RESHUT FOR THE ḤATAN TORAH The custom of calling up the Ḥatan Torah with an elaborate invocation is first found in the Maḥzor Vitry, written by a student of Rashi in eleventh century France. In those days it was the custom to call bridegrooms to the Torah with a similar invocation, on the Shabbat after their wedding. Prefacing a religious act – as we do, for example, in the Grace after Meals if three men are present – with a request for reshut, permission, is a formal acknowledgment of the (often legally constituted) authority under which the act is taking place. Permission would be asked, first of God, then of the Torah, then of the local religious authorities, then of the congregation. This gave the act, in this case, the blessing, its gravitas as an official honor, one of the highest the community could bestow.

אַשְׁרֶֽיךָ יִשְׂרָאֵל Happy are you, Israel. Moses’ last words to the people he had led from slavery to freedom, through the wilderness, to the brink of the Promised Land. His message is moving and clear: If the people stay faithful to God, they will be safe from their enemies, and need have no fear. The real challenge will not be military but spiritual. So it was, so it is, so it will always be: Israel is summoned to be a small nation, made great not by its own power, but by its fidelity to a Power greater than itself, larger than humankind, beyond the hazards of history and the winds of time. THE DEATH OF MOSES One of the most poignant moments in religious history. Moses, who had spent forty years leading the Israelites to the Promised Land, is told that he will not himself enter it: he will merely see it from afar. Thus he became the symbol both of the possibilities of a human life and of its limits. “It is not for you to complete the task,” said Rabbi Tarfon, “but neither are you free to stand aside from it” (Avot 2:21). For each of us there is a Jordan we will not cross, a destination we will not reach, a fulfillment we will not see. Hence the importance, in Judaism, of handing the tradition on across the generations – through our children, as in the case of Aaron, or our disciples, as in the case of Moses.

TORAH READING FOR ḤATAN BERESHIT This act of beginning the Torah reading anew exemplifies one of the most remarkable principles of Judaism: the idea of perpetual study. In this unique point of the Jewish year, we make the transition from the end of the Torah to a new beginning. The last letter of the Torah is the lamed of Yisrael, the first is the beit of Bereshit. When we join the end of the Torah to the beginning, the connection spells the word Lev, “heart.” So long as the Jewish people never stops studying, the Jewish heart will never stop beating. “You gave us a Torah of truth, thereby planting everlasting life in our midst,” says the blessing after the reading of the Torah. The word of the Eternal is, this side of Heaven, our one taste of eternity.

IN THE BEGINNING This majestic opening sets out, for the first time, principles that were not only to shape Judaism, but eventually also to transform the imagination of the West. Genesis 1 represents the emancipation of the human understanding of the universe from mystery, magic and myth. All ancient religions had creation myths to explain why the world is as it is. Always they involved a multiplicity of gods, fighting and struggling among themselves for dominance. The opening chapter of the Torah represents a decisive break from that entire mindset. There is only one God, and it is His creative will alone that made the universe as it is. As sociologist Max Weber pointed out, the roots of Western rationality lie here. However, the point of Genesis 1 is not to tell us how the world came into being. It is neither science nor proto-science. We see this in the sheer brevity of the account, a mere thirty-four verses, less than a tenth of the space the Torah dedicates to the other creative act it describes, namely the Israelites’ construction of the Sanctuary (Ex. 25–40). The Torah is telling us not how God created the world, but that God created the world. It did not merely happen. Behind the emergent order of the universe is a God who loves creativity and order. The creation narrative is not a substitute for science, but rather the articu­lation of fundamental moral principles that govern our understanding of the universe and our place within it. The first is that the world is good – the word chimes like a motif, no less than seven times. This in itself is a radical rejection of the view, widespread in the ancient world, and to some extent throughout history, that the physical world is bad, the arena of pain, suffering and injustice, from which we are liberated only by death and life-after- death. Then there is the deep structure of the text itself. As modern commentators have noted, the pattern of seven – a universe created in seven days – lies not only on the surface, but is also replicated in less obvious ways throughout. So, for example, there are seven words in the first verse, fourteen in the second, thirty-five in the closing three verses describing the seventh day. The word Elokim, “God,” appears thirty-five times, eretz, “earth,” twenty-one times, and the passage as a whole contains 469 (7×67) words. There is an intimation here that the universe has a precisely calibrated mathematical structure at every level, from the microscopic to the cosmological. The text is also designed to show that creation has an underlying order. For the first three days, God establishes a series of distinct domains from the undifferentiated void: On the first day, He separates light from darkness and day from night, on the second, the upper and lower waters, on the third, sea from dry land. For the next three days God furnishes each of the domains with the appropriate objects and life-forms: On the fourth day, the sun, moon and stars, on the fifth, birds and fish, on the sixth, animals and humankind. The key verb, appearing five times, is ב-ד-ל, meaning “to distinguish, demarcate, separate.” This will eventually become a key word relating to the priests: they will be charged with distinguishing between pure and impure, holy and mundane. There is a sacred ontology, a God-given structure to the universe whose integrity we are commanded to respect and preserve. Then there is the single most transformative sentence in the religious history of humankind: “Let Us make man, in Our image, Our likeness.” What is revolutionary about this idea is not that a human being could be in the image of God. That belief was commonplace in the ancient world: it is what rulers, emperors, pharaohs, and kings were imagined to be, a child of the gods or their chief intermediary. What was unprecedented was the idea that every human being, regardless of color, culture, class or caste, is in the image and likeness of God. The whole of the Torah’s ethics and politics are already foreshadowed in this one verse. It was to this that Rabbi Akiva was alluding when he said: “Beloved is man, for he was created in the image of God” (Avot 3:18). It is what the sages meant when they taught (Mishna, Sanhedrin 37a) that whoever destroys a life is as if he destroyed a universe, and whoever saves a life is as if he saved a universe, and that the first human was created alone so that no one would be able to say, my ancestor was greater than yours. The connection between this principle and the sanctity of human life is made explicit in the covenant with Noah: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God He made man” (Gen. 9:6). Finally, the Genesis creation narrative establishes the jurisprudential principle on which the entire Judaic structure of social ethics rests: that God, as Creator of the universe, owns the universe, and we, as its temporary residents, are bound by His sovereignty. Thus God rules, not by virtue of might, but of right.

