Imagine sitting through a two-hour movie only to have the screen go dark just before the final scene, or reading hundreds of pages of a great novel only for it to stop before the main conflict is resolved. We would find it maddening. Human beings have a powerful need for closure: once a story sets a destination, we expect it to arrive.
Which makes the end of the Torah deeply strange.
For much of the Torah, the Jewish people have been traveling toward one destination: the Promised Land. God tells Moses to take the Israelites out of Egypt and to bring them there. Moses devotes the rest of his life to that mission.
And then, in V’Zot HaBerachah—the Torah’s final parsha—just as the goal is within reach, the Torah ends.
Moses climbs Mount Nebo, and God shows him the land. But while he can see it, he will never enter. As the Torah draws to a close, Moses dies on the other side of the Jordan, without the Israelites having reached their destination. What happened?
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argues that this is by design. The Torah repeatedly refuses to give us the kind of closure we expect from a conventional story. God promises Abraham the Land of Canaan, yet Genesis ends with Jacob and his family in Egypt. The Torah begins the journey back, but it ends before the Israelites arrive. The Bible as a whole concludes with the righteous King Cyrus permitting the Jews to return to Jerusalem and build the Second Temple—but before we actually see them properly rebuild it.
As Rabbi Sacks puts it, “The Jewish story ends without an ending. It closes without closure.” Again and again, the Jewish story ends before the story is finished.
The question is: why?
Perhaps it’s because the Torah is teaching us that the most important work is rarely ours to finish.
Moses devoted his life to bringing the Jewish people to the Promised Land, but he never went in. It was left to his disciple Joshua to continue what Moses had begun. As the rabbinic work Ethics of the Fathers teaches, “It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”
Rabbi Sacks puts the challenge sharply: “The greatest mistake we can make is to do nothing because we cannot do everything.”
That may also explain the strange way we celebrate Simchat Torah. We finish the Torah and immediately begin again. The story never really ends; instead, one generation hands it to the next.
The Torah’s final lesson may be that we are not asked to complete the story. We are only asked to move it ahead.
Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Sinensky is director of the Rabbi Norman Lamm Legacy digital archive and director of Judaic Studies at Main Line Classical Academy. A member of the inaugural cohort of Sacks Scholars, he has edited over fifty books. He also publishes Reasonable Judaism on Substack and hosts a daily WhatsApp Torah audio series, From the Beginning.
This essay was written as part of our collaboration with The Rabbi Sacks Legacy Sacks Scholars.
