We think of the Torah as a closed scroll that sits waiting and ready in the synagogue ark. When opened, this version of Torah, displays only a few columns from the portion we are reading that particular week of the year. And, while that is one way to think of the Torah, that is not its preferred state. To really see the Five Books of Moses you must picture it the way we see it at CSS on Simchat Torah, open from end to end, held lovingly by our membership, the end and the beginning not on opposite ends, but connected in a large circle.
Our ancestors saw life not as a linear path, but as a circle, with ups and downs and in between – one that always returned to its starting position. I think of the wisdom of a congregant from my student pulpit in Atlanta, who counted her years in eighteen year blocks. Instead of seeing her age as an independent number, she saw it as a series of ever flowing cycles. In this way she was not getting older in the traditional sense, but embarking on ever deeper journeys of discovery. For her, how old she was mattered less than what place her current age fell on the Jewish magic number chai, eighteen, representing life.
As Ben Bag Bag tells us in Pirkei Avot, “turn it, turn it, everything is in it.” Each year we read the same words of Torah at roughly the same point of the year. The words are the same, but we are not. As we begin Genesis again this Shabbat, do not think of it as an abrupt start, but part of a continuum, one that started long before we came into this world and will continue long after we are gone from it. Open up the scroll of your own life, see the whole picture. As Professor Morrie Schwartz said in Tuesdays with Morrie: “The truth is, part of me is every age. I’m a three-year-old, I’m a five-year-old, I’m a thirty-seven-year-old, I’m a fifty-year-old. I’ve been through all of them, and I know what it’s like. I delight in being a child when it’s appropriate to be a child. I delight in being a wise old man when it’s appropriate to be a wise old man. Think of all I can be! I am every age, up to my own.”