On Simchat Torah we do something different than the usual We read the last words of the Torah, and a moment later we start again from the beginning with Bereishit. The two people honored with these aliyot are called Chatan Torah and Chatan Bereishit, which means groom of the Torah and groom of Bereishit. Why grooms? Two answers can be found in our parsha. One comes near its opening and the other is its very last verse.
An Inheritance or a Heritage?
The Torah says: תּוֹרָה צִוָּה לָנוּ מֹשֶׁה מוֹרָשָׁה קְהִלַּת יַעֲקֹב – “The Torah that Moshe commanded us is the heritage of the congregation of Yaakov” (Devarim 33:4). Rashi explains that we have taken hold of the Torah, and we will not let it go.
The Rambam (Hilchot Talmud Torah 3:1) builds a principle on this verse. Israel was given three crowns: Kehuna, Malchut, and Torah. Kehuna went to Aharon’s descendants and Malchut to David’s. The crown of Torah, however, is set aside and waiting for all of Israel. Whoever wants it may come and take it. His proof is our verse: מורשה קהלת יעקב
This seems to contradict the Mishnah in Avot (2:12), where Rabbi Yosei teaches: הַתְקֵן עַצְמְךָ לִלְמֹד תּוֹרָה, שֶׁאֵינָהּ יְרֻשָּׁה לָךְ
Prepare yourself to learn Torah, because it is not your inheritance. So is Torah our inheritance or not? (Believe me when I tell you that we’ve had this seemingly contradictory conversation at my shabbat table more than once, but I digress).
The Baal HaTurim notes that the word morasha appears only twice in the Torah. It appears here, and in Shemot 6:8, where Hashem promises the Land: וְנָתַתִּי אֹתָהּ לָכֶם מוֹרָשָׁה The pairing teaches us something. Eretz Yisrael was promised to the Avot, yet no generation received it passively. It had to be entered, conquered and settled. A yerusha passes to you automatically. A morasha is given to the whole community and passed down through the generations, but each person still has to reach out and take hold of it. So the Rambam and Rabbi Yosei agree. Torah belongs to kehillat Yaakov as a whole, but it is not your inheritance until you acquire it.
The Gemara (Pesachim 49b) goes further: “אל תקרי מורשה אלא מאורסה” Do not read it as “heritage” but as “betrothed.” Torah is not property, it is a marriage. You can leave property in a drawer for fifty years and it is still yours. You cannot do that with a marriage. You have to live it, day in – day out, through easy times and not so easy times.
The Last Words of the Torah
Now look at the Torah’s final words. After confirming Moshe’s unmatched prophecy, the Torah ends with “וּלְכֹל הַיָּד הַחֲזָקָה… אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה מֹשֶׁה לְעֵינֵי כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל”, “and all the mighty hand… that Moshe performed before the eyes of all Israel” (34:12).
Rashi, following the Sifri, explains what this refers to: “שנשאו לבו לשבור הלוחות לעיניהם”. Moshe’s heart moved him to shatter the Tablets before their eyes, “והסכימה דעת הקב”ה לדעתו”, and Hashem agreed with him. As the Gemara (Shabbat 87a) says, Hashem told him “יישר כחך ששברת”: well done for breaking them.
Is that so? The Torah’s final tribute to its greatest prophet is not recanting the splitting of the sea, navigating and leading a nation through the wilderness, or bringing Torah down from Sinai. It is the moment he smashed the Torah?
The Meshech Chochmah (Shemot 32:19) adds a further point. The people had begun to treat Moshe and the other leaders as if they held sanctity on their own. First Moshe was their “הָאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר הֶעֱלָנוּ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם”, and when he seemed to be gone, they replaced him with a calf. Moshe shattered the Luchot to break that illusion. Even tablets carved and written by Hashem have no holiness apart from Israel’s bond with Him. A ketubah is sacred because of the marriage it records. When the bride is dancing around a golden calf, the document on its own is only stone. Furthermore, had Moshe handed Bnei Yisrael the Tablets right after they built the Golden Calf, they would have abandoned the Calf but simply redirected their idolatrous worldview onto the Tablets.
VeZot HaBeracha and Bereishit – Together at Last
Now we can see why the Torah ends where it does. It has just called itself a מורשה, a treasure handed down, and there is a danger in that word. A people could come to treat the Torah as an heirloom: owned, displayed and unopened. So the last lesson Moshe leaves “לעיני כל ישראל” is this: Torah without the relationship is only stone. The Luchot were never meant to be possessed, only to be included in the service of Hashem in the Mishkan (and later, in the Mikdash).
The first Luchot were entirely “מַעֲשֵׂה אֱלֹקִים”, Hashem’s work, and they ended broken. The second Luchot were carved by Moshe’s own hand, “פסל לך”, and those survived. What endures is the Torah we put our own effort into. And according to the Gemara (Berachot 8b), the broken tablets were not thrown away. “לוחות ושברי לוחות מונחים בארון”: the whole tablets and the broken pieces lay together in the Ark. Our failures, once repaired, are kept alongside our renewals. That’s a great message in itself for teshuva, returning to Hashem.
Even the writing of the Torah’s last verses shows this מורשה at work. Rashi (34:5) brings the dispute in Bava Batra 15a. One view holds that Yehoshua wrote the final eight verses. The other holds that Moshe wrote them himself, in tears. The Ibn Ezra (34:1) says that Yehoshua wrote from “וַיַּעַל מֹשֶׁה” onward. Either way, at the Torah’s final lines the pen passes, or nearly passes, from teacher to student. The Torah ends by being handed on to all of us – לעיני כל ישראל, not in some private club for the elite, but in front of all of Yisrael.
The Simchat Torah Message
This is why, on Simchat Torah, we are not heirs closing a finished book, comfortable that we own it and putting it on a shelf. We are חתנים, grooms. The מורשה becomes a מאורסה. And we do not pause for even a day. We go straight from “לעיני כל ישראל” to “בראשית”. We are ready to start the process again – where did we come from, to whom do we owe everything.
It is often pointed out that the last letter of the Torah, the ל of ישראל, joined to its first letter, the ב of בראשית, spells לב, a heart. The first tablets were stone and could be shattered. The Torah we renew each year is the one Yirmiyahu promised: “וְעַל לִבָּם אֶכְתֲּבֶנָּה”, “I will write it upon their hearts” (Yirmiyahu 31:32).
If you read the first and last words in order it spells בל and the gematriya is 32 (same as lev), which is also the same as כבוד – honor. תן כבוד לתורה!
שבת שלום וחג שמח
Shabbat Shalom v’ Chag Sameach!
משה