The Beginning Is The End Is The Beginning - Shemini Atzeret & Simchat Torah

I have to admit, writing a drash for these last few days of chag, sorting out and ordering my thoughts since my father’s death, figuring out what’s up and what’s down, has been a challenge for me to put pen to paper.

These days are too many endings at once: the end of Sukkot, the end of the festival cycle, the end of the Torah, the beginning of the Torah again, Hoshana Rabbah's final pleading, and—this year especially—the end of a very difficult personal season.

And maybe there is a very strong d'var hiding in there.

Because maybe we aren’t “ending,” but learning how to begin again.

Look at the sequence:

-Hoshana Rabbah gives us one last opportunity to cry out before the judgment of the season is sealed.

-Shabbat gives us pause.

-Sh’mini Atzeret says, essentially, stay with Me a little longer.

-Simchat Torah takes the Torah's final words and immediately puts them beside its first words.

-V'Zot HaB’rakhah ends with Moshe's death—but the Torah itself does not end with him.

-And then B’reshit begins.

There is something about the Jewish calendar's refusal to let an ending remain an ending.

Moshe dies.

The Torah closes.

And then, almost without taking a breath:

“B’reishit bara ELOQIM...In [a] beginning…”

In Jewish time, completion is rarely the opposite of beginning. Sometimes completion is what makes beginning possible.

We spend all of Tishrei talking about beginnings and endings. We stand before G’d on Rosh Hashanah. We fast on Yom Kippur. We build a sukkah. We gather together. We celebrate. We plead. We give thanks.

And then, just when we think the season is finally coming to an end, Judaism gives us one more set of endings.

Hoshana Rabbah.

Shemini Atzeret.

Simchat Torah.

V'Zot HaB’rakhah.

The death of Moshe.

The end of the Torah.

And then—

B’reshit.

The beginning of the Torah.

Again.

Perhaps that is the point.

Because Judaism does not seem particularly interested in endings that simply remain endings. And perhaps that is one reason this idea speaks so powerfully to African-American Jewish experience. So much of African-American history has been shaped by people who were told that something was over—the end of freedom, the destruction of a community, the closing of a door, the disappearance of a tradition—only to discover that an ending could become the material from which something else was built.

Perhaps the Torah is teaching us something about the difference between starting over and beginning again.

Starting over suggests that what came before has been erased. That we are back where we began.

But beginning again is not the same thing as starting over. Beginning again means something else.

Beginning again means carrying what came before into whatever comes next. It means that we begin from here—with everything we have carried, everything we have learned, everything we have lost, everything we have loved, and everything we are still becoming. The lessons we learned, the memories we made, the blessings we received, and even the work we have left unfinished.

And sometimes, we begin again precisely because something has ended.

Hoshana Rabbah gives us one last opportunity to cry out, “Hosha na—save us.” Sh’mini Atzeret tells us to stay a little longer. Simchat Torah tells us that we have reached the end. And then B’reshit tells us to begin.

As Jews, as African-Americans, as Eidot CHeMDaT”A, as peoples accustomed to having history tell us that something was finished, beginning again can itself become an act of historical memory. We begin again not by pretending that what happened did not happen, but by refusing to let what happened determine the limits of what can happen next.

So as we come to the end of this season, perhaps that is what these final days of the chag are asking of us—not simply what we are leaving behind, but what we are carrying forward. Because we do not enter the next chapter empty-handed. We enter it carrying everything this season has given us, and everything it has taken from us.

We mourn, we remember, we give thanks, and eventually we begin again—not because the ending did not matter, but because it did.

The Torah does not promise us that nothing will end. It gives us a way to live faithfully after things end.

And so, as we close the Torah, we open it. As the year turns, we turn with it. And after V’Zot HaB’rakhah comes B’reshit.

Again.

In the beginning.

Shabbat shalom and chag sameach