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October 20, 2000/21 Tishri 5761, Vol. 53, No.4
Simchat Torah honors 'inner Torah'
Torah Study
RABBI SHLOMO RISKIN
Shemini Atzeret-Simchat Torah/Deuteronomy 33:1-34:12
The truest essence of reality is not necessarily that which meets the eye; indeed, most things and most of us are not what we appear to be.
Our most profound statement of faith, "Hear O Israel the Lord our God the Lord is One," is always recited while covering one's eyes with one's hand. It seems to me that this is in order to teach us not to be distracted by what we see.
This entire holy day period, beginning with Rosh Hashana and culminating with Simchat Torah, is dedicated to the inner self and to the essential soul of things. The piercing sound of the shofar resonates with the inner cry of the human being; the liturgical poems remind us that God "searches the inner feelings of every human being."
On Yom Kippur, each of us stands before the Almighty bereft of his or her physical trappings and even minimal bodily comforts such as food and drink. It is our inner soul that stands before God ready to be purified.
In a similar vein, it may be said that the Jewish calendar establishes a separate celebration for each of two aspects of the Torah - or, if you will, a separate celebration for each of our two Torahs.
Shavuot, the Festival of Weeks, marks the revelation at Sinai when God first presented to us the Torah. But that was an external Torah. On Yom Kippur Moses received the second Torah, this time in the midst of divine silence and in the lonely splendor of intimacy with the divine.
These two Torot, the outer and the inner, are expressed in the K'tiv and Kri of the Torah as we experience it. The K'tiv literally means the "writing," the black letters as they appear in the Torah scroll; the Kri is the way tradition mandates that we read those letters, sometimes in a different way than we would expect. One might say that the K'tiv is the external Torah and the Kri its internal counterpart.
On Simchat Torah we celebrate the inner Torah, the oral Torah, the Kri. Simcha, joy, also has an external form as well as an internal essence. "A beautiful wife, a beautiful house and beautiful objects enlarge the horizons of an individual," teach our sages. Conventional wisdom suggests that these three adornments bring joy and happiness. Nevertheless the Torah mandates that during the Festival of Joy, the holiday of Sukkot, which leads directly into Simchat Torah, we leave our fancy homes and expensive furniture and move into what appears to be a most temporary and inadequate dwelling place.
The message is indubitably clear: True joy is a function not of what we have but of who we are. It has nothing to do with the size of our chandeliers but is the result of our hosting Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph and David in the sukkah.
Finally, on Simchat Torah we read of the death of Moses, whose life has both K'tiv and Kri, external form and internal essence. From a simplistic external perspective, one might conclude that Moses was a tragic personality. He began life amidst the wealth and fame of Pharaoh's palace and concluded it while wandering in the desert, without even a solid roof over his head. His goal had been to take the Israelites into the Promised Land. After enduring a series of quarrelsome rebellions and 42 temporary destinations, Moses departs from his people and the physical world without even a cemetery monument to mark his memory.
The truth, however, resides in the Kri of Moses' life, the internal essence that follows us and that we follow to this day. It was Moses who spoke to God face-to-face as it were, and forged a slave people into a God infused nation. If Moses' words were not always heard by his generation, his message reverberates throughout all the Jewish generations. We celebrate the Torah even as we read of Moses' death because for us Moses never died; his grave is unmarked because through the words of the Torah that he communicated to us he lives and we live eternally.
Moses in essence resides in his inner message, the that which remains his eternal legacy. It is this Torah over which we rejoice on Simchat Torah.
Rabbi Shlomo Riskin is the spiritual leader of Efrat, Israel.
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