we are given the letters of our story before we understand the words.
Moses could not yet see the meaning of his ending. But he trusted that, after him, the letters would fall into place. That is Torah, and that is life.
There is a profound message here for all of us.
Moses’ final gift to the Jewish people was the story of his own death. He buffered the news of his own loss and gave us one last teaching, bedema, with tears.
What was Moses teaching us?
The Talmud says, “Every gate has been locked except for the gates of tears.”
Moses stood at that gate at the very end of his life and taught us something extraordinary: there are moments when words are simply not enough.
After a lifetime of speaking face to face with G-d, after the promises, the miracles, the laws, the struggles, and the suffering, Moses' final lesson was how to stand before G-d completely vulnerable, raw, and real.
Why did Moses cry?
Were they tears of gratitude? Longing? Regret? Joy?
Was he mourning the fact that he would never enter the Land of Israel? Was he worried about what would happen to his people without him? Was he saying goodbye to the nation he had loved and shepherded for forty years?
Perhaps they were all of these things.
Moses had lived 120 years. Now his soul was about to leave this world. How do you put a moment like that into words? You don't.
Sometimes tears express what words cannot.
And isn't that true of our own lives?
The Baal Shem Tov taught that the Jewish people are a living Torah, and every Jew is one of its letters. Each of us contributes another chapter to the sacred story of our people.
Some chapters are written in ink. Others are written in tears.
And that becomes especially powerful today.
How do you describe your relationship with your mother or father? Your grandparents? A sibling? A close friend? A beloved child?
How do you describe the emptiness their death left behind?
How do you describe the last time you looked into their eyes? The last goodbye? The moment you watched the earth cover someone you loved?
There are no adequate words.
Moses permits us to use another language.
Tears are not weakness. They are not the language of the frail. They are the language of a human being standing before something too immense for the mind to fully comprehend.
Tears are what happens when we encounter the infinite, when we experience love, loss, gratitude, awe, joy, or pain that cannot be contained by words.
They are the language of surrender to the mystery of life and death.
Sometimes what we need is not an explanation.
We need to be held by G-d.
Like a mother holding her sobbing child, the child may not understand what is happening, but the child knows he/she is not alone.
That is why tears are not always tears of sadness.
They can be tears of awe. Tears of gratitude. Tears of joy. Tears of love.
The Zohar tells us that Rabbi Akiva would weep when studying Shir HaShirim, the Song of Songs. And those who witnessed the Rebbe speak about matters of deep spiritual emotion remember how often his words gave way to tears.
I remember Simchat Torah 1986, when the Rebbe spoke about Moses' love for the Jewish people. Before many people, he began to cry and continued for nearly half an hour.
Why? Because sometimes the deepest truths cannot be spoken. They can only be felt.
And here the two interpretations of bedema come together.
According to the Baal Shem Tov, Moses wrote the final verses in a hidden, scrambled form the infinite light of Torah before it was organized into words.
According to the other interpretation, Moses wrote with actual tears.
Perhaps these are not two different ideas at all.
The deepest Torah is the Torah we cannot fully articulate.
Moses spent his life teaching Torah with words. But at the very end, he taught us something beyond words.
He taught us that some truths are too luminous, too painful, too sacred to be written in ink.
They must be written in tears.
Every one of us has chapters like that in our personal Torah.
Tears of sorrow.
Tears of gratitude.
Tears of joy.
Tears of awe.
Tears of love.
And today, we remember that those tears are not something to hide.
They are part of our Torah.
They are the invisible ink of a heart that has loved deeply.
And perhaps Moses is teaching us one final lesson:
When words fail, tears can become prayer.
When explanations fail, tears can become faith.
And when we cannot understand the mystery of life and death, tears remind us that we are still held by G-d.
That was Moses’ final lesson.
And perhaps it is the most human lesson of all.
Chazak! Chazak! V’nitchazek!
Moses remains our teacher until the very end.
In his final words, he teaches us the power of tears, the mystery hidden within the letters of Torah, and the ever-changing text of our own lives.
And perhaps that is why the Torah ends not with an ending, but with a beginning.
We finish reading V’Zot HaBerachah, and immediately we return to Bereishit.
The last word is not really the last.
The Torah ends—and begins again.
Because there is always another chapter to write. Another lesson to learn. Another opportunity to discover new meaning in the ancient words of Torah and in the unfolding story of our own lives.
Chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek.
May we be strengthened by the Torah,
may we strengthen one another,
and may we have the courage to write the next chapter of our lives with faith, with love, and sometimes, when words are not enough, with tears.
The miracle that occurred yesterday in the sky is something that words cannot fully explain.
180 Israelis were in tremendous danger, and then, against all expectations, a miracle happened: every single passenger arrived safely in Israel—alive and unharmed.
How do we explain something like that?
Sometimes there are moments when the human mind has no words, when logic cannot capture the magnitude of what has happened.
There are moments that can only be described with tears.
Yesterday was one of those moments.
We can call it a miracle. We can call it Divine providence. We can simply stand in awe.
When one of the passengers was asked by a reporter, “What do you have to say?” she simply responded:
“Thank you, G-d, for all the good You do for us.”
What more can be said?
Whatever words we choose, the feeling is the same:
Thank You, Hashem.
180 people went into danger, and 180 people came home safely.
Sometimes the greatest miracles are too powerful to explain. They can only be felt, and sometimes, they can only be cried.
Shabbat Shalom and a Chag Sameach,
Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky