CHAZAK CHAZAK VENITCHAZEK!

Sol calls the Rabbi. “Rabbi, I am preparing for the end. I am searching for the right rabbi to officiate at my funeral and give the eulogy. So, I am shopping around for the right one. It all depends, of course, on the price.

Sol was wealthy but stingy, and a tough guy.

“Rabbi, how much would you charge to do my eulogy?” The Rabbi responds: Depends on what you want. If you want a super deluxe package, it costs $10,000.

For that, you get a beautiful eulogy, during which I cry. For $5000 you can get a deluxe package. I give a beautiful eulogy, I say beautiful things about you, but no tears.

Rabbi! That’s too expensive. What can I get for 500 bucks?  “For 500 dollars,” says the rabbi, “I will say the truth.”

It is a fascinating question. Who wrote the final eight verses of the Torah? Our tradition maintains that Moses wrote the Torah. But its last verses describe his death and burial?!

This is how the Torah concludes:

And there was no other prophet who arose in Israel like Moses, whom G-d knew face to face, as manifested by all the signs and wonders, that G-d had sent him to perform in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and all his servants, and to all his land, and all the strong hand, and all the great awe, that Moses performed before the eyes of all Israel.

How, asks the Talmud, can a living Moses write the words “and Moses died there…”?

Rabbi Yehudah says that the last eight verses, written after Moses’ death, were indeed written by his disciple and successor, Joshua.

Rabbi Shimon disagrees. The entire Torah was written by Moses. “What happened was that up to this point, G-d dictated and Moses repeated each word and wrote it down; from this point and on (the final 8 verses of Torah), G-d dictated, and Moses wrote with tears." He recorded his own end.

But how does Rabbi Shimon answer the question? If Moses was alive, how can he write the words “and Moses died?” if it is not true? How does this get answered by saying that G-d dictated the final verses of the Torah and Moses wrote them with tears?

One of the most moving interpretations comes from the Baal Shem Tov. The Talmud does not mean that Moses wrote these verses while he was crying; it means that he wrote them with tears, instead of ink.

Most of the Torah was a Torah of ink; the final verses, the last words Moses wrote, constituted a Torah of tears.

Moses wrote a jumble of letters, not yet intelligible. The final verses were dictated to Moshe as scrambled letters and were thus indecipherable. It was only after his death that Joshua had the letters fall into their rightful place.

The Torah contains two dimensions: the revealed one, and the esoteric one. The revealed Torah is the one we have before us today. But the very same text of Torah also possesses a very different format, in which all the letters are connected, with no word or line breaks. 

According to this reading of Torah, the very text we have today can be read in endless different ways, as it is not defined by the word break, we know today.  Do you know how many ways you can read a word consisting of five letters reconfiguring the letters? 120 ways! Six letters?  In 720 ways. 8 letters? 5040 ways!

So, you know in how many ways you can read 304,805 letters (the number of letters in the Torah?) infinite ways!

In fact, the Bible Codes which have become popular in the last few decades, employ this exact method. The Bible codes will point to the events of 9-11, or the Holocaust, the Black Death, or the fall of Communism, by highlighting in a particular section a few words, for example, read backward, spelling out the year, name, and location of a particular event.

This explains how the Torah could have preceded the creation of the world, as the sages teach. This seems impossible because most of the Torah is comprised of stories that occurred after creation! How can you write about the Tree of Knowledge, or the Exodus of Egypt, when the Jews were not even there yet? Yet, it all depends on which dimension of the Torah you are addressing. The esoteric dimension of the Torah was present pre-creation of the universe. The revealed and organized text of the Torah took shape as Moses formatted its readable and logical text structure, with the words, verses, and sections familiar to us to this very day.

That is, says the Baal Shem Tov, the entire Torah besides the last 8 verses! In those verses, “G-d said them, and Moses wrote them in a mixed-up way.” These final verses were given to him in the pre-creation format. They retained their pristine esoteric jumble. He wrote them down, but they did not read yet the way they read now: “And Moses died…”

So, in truth, the two opinions in the Talmud are not arguing. Moses did indeed write the final eight verses; yet these verses he wrote in the “esoteric” realm—in which the words did not have their present configuration. The text was the same, but the letters were confused and mixed up. It fell to Joshua to form the actual words that described his master’s death for all the subsequent generations to read and mourn.

