Parshas V’Zos HaBracha: The Shabbosless Parsha

This Shabbos is Chol HaMoed Sukkos. We’ll sit in our sukkahs, eat our meals beneath a sky of bamboo and stars, and let the Shabbos Queen rest inside a hut that was never built to last.

But the last parsha of the Torah won’t join us this Shabbos.

V’Zos HaBracha waits to be read on Simchas Torah next Wednesday.

It is the only parsha that never has its own Shabbos. In Chutz La’Aretz, Simchas Torah can never fall on Shabbos. 
In Israel, where Shemini Atzeres and Simchas Torah are the same day, it can fall on Shabbos — yet the reading still belongs to Yom Tov, not the weekly cycle.

That unsettled rhythm matches the parsha itself. These are Moshe’s last words: blessings for every tribe, a song for Hashem, then his climb up Har Nevo. 
He sees the Land but never enters it. He dies outside, and his grave is hidden. 
The Midrash says if you looked from the valley it seemed above, and from the mountain it seemed below. Always shifting. Just out of reach.

Moshe doesn’t settle in the Land. 
His grave doesn’t settle in one place. 
His parsha doesn’t settle in the weekly calendar.

That unsettledness is not a flaw. It is the key. The final blessings that Moshe gives us don’t find their Shabbos — their place of rest — in a weekly reading. 
They find their place when the Torah is lifted from the ark and pressed into our arms. 
When we carry it, when we circle with it, when we dance.

On Simchas Torah, we go back to echo the way we received the Torah. Naaseh before Nishma — first the joy of committing, dancing it into our bones, so that the words we return to will stay with us. 
Only then can we complete the reading cycle, and start it back from the beginning again. Ready to internalize it on a deeper level, fueled by the new layer of joy inside.

The shifting grave, the hovering parsha, the dancing circle — they are all the same truth. 
Holiness isn’t locked to one day or one monument. Blessing comes alive, and finds us where we are, if only we carry ourselves forward. 
With Torah. 
With joy.

From the sukkah to the circle, from Shabbos to Simchas Torah, may we carry the Torah with joy and let it carry us too.

Good Shabbos and a Gut Moed.
– Berke