Poor, old Michael Finnegan, begin again.

Every year when reading V’Zot Habracha I get emotional. It tells us the story of the end of Moshe. G!d takes him up to see the land, he is reminded that it was promised to his ancestors, and then he dies there. And if I’m not yet emotional by that point, Devarim 35:6 always does me in:
וְלֹא־קָ֨ם נָבִ֥יא ע֛וֹד בְּיִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל כְּמֹשֶׁ֑ה.
Never again did there rise a prophet like Moses.

The book that begins with the creation of the world ends with the death of Moses. Who is never. ever. replaced. The book is closed here. Sort of. As we know, the Bible continues, but Torah does not. Mostly.

The book of Torah is shelved. Joshua takes over as the leader and the rest of the Bible begins. The story of the people continues smoothly in the book of Joshua, we see what happens next to the tribes, the land, and so on and so forth. But the story feels different from there, both from religious and academic perspectives.

This feels like how our lives are affected by death. The book of our lives that contains someone we’ve loved who dies is closed. There’s no going back and changing it, there’s no adding to it, we have to close it and we put it on a shelf. But we carry on with our own stories. Our lives look different, the central characters may change, we will have changed, but we must continue to write the next chapters and stories.

It’s even more than that, though. While it feels like Torah is a completed project at the end of Devarim, it doesn’t actually get shelved. We don’t finish tonight and then just put the torah away in the ark and say we’re done with it because we’ve heard the story. We immediately roll it back to the beginning and start telling the story again. So, too, the chapters of our lives with love ones we’ve lost are fixed, but not hidden. They are ours to return to, to read, to cherish, and to share. Like Torah, we can renew them for ourselves and share them with those around us.

Even with all of this, with our immediate return to the beginning of Torah, with knowing that the stories are there for us, all of that, I still find myself tearing up every year when this verse is read. Grief is funny like that, even indirect grief. Moshe is still gone; the ancient Israelites lost someone irreplaceable to them, my people have suffered a loss. No one has ever replaced him, but we all know his name. And his story.

The stories of loved ones we’ve lost are ours. They stay with us, they are part of our books, even as we move forward in writing new chapters and new stories. They are ours to put on a shelf, to pull out when we’re ready, and to keep telling year in and year out.