Vezot Haberachah

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.

Vezot Haberachah is unique in being read not on an ordinary Shabbat but on the festival of Simchat Torah, when the annual cycle is completed and immediately begun again from Genesis, so that the account of Moses' death is followed at once by the words 'In the beginning.' The custom expresses the tradition's ideal of Torah study as ceaseless, with no true end. The portion's closing tribute names no prophet in Israel since like Moses (34:10).

Simchat Torah itself, the festival on which this closing portion is read, is not a biblical institution: Deuteronomy legislates nothing about it, and the celebration developed only in the early medieval period, when Babylonian Jewish communities of around the ninth and tenth centuries, already keeping an annual reading cycle that finished on the second day of Shemini Atzeret, began marking that day's completion with dancing and rejoicing over the scroll, a practice that had acquired its familiar name by around the eleventh century. The custom of immediately opening a new cycle at Genesis the moment Deuteronomy ends is itself the practical expression of the older rabbinic dictum that Torah study has no true terminus, only a turning. The custom of dancing with the Torah scrolls on Simchat Torah, hakafot, in which the scrolls are carried in joyful circuits around the synagogue, developed alongside the festival itself in the medieval period and is not mentioned in any earlier source describing the completion of the annual reading cycle.