Moses Passes Away & We Dance? - Simchat Torah

Here is comes … the finale and climax of all the High Holiday - Simchat Torah … the day our joy knows no bounds … the day we celebrate our Torah and our Judaism.

 

And on this joyous day, what words of the Torah will we read?

 

“And Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab  according to the word of G‑d”

 

It’s hard not to shed a tear as these final verses of the entire Torah are read. For almost a whole year we lived with Moses each and every Shabbat. We watched his birth, his rescue, in the hands of the Pharaoh’s daughter, his being raised in the most unlikely of places in the palace of Pharaoh . We followed his courage, caring, and display of leadership. And now, this glorious life - one that never was and never would be again - comes to an end. All in one simple verse, almost deceiving in its simplicity:

 

Yet instead of tears, we sing and dance.

 

Dear friends, the message is a powerful one. Moses passed away, but the Torah he gave us remains, continuing to invigorate us for millennia, through thick and thin, through tranquil and turbulent times, through all of their journeys and voyages, for 3300 years. Yes, it’s the same exact Torah Moses wrote and bequeathed to the people of Israel that still sustains us, empowers us and guides us today.

 

Just a few years ago cutting-edge technology allowed archaeologists to finally read the contents of a burned 2000-year-old scroll found near the Dead Sea in 1970. The archaeologists found a parchment rolled up but entirely burned, so damaged by a fire that it was impossible to unroll it for inspection without the charred parchment crumbling into ashes. The scroll was faithfully stored away by the Israel Antiquities Authority with little hope of ever being able to study what was written on them.

 

But then in 2015, computer scientists at the University of Kentucky developed software for unraveling damaged and delicate texts. Incredibly, they were able to create a digital image of the scroll and “unroll” the image without even touching it, so it would not crumble into ashes.

 

The scan revealed two columns of writing, composed of 35 lines, 18 of which were preserved while the other 17 had to be digitally reconstructed. When the researchers saw the first results, it made for a startling revelation: All of the words and paragraph breaks were absolutely identical to the Torah text still used today, in 2018.

 

This latest discovery is the just another proof that the chain of our tradition has remained fully intact; that not even a difference of a single letter exists between our Torahs today and that Torah scroll from 2000 years ago.

 

So we dance on Simchat Torah when we read of Moses’s passing. Indeed Moses is still here dancing with us.

 

Moses is more alive today than ever before. He has not faded away into the history books. Here we are in 2018 lovingly holding on to the very same Torah that he wrote, dictated by G‑d, and gave to the Jewish people.

 

This Torah has been copied, with tender, love, and care, by each generation, letter by letter, word by word, portion by portion. We study it, we practice it, we preserve it, we live it, we breathe it, we teach it to our children, we create our identity around it, and it continues to preserved us throughout.

 

Am Yisrael Chai! The nation of Israel – together with Moses – live on!