This past week saw the release of a new Harry Potter book – Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Ten years after the last and final book in the Potter series was published, we now have a new last and final Harry Potter. While I am only a peripheral Potter fan only having read to the fourth book, I wonder how this now edition will change how we feel about the characters in the series. Does this eighth book make us feel differently toward the seventh one? Does it add or subtract from what came before?
I ask these questions as we come to the end of the book of Numbers, the original last and final book of the Torah. Yes, you heard it correctly. There was a time when the Torah was four books not five. In the Seventh Century BCE, Hilkiah, an Israelite High Priest who lived during the time of Josiah, discovered a new book of the Torah (2 Kings 22), a book scholars suggest is the book of Deuteronomy. Suddenly many things had to be changed, emblems of Balaam had to be purged from the Temple, local sanctuaries outside of Jerusalem had to be destroyed. The Israelite world was in a tumult. While not a lot of changes occur in Deuteronomy from a perspective of plot, the Torah now would end with a long, extended speech by Moses and an elaborate description of the prophet’s death. This is stark contrast to the end of this week’s double portion, Motot-Masei, where the Children of Israel sit on the Plains of Moab, at the Jordan, by Jericho in preparation for the great war they will fight in the book of Joshua. How strange that these largely ignored Torah portions would have had so much more significance without Hilkiah’s intervention. It all goes to show that the placement of a book or a thought is almost as important as its content. Only time will tell where J.K. Rowling’s new creation where end up in the Harry Potter Pantheon.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Alex
Last Updated on 08/05/2016 by Marc Slonim