In the synagogue the Torah is read aloud in a fixed annual cycle of fifty-four weekly portions (parashiyot), one each Shabbat morning, with certain adjacent portions doubled in ordinary years so the sequence fits the calendar. Each portion is named for a distinctive word near its opening and is paired with a haftarah, a reading from the Prophets. The cycle closes and restarts on Simchat Torah. Vezot Haberachah ('And This Is the Blessing', Deuteronomy 33:1-34:12) closes the Torah with Moses' tribe-by-tribe blessing of Israel and the account of his death on Mount Nebo, in sight of the land he could not enter, buried by God in an unknown grave. It is the only portion not read on an ordinary Shabbat.
Deuteronomy's final chapters pose a puzzle rabbinic tradition confronted directly: how could Moses have written 'and Moses the servant of the Lord died there' while still alive to write it? The Talmud (Bava Batra 15a) records two answers, that Joshua wrote the last eight verses after Moses' death, or, in Rabbi Shimon's view, that Moses wrote them in advance with tears, God dictating what had not yet occurred, a dispute later commentators have used to frame the wider question of Mosaic authorship without abandoning it. Textually, Deuteronomy is one of the books the great Aleppo Codex does not preserve at all, its Torah portion lost, which makes the complete, if slightly later, Leningrad Codex of 1008 CE the primary Masoretic witness to this closing chapter and to the poem of Haazinu before it.