Judaism
What Simchat Torah says about science
Reading about the creation immediately after completing the Torah encourages us to integrate our Jewish and general knowledge
October 9, 2020 08:27
By, rabbi JOSEPH DWECK
3 min read
Reading about the creation immediately after completing the Torah encourages us to integrate our Jewish and general knowledge
October 9, 2020 08:27ByRabbi Joseph Dweck, rabbi JOSEPH DWECK
At the close of the Succot festival we also come to the close of the annual cycle of our public Torah reading. Customarily just after completing Vezot Haberachah, the last parashah, we begin Bereshit, the first parashah without interruption.
Over the generations an array of commentaries has been offered on the connection of Torah’s end to its beginning. A notable example is Hayim Tehila, written by Rabbi Hayim Palachi, Chief Rabbi of Izmir, Turkey (1857-1869), in which he offers no less than 101 interpretations. The usual, popular reason given for this custom is in order to show that we never actually complete our study of Torah and that we begin again with each cycle yielding new insights, discoveries and lessons.
By Torah’s end, 613 commandments have been given and frameworks for every aspect of life have been outlined. At the cycle’s closing we are brought into a different mindset than we had at its beginning. The culmination of our annual readings has us immersed in religious and moral issues rather than the story of the origins of the universe.
Reading about the prohibitions against charging interest and delaying payment to workers does not necessarily mesh in our minds with the creation of stars and planets. The reading on Simchat Torah is an opportunity to see Torah not simply as a book of diverse commandments and religious frameworks, but as an interwoven structure for our lives that sees the very origins of our world and our developments as human beings as essential to the system.
In its subtle way the juxtaposition of Torah’s end with its beginning on Simchat Torah highlights key questions. Do the scholars and adherents of God’s law also genuinely see it embedded in God’s world? Can we properly study the laws and ideas of Torah without paying close attention to nature? Can we come to know the Torah given by a man named Moses without knowing the story of mankind?
Torah is not meant to be the source of our scientific knowledge but, as Maimonides writes in the Guide for the Perplexed, science is meant to be understood in tandem with it (I:34). The wider the gap between our Torah study and our study of science and the nature of our world, the wider the gap that holds Torah’s end to its beginning.
The Torah loses cohesiveness and it becomes increasingly challenging to see a genuine connection between our humanity and our religious commitment and wisdom. God is then found either in Torah or in the world but not in both, a tragedy that directly undermines our recognition of God’s unity.
In relegating God to only one sphere, we cut away at the wholeness of His presence within us; we keep Him, to some degree, as an acquaintance only wishing to know Him on particular terms in particular settings. But one can hardly argue that the God who commanded us at Sinai to follow His law and teaching is not the God who created rainbows, ravens and Rembrandt.
And if we acknowledge that He is the one who created all things, do we not keep from knowing Him as intimately as we can, when we look away from studying and understanding, to our best ability, all that He made?
When we recognise that the Author of the Torah is the Author of the World and that there are no contradictions between the two, we better understand the joy of Simchat Torah. And we will feel less torn between our religion and our humanity. A tear that is unnecessary for us to experience at all.
The joy of Torah is the divine meaning it brings us in our very human lives. The God of Israel seeks residence among His people rather than simply peering down at them from on high. Simchat Torah celebrates God’s integrating of the cosmos with our common, human practices.
With each cycle of our Torah reading we are meant to gain greater and more meaningful insights into Torah. We are meant to re-examine the understandings of our youth with our mature and developed minds. We are meant to do the same with our understanding of nature.
The cycles of Torah are meant to complement the cycles of our lives. There are priceless lessons embedded in many of our precious customs. This year, when we will not be dancing as we are normally used to, I will focus even more on the reading of the day.
The custom to run Torah’s end into its beginning and to move from mitzvah to Ma’aseh Bereshit (the works of Creation) reminds us that the dat Moshe, the “religion of Moses” must always find its connection back to the human condition and God’s universe.
Joseph Dweck is Senior Rabbi of the S & P Sephardi Community
