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Orchard of Delights
future leaders either overtly or covertly plot their rise to power at the
expense of the current leaders. Yet throughout the Torah, Joshua
humbly serves Moses his teacher. When Eldad and Medad prophesied
that Moses would die and Joshua would lead the people into the Land
of Israel, he even zealously defended Moses’ honor (see the portion
of Beha’alotcha, “Prophecy: Past, Present and Future”). Likewise,
Moses publicly backed Joshua as his successor, even though God had
chosen him instead of Moses’ own two sons, a reason someone of a
lesser stature than Moses might have resented the appointment.
At the very dawn of Jewish history, Abraham and Isaac “went
both of them together” and thus implanted in their descendants a
sense of unity. At the end of the Written Torah, Moses and Joshua
went together, and in so doing established a model of true, selfless
Jewish leadership.
£The Song of CreationThe Song of Creation
££The Song of Creation
Another concept in Vayeilech that ties beginnings and endings
together is the commandment to write – or participate in the writing
of – a Torah scroll. This mitzvah is the very last of the Torah’s 613
mitzvot, yet at first glance the verse from which it is derived appears
to be making a far more limited request: “And now you should write
this song and teach it to the children of Israel, place it in their mouth
so that this song will be a witness against the children of Israel”
(Deuteronomy 31:19). God seems to be merely instructing Moses to
teach the song of Ha’azinu to the children of Israel, which he does in
the next portion. The Sages, though, possessed a tradition explaining
that the song referred to in the verse is actually the entire Torah;
thus, they derived the mitzvah to write the entire Torah from this
verse. This tradition makes a profound connection between Torah
and song, as Torah itself is referred to as a song!
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large, thus alluding to the word “ed” (witness), which together they
spell.
Another meaningful connection between the power of creation and
the power of prayer appears in the following verse: “These are the
generations of the heaven and earth when they were created, in the
day that God God [Hashem Elokim] made earth and heaven” (Genesis
2:4). In this verse, at first heaven is mentioned before earth and then
earth is mentioned before heaven. Furthermore, the Sages point out
that the Hebrew word םארבהב (behebaram), “when they were created,”
contains the same letters as the Hebrew word םהרבאב (be’Avraham),
“in [or through] Abraham,” (Bereishit Rabbah 12:9). The implication
being that until Abraham came to be a witness to the reality of
one God, the world was sustained almost exclusively from above.
Abraham introduced the notion of human beings becoming partners
in creation by initiating the process of Awakening from Below in his
efforts to draw nearer to God.
The Awakening from Below that we are discussing is summed up
best by the words: “with all your heart, with all your soul, and with
all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). This phrase is found in the first
paragraph of the Shema. The Hebrew word “meodecha,” translated
as “with all your might,” could also be read as me-edecha, “from your
ed” – “from your mist” – symbolically alluding to an Awakening
from Below. This derash teaches us that if we concentrate and devote
ourselves to our prayers, we have the ability to facilitate a true
arousal from below; we can harness all our innate, but concealed,
soul powers to emulate the Divine powers of creation.
We achieve this most aroused state of prayer in Neilah, the last
of Yom Kippur’s five prayers. These prayers correspond to the word
“ed” (mist), whose numerical value is also five. No matter how worn
out people are by the waning hours of the fast, with the approach
of Neilah (which literally means the closing of the gates), they all
muster their remaining energy and expend it in one last burst of
soulful prayer. Paradoxically, it is during Neilah, when the gates of
the Ten Days of Repentance are closing, that the gates of heaven
and the soul are actually open the widest. This moment truly gives
expression to the phrase “with all your might.” Like true witnesses
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