There is a profound message here for all of us.

Moses' final gift to the people was this complex rendering of his own death. Buffering the news of his own loss, he offered them one last teaching. What was it?

To those who say that Moses cried his way through to the end, it seems that Moshe left an important legacy of tears. After all the talk "face to face," the miracles, the greatest lesson of all that Moshe models is how to cry with G-d, how to render oneself raw, vulnerable, and real.

The Talmud states: “Every gate has been locked except for the gates of tears.” Standing at that gate, Moses teaches us in his final moments that no matter where one finds oneself; no matter how despairing one might feel; no matter how close one lies to the end, physically or mentally, G-d hears and absorbs the tears of those who call to Him.

Why did Moses weep when he wrote those final verses? When Moses wrote the last verses of his story with his tears, what was he feeling? Were they tears of gratitude, or of longing? Tears of regret, or tears of joy? Was he overcome by anguish at the prospect of his own demise, and his inability to enter the land of Israel? Or, maybe, it was the pain he felt saying good bye to his beloved people? Writing these words, made his departure concrete, and the great lover of Israel, their faithful shepherd for 40 years, the man who turned them into a people, and led them through the wilderness, could not stop the flow of tears when it was time to say the last good bye?

He lived for 120 years; now his soul was about to depart. How do you put that into words? You don’t! Tears capture the truth and depth of the moment, far more than any word can.

Is this not true for each of our lives? The Baal Shem Tov said that the Jewish people are a living Torah, and every Jew is one of its letters. Each of us adds another chapter to the sacred Scroll of Jewish history.

Moses gave us the formula. He taught us that some verses of our life, some verses of our Torah, and some verses of our journey, must be written not with ink, but with tears. Sometimes, tears are the only fair language to capture the sheer magnitude, enormity, depth, and mystery of the moment.

Tears are not for the frail, weak and the children among us. No. they are the language of our internal child who cannot make sense of the magnitude of life and love and pain! It was the language of Moses when he came face to face with the greatest mystery of all: the transition from this world to the next, and the need to say good bye to a world and a people you lived.

 Tears embody the language of surrender to the ineffable, the indescribable, the indefinable. It is the language of intimacy with the infinite mystery of life and death, when what we need are not explanations, but to be held by G-d in His arms, as a mother holds her sobbing baby and the infant feels comforted even if it understands nothing.

These are not always tears of sadness; they are often tears stemming from an awareness of the infinite grandness of the moment. Rabbi Akiva, says the Zohar, would weep when learning the Song of Songs. I recall how the Rebbe would so often speak of deep emotion and break down weeping. Once, in Simchat Torah 1986, he spoke of Moses’ love to the Jewish people and he cried for 30 minutes in front of 17,000 people, sobbing uncontrollably.

There are chapters in everyone's Torah of lived human experience that are written with tears—tears of sorrow, tears of gratitude, and tears of facing the infinite mystery, pain, and joy of life.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe would receive some 2000 letters a day, and he always opened each envelope by himself, not allowing his secretaries to open the letters, due to their confidential nature.

Do you know what it’s like to open 2000 letters a day? So, Rabbi Zalman Chanin once purchased for the Rebbe an electric envelope opener, to make the job easier. But the Rebbe returned it, saying, it made too much noise. Chanin went and with great effort found an electric opener which was silent. He sent it to the Rebbe, but the Rebbe returned that one too.

The Rebbe explained:

Different people seal their envelopes, containing their letters, in different ways. Some seal them with saliva, others with glue, or scotch tape. But there are those, said the Rebbe, who seal their envelope with their tears…

How can I open with a machine that which a Jew sealed with his tears?

You see, a machine would not pick up on the tears, but when I open the letter with my hands I can detect and absorb the tears.

Moshe remains a teacher until the very end, showing us all the power of tears, and the dynamic nature of the text of Torah and the text of life. From this ending that is not an ending, we may now return to the beginning of the Torah to start all over again. Chazak chazak ve'nitchazeck.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach,

Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky