Hey, so: How does the Torah end?

Probably fewer people could quote any text here than would be able to offer a rough translation of the beginning, but you probably wouldn’t have to search too long and hard at a post-service oneg to find someone who could tell you that the Torah ends with a eulogy. Mosheh dies and is buried in an unknown place, and then we’re told that there was never again a prophet like him, a guy who talked with G-d face to face and who displayed the miracles of the Exodus לְעֵינֵ֖י כׇּל־יִשְׂרָאֵֽל׃ | lə’einei kol yisra’eil | “to the eyes of all Yisra’eil” (Dəvarim 34:12). And that’s it, that’s the very last word of the very last of the five books of Moses.

Yisra’eil is, of course, the Biblical name for the group that would ultimately become the Jewish people, and it comes, of course, from the patriarch Ya’aqov, who is granted the name Yisra’eil in addition to his birth name way back in Bəreishit 32:29 after wrestling with a mysterious being. In that earlier passage, the mysterious figure — conventionally read as an angel, tho the text itself doesn’t make that claim explicitly — explains the new name by telling Ya’aqov/Yisra’eil כִּי־שָׂרִ֧יתָ עִם־אֱלֹקִ֛ים וְעִם־אֲנָשִׁ֖ים וַתּוּכָֽל׃ | ki saríta im elo[q]im və’im anashim vatukhal. | “you have wrestled with G-d and with humans and you have prevailed.”. Riffing on the verb sarah [a], this explanation reads the name as something like “he wrestles with G-d”.

[a] Etymologically unrelated to the name of the matriarch Sarah, which means “princess”.

This kind of sentence-name is pretty typical for Biblical Hebrew. Gabriel means “G-d is my champion”, and Yəhoyakhin, one of the last kings of Yəhudah, has a name meaning “[haSheim] establishes” (presumably implying something like “the security of my reign”). What’s less typical is the arrangement of the sentence itself: Normally, you would expect G-d to be the subject of the sentence, not its object, and you certainly wouldn’t expect G-d to be an object of anything other than praise, gratitude, or beseechment. G-d as the opponent in a wrestling match is right out. Nevertheless, that’s how the Jewish tradition has long understood this name, right down to the present day — it’s so ubiquitous that the introduction to Judaism textbook my conversion class worked out of actually translates the first two words of the Shəma as “Listen up, G-d-wrestlers!”.

Modern Biblical scholarship has been less sanguine about it. Beyond the conceptual difficulty of making G-d the object of a grappling match, there are, apparently, philological difficulties in getting from the proposed root שׂרה | SRH to the יִשְׂרָ-‏ | \emph{Yisra-} at the start of the name. Published journal articles about it very quickly get very technical — expect references to sister languages ranging from Akkadian to Sabaic and plenty of passages of untranslated nineteenth-century academic German — and their conclusions are, to put it mildly, not always that compelling [b]. Of the proposed explanations I’ve encountered, my favorite is Leonid Kogan’s etymology of “G-d heals” or “G-d protects” [c], but I freely admit that this is a favorite derived along emotional and aesthetic lines, not scholarly ones; if you want to wade into the sources to figure out the etymology you think is most defensible on rigorous intellectual grounds, I wish you g-dspeed but cannot be your guide.

[b] Leonid Kogan, in “The Etymology of Israel” (Babel Und Bibel 3: Annual of Ancient Near Eastern, Old Testament and Semitic Studies, edited by L. Kogan, N. Koslova, S. Loesov, and S. Tishchenko, 3:237–56. Penn State University Press, 2006.), goes so far as to dismiss most etymologies proposed by scholarship of the past 150 years as “[ranging] from unconvincing to merely fantastic” (p 239).
[c] Check the previous note for the citation.

Nevertheless, I think this dichotomy, this tension — between the inherited meaning of the name and the academic quest for its original meaning — is a beautiful capstone to this one-word Torah project and a fitting summary of the task we face as contemporary Jews. I don’t partake of the sport of wrestling, but from my outside perspective, it seems to require trying very hard to hold fast to things (usually human limbs) that are furiously striving to pull away from you in different directions, all while trying not to get held fast yourself.

We are in a moment of expansive access to Biblical commentary, whether in the form of digitized (and translated!) compendia by medieval Jewish philosophers or in the form of open-access publications by contemporary academic presses. I think this is mostly all to the good (tho I confess to worrying, at times, about the oral culture and lineages of transmission that get lost when I look up, say, the work of Rashi on my own in my bedroom instead of studying him under the aegis of a teacher in a chain of teachers), but it can very easily get overwhelming. In the face of that overwhelm, there is a real temptation to let certain sources go, to say, perhaps, “What use is this mystical mumbo-jumbo when the odd word they were trying to explain is perfectly accounted for now that we’ve re-discovered Ugaritic?”, or “Why would I pay any attention to what secular academics think proto-Jews 3,000 years ago may have been doing when I have the halakhic tradition to guide my understanding of these central Pésaḥ texts?”. From there, it is easy to get held fast, to find yourself over-committed to one kind of explanation, as much pinned by its grip as pinning it in yours. And I think that leads to a fragility and incuriosity that limits the possibilities of Judaism, that cuts us off from the potential of our texts.

It is undeniably true that different commentators pull us in different directions, frequently with great contradictions between them. And it is also true that we are, in my corner of the world at least, living in a cultural moment that abhors contradiction, that wants everything to be tidily categorizable, rigorously differentiable, either one thing or another. This historical figure was either a butch lesbian or a trans man avant la lettre. The voting patterns of hundreds of millions of people can be explained perfectly by this one factor. The scientific literature says exactly one thing, conclusively, about the efficacy of a new medical intervention. The text means this, just this, and not anything else.

I believe the task that we have as humans in the present moment is to become more comfortable navigating a world of ambiguity and contradiction. To learn how to hold at the same time explanations that pull in alternate directions, without being held ourselves. This is not to abandon the very possibility of truth — I believe in truth, I believe that truth is important and vital and absolutely necessary — but to abandon the notion that truth is always simple, direct, easy to acquire and understand. In a complex world, truth is often complex and the search for it difficult; the conclusions we reach will necessarily often be tentative, partial, incompletely satisfying. We must cultivate our ability to stay nimble, to learn broadly, to tangle with sources working at cross purposes. To wrestle, as it were, with the world, and to win, or at least bring it to a stalemate.

And when the world wrestles back, and cheats, and wrenches our hip, we have to trust that that is not the end, that healing is still possible, repair still possible, that there is still some force out there — the force of justice, the force of love, the force of countless friends and comrades and strangers working towards the good — fighting tooth and nail to protect the magnificence of life on this beautiful Earth.

⁂

Thank you for coming on this journey with me. Whether you followed each entry in this series as it appeared, dipped in occasionally, or are only just catching this one as your very first, I hope you found these posts worth the time it took to read them. I hope you found some meaning in them. I hope that, even when you disagreed with my conclusions, they showed you new or unexpected ways of grappling with these sacred texts. I tried not do do the same thing every week, in terms of either methodology, outlook, or conclusions. I hope you learned something, whether about the Hebrew language, about mystical numerology, or about the history of interpretative thought. More than anything else, I hope I made a strong case for my original premise: that the Torah is more than a collection of weekly themes, that there is mileage yet in paying close attention to the specific words written on this scroll, that attending to the concrete language here has its rewards. There are so many stones here left unturned. There is so much left to say.

For my part, I have learned a tremendous amount writing these 60,000+ words. There’s certainly been my forced march thru the Anchor Yale Bible series, an exercise I cannot say I really recommend for all that it illuminated both the depth and folly of certain streams of academic thought. But there’s also been a deepened awareness of traditional Jewish sources, both their content and their general patterns of thought. I still count myself a novice in this regard, but I at least think I can begin to see the dimmest contours of the outlines of my ignorance. More than that, I’ve learned a great deal about myself and what kind of relationship I have (and want to have) with the texts of my tradition. I don’t think I’ll ever be done growing and changing here — I want to stay open to newness until the day I die — but confronting the question of what I want to say about this text and who I imagine I’m saying it to week in and week out is nothing if not a rigorous exercise in evaluating those relationships. If you are drawn to large quixotic projects, perhaps you will find value there, too.

Originally, I was going to follow this year of drashes on the Torah portion with a year of drashes on the haftarah. These prophetic/historical texts are rich with interpretative potential, and my experience is that in many shuls they pass by almost entirely free of comment. I would like to dig into them, to make an argument for their continued vitality as part of the practice of our religion.

Unfortunately, I think that’s a project that’s going to have to wait. As much as I’ve enjoyed writing these divrei, there’s no denying that doing so has taken up rather a lot of my free time this past year, and free time is not exactly a resource I am drowning in. There are other things I would like to write. There is a prayerbook I would like to re-code. There is an opera I hope to complete. There is an entire world of interpersonal relationships that I want to nurture. There are books that aren’t academic Bible commentaries — a genre best measured not in pages but in feet of space taken up on a shelf — I want to immerse myself in. I would like to come back and tackle the haftarah cycle, but I would also like to live the rest of my life, and right now, the latter desire is stronger than the former, especially given how few hours I can call my own outside of gainful employment, eating, chores, and sleep. G-d willing, someday I will have the time. Maybe I will see you then.

⁂

The very last letter of the very last word of the very last book of Torah is ל, lamed, the equivalent of the Latin L. The very first letter of the very first word of the very first book is בּ, beit, the equivalent of the Latin B. There is a teaching — which I learned from Rabbi Marissa James, tho I believe she attributed it in turn to a different source which I have since, sadly, forgotten — that you can combine these letters to make the Hebrew word לֵב | leiv | “heart”. I’m not sure how you would do the equivalent in English (tho finding a V word to begin Bəreishit might let you gesture at “love”), but you can kind of get a hint at it if you render Bəreishit 1:1 as “Beginning: G-d made the heavens, the earth” and then dip into German to avail yourself of Leib and lieb.

The Torah splits our hearts, then. Or, perhaps better, to make the Torah whole, to bridge its end and its beginning into a ring of cyclic time, it takes our hearts. The Torah is incomplete without us, without its readers, its hearers, its interpreters, its carriers forward. And it wants us not as placeholders, automata, but as thinking, feeling beings. It is only when we come to Torah with our whole hearts, with the full richness of our lives and experiences that this strange impossible dance of drashing works. The Torah does not hang there, suspended in a vacuum, teaching immutable dictates to the stars — it is not in heaven, but right here, with us, in this place, in this moment. It is not enough to know what it has said to a prior generation, because their hearts are not our hearts; if it is to live, it must be thru us, shaped by the contours of everything that we know, everything that we care for, everything that we love.

We roll the scroll back to the start and begin again, and a year from now we’ll begin again, and then, later, begin again and begin again. What happens next depends on us.

[This is the final installment of one-word Torah. You can read the full series here.]