DEUTERONOMY XXIX:9-XXX:20

HIDDEN LEVELS OF THE TORAH

Hershel Schachter, Rosh Kolel of Yeshiva University, quotes a writing by Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin, one of the most distinguished disciples of the Vilna Gaon. According to Rabbi Chaim, the Gaon held that the Chumash Devarim, the fifth of the five books of the Torah, consists of ten Sidrotdetermined by the weekly reading and that the sections of Nitsavim and Vayelech should be considered as a single unit.

According to the Talmud, the world will last for 6 millennia, which will then give way to a  universal Shabbat. These six millennia are divided into 3 stages. The first of these is called tohu, because it refers to the disorder and anarchy that characterized it. The second stage, which began with the appearance of the three patriarchs, is based on the Torah received at Mount Sinai, a document in which God manifested His Will to Humanity through the Jewish people and specified the path that must be traveled to conquer and eliminate the tohu, the chaos that reigned in the beginning. 

Today we are in the third stage: redemption, the messianic moment. The calculation is as follows. Patriarch Avraham was born in 1948 after the creation of the universe (we start from the reference that we are currently in the year 5763, according to Jewish tradition) and began his mission to propagate the monotheistic ideal at the age of 52. 

According to the Talmud, the nomenclature used for the document that Moses wrote in accordance with the express Will of God is the TorahShebichtav, the Written Torah, although simultaneously the ShebealpehTorah, the Oral Torah that collects the different explanations of the Mitsvot, was developed, ordinances and stories contained in the written document. The Torah Shebealpeh was finally formulated in written form in the text that is called the Mishnah. The author of this Mishnah was Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi, who passed away in 220 C.E. If we consider that after his death some amendments were still made, we arrive at the year 240, which completes the second period of 2 millennia. So the year 2240 of the Common Era will mark the end of the third period: the days of Moshiach.

The Vilna Gaon held that the 10 Sidrot of Devarim represent the last 10 centuries of humanity, and in each of these sections you can find some specific message about the specific century. In a way, the Torah foretells the events that unfolded at each stage. A notable example is the fact that the Sidra (usually referred to as Parshah) Ki Tavo, which corresponds to the century between 1840 and 1490 CE, contains the Tochacha, which consists of a series of warnings about the disasters that will befall the Jewish people if they stray from the path of Torah . The century in question includes numerous pogroms and the beginning of the Naziperiod, which produced genocide: the greatest destruction in the history of humanity.

The chapters contained in Nitsavim and Vayelech mention the coming conquest of the Promised Land, the necessity of teshuvah: the return to ancestral roots, and the Mitzvah to write the text of the Torah. By taking into account the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the intensive phenomenon of the Baalei teshuvah, the thousands of young people who return day by day to the tradition of their ancestors, and the vigorous resurgence of Torah study  in our day, one can see a direct correspondence between the biblical text and current events.

Exceptional figures such as the Vilna Gaon, possessors of a privileged intellect and profound spirituality, can see more clearly the correspondence between the Sacred Scriptures and the development of history. Nonetheless, it is a sobering intellectual exercise that invites one to read the Torah with greater attention to the messages that are not obvious during a light reading.