HAFTARA FOR Simḥat Torah There are, in Judaism, (at least) two conceptions of time: cyclical and historical. Cyclical time is time as it is in nature: in the succession of nights and days, the seasons, and the lifecycle. Historical time – held by many scholars to have been first conceived in the Hebrew Bible – is time as a narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end, or as a journey, with a starting-point and a destination. History in Judaism is an arena of change, as we come closer to, or drift further from, what R. Aaron Lichtenstein called “societal beatitude” – a world of justice, compassion and peace. The three festivals, Pesaḥ, Shavuot, and Sukkot, all have this dual character. They are cyclical, seasonal, representing respectively spring, first fruits, and harvest. And they are also historical, commemorating first the exodus, then the revelation at Sinai, then the forty years of wandering without a permanent home. On Simḥat Torah, after concluding the last of the Mosaic books, we make a dramatic entry into both systems of time: cyclical as we move directly from the last word of the Torah to the first, ensuring that our cycle of Torah reading will be unbroken. Immediately thereafter, we take a decisive step into historical time, as Moses dies and his successor Joshua takes on the role of leadership. A new generation, and a new chapter in the Jewish story, begins, as the Israelites move from the desert to the land, from exile and exodus to homecoming, and from journey to destination.

וְאַל־תֵּחָת Do not be terrified. Faith is the antidote to fear. “The LORD is my light and my salvation - whom then shall I fear?” (Ps. 27:1). וְאַל־תֵּחָת And to the people of Reuben and Gad. A reminder of the agreement they made with Moses (Num. 32), that though they would settle on the east bank of the Jordan, they would first honor their commitment to lead the Israelites into battle against the Canaanites. Only when the land was conquered and settled would they return to their families. רַק חֲזַק וֶאֱמַץ Only be very strong, be very determined. Dayan Yeḥezkel Abramsky noted that in the previous verse, speaking of the conquest of the land, God tells Joshua to be “strong and of good courage.” Now, speaking of the religious challenge of remaining faithful to God’s law, a far more emphatic form of words is used, signaling that the spiritual dimension of leadership demands greater strength and courage than the military or political dimension. לֹא־יָמוּשׁ סֵפֶר הַתּוֹרָה הַזֶּה Let the Torah in this scroll never leave your lips. A command stated in the Torah in relation to a king (Deut. 17:18–20), thus conveying another fundamental rule of leadership: the heavier the responsibility, the greater the need for constant moral and spiritual guidance. A leader who guides people into the unmapped territory of the future needs, above all, an inner compass, to avoid the moral drift that is otherwise the fate of those who allow themselves to be merely reactive to events. כְּכֹל אֲשֶׁר־שָׁמַֽעְנוּ אֶל־מֹשֶׁה Just as we listened to Moses. The people give their consent and pledge their allegiance to Joshua as Moses’ successor, an instance of a fundamental principle of Judaism, as of the American Declaration of Independence, that leaders and governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed.