From the End to the Beginning

Earlier this week, I got to experience one of my favorite moments of the year: chanting the last line of D’varim and the first line of B’reshit in a single breath. Yes, I love a challenge and yes, I love having words of Torah in my mouth and lungs, but there’s a deeper reason I find this practice to be so special.

On Simchat Torah, we restart the annual cycle of reading through the five books of Moses by moving from the ‘end’ to the ‘beginning.’ I’m using quotes here because there is a rabbinic perspective from Pesachim 6b that there is no ‘earlier’ (מוּקְדָּם) or ‘after’ (מְאוּחָר) in Torah. So while you might think that a Torah scroll has a beginning and an end, something far less linear is going on. This chanting practice is a powerful reminder that our tradition is wary of anything that seems too simple. When we chant the ‘last’ and ‘first’ words as a continuous phrase, we honor the depth and complexity of ends and beginnings, especially those we find in Torah.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the ambiguities of beginnings because immense change has taken place in my personal life over the past five months. I’ve gone from being a full time student to navigating a multi-gig life, which has transformed the flow of my days. I have gone from parenting ‘cats’ to ‘a cat.’ From being chronically single to partnered. From a SVARA-nik to a SVARA faculty fellow. During this period of transition, I have been reminded that our lives do not fit neatly into chapters: that loose ends are rarely wrapped up all at once. Endings and beginnings blend into each other like watercolors, giving way to both individuation and blurriness. This blending is what comes alive for me at Simchat Torah as the chanter’s breath links D’varim and B’reshit: we circle back, with last year’s reading still ringing in the air, to encounter these holy words again. We return to the beginning with the end in mind, knowing there is no earlier or after in Torah. 

And yet, like all deep learning reveals, things aren’t always what they seem. Just as Pesachim 6b myth-busts Torah’s linear progression, the following midrash from B’reshit Rabba teaches that the Written Torah’s first word, b’reshit (בראשית) – ‘in [the] beginning,’ marks a clear, significant start of the world. 

רַבִּי יוֹנָה בְּשֵׁם רַבִּי לֵוִי אָמַר, לָמָּה נִבְרָא הָעוֹלָם בְּב’, אֶלָּא מַה ב’ זֶה סָתוּם מִכָּל צְדָדָיו וּפָתוּחַ מִלְּפָנָיו, כָּךְ אֵין לְךָ רְשׁוּת לוֹמַר, מַה לְּמַטָּה, מַה לְּמַעְלָה, מַה לְּפָנִים, מַה לְּאָחוֹר, אֶלָּא מִיּוֹם שֶׁנִּבְרָא הָעוֹלָם וּלְהַבָּא

Rabbi Yona said in the name of Rabbi Levi: Why was the world created with [the letter] beit [ב]? Rather, just as this beit is closed on all [three of] its sides but open from its front, so, you do not have permission to say: What is below, what is above, what was before, and what is after, but only from the day when the world was created and onward.

I’m imagining B’reshit’s ב as an open parenthesis that creates a barrier between the world as we experience it and what came before. This midrash acknowledges that something unknowable exists beyond the boundary of Torah’s beginning, but recognizes that with Torah – at least, in our mythic retelling – came a turn in the cosmic world that prompted the construction of human time.

Next week, Shiur Klali is going to dive into the first Mishnah in Berakhot, which is often considered the beginning of the Babylonian Talmud (a text that, like Pesachim says, has no beginning or end). I have a hunch that the first word of the Written Torah, which I’m arguing ushers in the era of human time, is important context for understanding the first word of the Oral Torah because both openings identify moments in time. 

The Mishnah begins with מאימתי, which is a mashup of three words – ‘from’ (מן) ‘where’ (אי) ‘when’ (מתי) – and signals an incoming question. I like to translate it as ‘from when in time?’ as a way to preserve the feeling of searching that I get from ‘where’ (אי). 

As you can see in the picture above, מאימתי is in a box floating above the rest of the the daf, inviting us to take this opening word on its own terms. Its visual prominence and separateness situates מאימתי as a greeting to each and every reader, asking, “from where in time [are you]?” מאימתי feels like my rabbinic (tr)ancestors calling through the torah portal, asking me to locate myself in time as I prepare myself to engage with what they’ve left behind. The nonlinearity identified in Pesachim manifests through the Oral Torah in open chains of transmission, enabling us to gather thinkers separated by hundreds of generations together in conversation. מאימתי reminds us to remain connected to our generational moments as we set out to time travel through Talmud for it is our responsibility to bring the truth that is only apparent in our time into the tradition. 

It’s our job to be humble enough to honor the nonlinearity of both torah and time, while also being brave enough to start something new.