Bob Smith was sick of his job and was determined to find work elsewhere. He was a truthful man, never uttered a lie, but he had one vice: he never showed up on time to his job.
So no matter how hard he tried, his reputation as someone who was not dedicated to the job, followed him around. One day the phone rang at his office. Although Bob did not usually pick up the phone, he picked it up and said hello. “Hi” said the man on the line, “I have an unusual question to ask you, I’m looking into a fellow Bob Smith for a position in my company. Do you know this fellow?”
“Sure I know him”, responded Bob with a smile.
“Tell me,” asked the man. “Is he consistent with his work? Does he always show up on time?”
Oy. What should he say? He never said a lie. But if he says the truth, his chances to get this job are null.
So he said this: “Well I’ll be honest with you,” Bob replied, “I’m not so consistent myself, but whenever I’m here he’s here!”
On Simchat Torah, we complete the entire Torah. The Torah comes to its completion with the following verses:
And Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord. And He buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, but no man knows his grave till this day. And Moses was 120 years old when he died; his eye was not dim, nor his natural force abated. And the people of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days…
And there has not arisen since in Israel a prophet like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face… in the sight of all Israel.
I can’t help but find myself in tears each year as these final verses of the entire Torah are read. For almost a whole year we lived with Moses each and every Shabbat. Moses is the central figure in the Torah. We watched his birth, his rescue, in the hands of the Pharaoh’s daughter, his being raised in the most unlikely of places in the palace of Pharaoh. We followed his courage, caring, and display of leadership, and how he stands up to the Super Power of the time, liberating a nation from bondage. We crossed the Red Sea with him and we escorted him for forty years in the wilderness, as he led his beloved people through every crisis.
And now, this glorious life—one that never was and never would be again—comes to an end. All in one simple verse, almost deceiving in its simplicity: And Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord.
And I will tell you about someone else who cried while learning these verse.
It would be quite an unusual to read an autobiography that describes the author's own death and burial; by the time the author has been buried, he has probably stopped writing... The Chumash, however, defies this premise: while not an autobiography, it was transcribed by one of its major protagonists, Moses, who was nonetheless apparently able to record his own passing and then continue writing for seven more verses, eulogizing himself.
The Talmud addresses this anomaly and records:
Rabbi Shimon says, G-d spoke and Moshe wrote the words, in the expression of the Talmud, “bedama,” “with tears.”
Moshe was crying, understandably, while receiving and transcribing the prophecy of his impending death and his own eulogy.
Some commentators explain the Talmud differently. “Moses wrote the words with tears” means that these words were not written with ink but with tears. As Moses was writing these verses, he was crying. And he wrote these letters with his tears. Is it a wonder that these final verses of Torah trigger such deep emotion?
But then, something so strange happens.
As we complete the Torah, we start to dance and dance. The entire tradition of dancing “hakafot” on Simchat Torah is to celebrate the completion of the Torah. But it seems counter-intuitive. Moses’ death and burial was the end of the life of the greatest prophet, teacher, and leader who ever lived it spelled the end of the most glorious era of Jewish history. Moses himself wept when he wrote these verses. These verses were written not in ink, but in tears. Is it even appropriate to dance at this moment?
But there is a reason to dance. Moses passed away, but the Torah he gave us remained, continuing to invigorate his people for millennia, through thick and thin, through tranquil and turbulent times, through all of their journeys and voyages, for 3300 years. The same exact Torah Moses wrote and bequeathed to the people of Israel still sustains us, empowers us and guides us.
We were reminded of this just a few years ago an incredible cutting-edge technology allowed archaeologists to finally read the contents of a burned 2000-year-old scroll found near the Dead Sea in 1970.
It is an amazing story. The scroll was first discovered in 1970 when archaeologists were working near Ein Gedi, a natural spring oasis on the shore of the Dead Sea. They discovered the remains of a Jewish community dating back to eighth century BCE, that in middle of the First Temple era.
The small city had thrived until 600 CE when it was destroyed and the buildings burned. In the remains of the ark of the synagogue, the archaeologists found a parchment rolled up but entirely burned, so damaged by a fire that it was impossible to unroll it for inspection without the charred parchment crumbling into ashes.
The scroll was faithfully stored away by the Israel Antiquities Authority with little hope of ever being able to study what was written on them.
Forty years later, in 2015, computer scientists at the University of Kentucky developed software for unraveling damaged and delicate texts. Originally designed for deciphering Roman scrolls, the technique is even more successful with ancient Jewish texts written with ink containing a metal element that shows up more clearly on the X-ray scans.
The researchers scanned 100 sections from the charred remains of the Ein Gedi scroll, which had been rolled five times. Incredibly, they were able to create a digital image of the scroll and “unroll” the image without even touching it, so it would not crumble into ashes. The scan revealed two columns of writing, composed of 35 lines, 18 of which were preserved while the other 17 had to be digitally reconstructed.
The new technology, called ‘virtual unwrapping,’ is a complicated and difficult process based on the technology used in medical CT scans, allowing scientists to read the Ein Gedi Scroll, a charred, ancient parchment discovered in an ancient destroyed synagogue on the shores of the Dead Sea more than forty years ago which has sat on a shelf, untouchable and indecipherable, ever since.
Studies based on historical handwriting placed it at around the first century CE, the century when the Second Temple still existed. This means they were holding onto the earliest Torah scroll to ever be found in a synagogue, in a Holy Ark.
When the researchers saw the first results, it made for a startling revelation: all of the words and paragraph breaks were absolutely identical to the Torah text still used today, in 2018.
“This is quite amazing for us. In 2,000 years, this text has not changed,” Emmanuel Tov, a participant in the study from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told the Times of Israel, “It can’t be coincidental that the synagogue in Ein Gedi that was burned in the sixth century housed an early scroll whose text was completely identical with medieval texts. The same central stream of Judaism that used this Levitical scroll in one of the early centuries of our era was to continue using it until the late Middle Ages when printing was invented.”
Until 1947, the oldest known Biblical texts dated only to the tenth century. The Dead Sea Scrolls, written in approximately the third century BCE, provided a rare and exciting glimpse into even earlier ancient Jewish texts. But these texts were buried in caves and were indeed different than the texts we have. Now, the Ein Gedi scroll is filling out that picture and confirming the authenticity of present-day texts.
Of course, none of this was surprising to us. Jewish scribal tradition ensures that discrepancies in reproduction do not occur. Holy texts are a hand-copied letter for letter from accepted originals. Strict guidelines are given for writing techniques, shapes of letters, and breaks in the text, striving to maintain an unbroken chain from Sinai. The latest discovery is the closest Jews have yet come to proof to secular scientists that the chain has remained fully intact. There is not even A SINGLE LETTER CHANGED between our Torah’s todays and that Torah scroll from 2000 years ago.
And that is why we dance on Simchat Torah when we complete reading the Torah.
Moses died. But did he really die and fade away into a distant past? No! Here we are holding on to the Torah—the EXACT SAME TORAH that Moses wrote, dictated by G-d, and gave to the Jewish people. This Torah has been copied, with tender, love, and care, by each generation, letter by letter, word by word, portion by portion. We studied it, we practiced it, we preserved it, we lived it, we breathed it, we taught it to our children, we created our identity around it, and it has preserved us throughout.
Moses died—but the Torah did not. Which means that Moses also lives on.
Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach,
Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky
Tom Peacock wrote...