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Orchard of Delights
as the numerical value of the Torah’s first word, “bereishit” (“in the
beginning”). Dancing at the beginning of a year full of promise, we
are imbued with joy, trust, and faith in what the new year will bring
to us as individuals and as Jews. Although the script of the Torah
is written and God has rendered and sealed our judgments for the
upcoming year, Judaism firmly believes that in some sense the script
is still blank as we all continue to write our own script every day of
the year. Paradoxically, far from being closed books, our lives are
open to change; we still have the ability to determine much of what
we will experience in the upcoming year. This realization brings with
it great joy and power, as we symbolically roll the Torah back to
Bereishit and acknowledge our ability to choose to begin again.
The Talmud states that everything goes after the sealing (Berachot
12a). The manner in which we conclude any journey in life affects how
we will remember it and how it will impact on our lives. Therefore,
the Sages decided that we should conclude the yearly reading of the
Torah and the High Holiday season with great joy and celebration,
so that this energy would remain with us and carry over into the new
year.
At one of the most climatic moments during the Rosh Hashanah
and Yom Kippur prayers, we declare that repentance, prayer, and
charity have the power to nullify negative decrees. Immediately
following the Ten Days of Repentance, the joyous holidays of Sukkot
and Simchat Torah teach us that joy also has the power to nullify
negative decrees, wiping the slate clean, and allowing a truly new
year to begin.
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Ki Tavo
every phenomenon that has ever happened or will ever happen is
alluded to in the Torah. (This notion is most succinctly conveyed by
Ben Bag Bag in Pirkei Avot (5:26): “Turn it [the Torah] and turn it
again for everything is in it.”) Until recently the notion that twelve
stones could contain seventy different versions of the Torah probably
did not attract a lot of attention. Today, though, this miracle gains
fresh relevance because of the invention of the microchip. The
increasingly vast amounts of information that can be encoded on
smaller and smaller chips is alluded to by these twelve stones, which
in turn allude to the miraculous notion of “the little that contains
much” (Bereishit Rabbah 9:7).
Although by now we take technological advances as a given, it
should not cease to amaze us that machines that once filled whole
rooms and could perform a handful of functions now fit in the
palms of our hands and have the capability of performing millions
of functions per second. This miracle is alluded to by the seventy
versions of the Torah written on the twelve stones.
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