A little Simchat Torah teaching: Many of us know the teaching often mentioned at Simchat Torah about the first and last letters of Torah – ל and ב. As we finish the end of the Torah with “כל־ישראֵל” and then loop back to the start “בראשית ברא אלהים” we can read those letters as “לב” – heart in Hebrew. Many a drash/sermon has mentioned this hidden heart living in the between spaces of the end and the beginning.
So now I offer a similar teaching. The first word of Torah is known to be a bit of a grammar oddity, a construct called the s’michut that inherently should be attached to another word. And yet, this opening word is alone – “בראשית” in the beginning of ….? Of what?
If we take as tradition that the first and last letter should be read together and the vast space between elided into the word, then I suggest we close this first word with the final. “In the beginning” of what? In the beginning of “all yisrael.”
And what rests between these two words? What is the beginning of all yisrael? Torah.
And so we find, the beginning of all yisrael is Torah and our collective heart lives in the white fire between the words.
eish zarah 