Torah Posting: וילך
This one’s really short. Just 30 verses. Mosheh has completed his transmission — and his appeal to the people’s hearts and minds. Now it’s time for his closing statement.
“I am now 120 years old,” he tells them. “I can no longer be busy. Moreover, God told me I will not cross the Jordan.” In fact, God will cross the Jordan before the people and wipe out the land’s inhabitants. Faithful Yehoshu’a will lead the people in Mosheh’s stead, as God has said. Mosheh promises the people’s enemies will be vanquished and implores them to have faith and not fear.
Mosheh calls Yehoshu’a up before all the people and formally charges him with leadership. Then, the text says, Mosheh wrote down the Torah and handed it to the priests. (Remember what we’ve recently covered about what “this Torah” may or may not be.) Then he instructs them to read the Torah aloud every seventh year, during the year when the land is allowed to rest, at the time of the festival of Sukkot. Gather all the people together in the sukkah and let them hear every word of the Torah, so that everyone — especially new generations who were not physically present for the events in the Torah — can relive them and understand their place in them.
We do not still do this, exactly; we now read the whole Torah in sections every year, as Torah Posting has documented this year. But the timing of it is preserved. The later holiday of Simchat Torah ends the celebration of Sukkot, and this is the day when the last parashah is read, we dance and sing with the Torah as a community, and then we read the first parashah, starting over again.
The end of summer and beginning of fall (in the northern hemisphere) is an incredibly dense time in the Jewish calendar. Remember, the Torah follows the ancient way of marking the year as beginning in the spring, so when giving us the timing for the sounding of the shofar, the Torah refers to it as the New Moon of the seventh month. As we read parashat וילך, that New Moon is about to happen. The later rabbinic tradition times the creation of the world to that date, and that anniversary is what inclines the rabbis to mark it as the start of the liturgical calendar year, Rosh Hashanah (“head of the year”).
So Jewish time involves a richly interlocking series of ways to track the time — agricultural, liturgical, botanical, civil, so many kinds of years — and while Passover, springtime, the liberation from slavery, is the beginning of the year in the Torah, the religious year surrounding the Torah begins at the first New Moon of fall. On the New Moon, we sound the shofar. Then, 10 days later, we fast and purify on Yom Kippur. Four days after that, on the Full Moon, we hold the week-long festival of Sukkot, and at the end, we celebrate the completion of the Torah and start it over again.
When it comes to the cycle of reading the Torah, this last part goes more slowly than at any time of year, because we read special parshiyot pertaining to the holiday during the weeks of the major holidays. As I write this, there are only two quick parshiyot left, but the Moon still has a sizeable slice of its waning crescent left — the Shabbat when we read this parashah is on the 25th of Elul this year — and it will be the 23rd of Tishrei when we finish the cycle. So let’s not dwell on the end yet! We still have a month to go!
Of course, where we last left our hero, Mosheh, a month is no time in this 40-year wander that’s about to end. With the instructions for this recitation of the Torah complete, God calls to him and says, “The time is drawing near for you to die.” God tells Mosheh to bring Yehoshu’a to the Tent of Meeting, so that he can receive his formal transmission of leadership from God directly.
God appears to them as a pillar of cloud resting at the entrance of the tent. Addressing Mosheh, God says that after he dies here shortly, the people will promptly go astray after the alien gods in their midst in the land they are about to enter, just as Mosheh has been telling them not to do. God warns Mosheh that this is going to go poorly for them; God will hide God’s countenance from them. God gives this as a reason Mosheh must transmit textual teachings to them, so they can eventually remember — but rather than call it a תורה, a Teaching, God calls it a שירה, a Song. The text says Mosheh wrote down the song that very day and taught it to the people.
Then God turns to Yehoshu’a, son of Nun, and gives him just a brief word of encouragement.
After Mosheh has finished writing down the Torah, he takes it to the Levites who carry the Ark and charges them to place the book beside it as an extra witness to the deviations from the teaching that are about to occur upon his death. He tells them to call all the elders and leaders of the tribes to him, so he may warn them about what is about to happen when the people enter the land, get high on conquest, become comfortable in their newfound abundance, and forget the rigors of their trials they faced under the leadership of Mosheh, who will no longer be with them. As his last act of living leadership, Mosheh begins to sing the Song.
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