When we open the ark, we sing, “vayehi binsoah haaron…” “With the moving of the ark, Moses would say, ‘Arise, Ad-nai, so that your enemies be scattered, and those who hate You flee from before you.’” When the Torah is returned to the ark, we recite, “And with its resting, he would say, ‘Ad-nai, return to the myriad families of Israel…’”
These two phrases are actually two consecutive verses in the Torah, Numbers 10:35-36. And they are unique, because in the Torah text itself they are marked out by 2 reverse nun letters, forming a kind of parentheses. Some commentators even go so far as to say that they constitute a whole separate book of the Bible (in other words, they make it 6 Books of Moses, as opposed to 5 Books of Moses).
Even without going quite so far, they clearly are meant to be seen as a unit. Rabbi Judith Hauptmann sees them as an inclusio, a fancy way of saying that the entire Torah service is “wrapped” in these two verses, one at the beginning and one at the end.
The question we have to ask is, “Why?”
At its simplest contextual level, the Torah is describing G-d, represented by the ark, going off to war, and then returning victorious. Used in the context of the prayer service, the liturgy is reminding us that the Torah is not just good literature, and not merely personally edifying. It is a challenge, a call to battle so to speak, asking us to take the ideas and values it embodies and bring them out to a world that is often reluctant to hear them, if not actively opposing them. And the verse of return can be seen as an expression of hope, the hope that we eventually will achieve a kind of tranquility when Torah values help the world become civilized.
This is itself quite admirable, but there is a deeper level still. An ancient Gnostic text, the Gospel of Thomas (50), asks the rhetorical question, “What is the sign that you have been touched by G-d?” And the answer is: “Movement and Rest.” What does this mean? Movement and rest encompass all of reality. Those who accept and embrace this understand something about the Oneness of G-d, Who embodies and encompasses “Movement and Rest.” In other words, “Doing and Being.”
The story is told of the great pianist Arthur Rubenstein. After a concert, a woman gushed, “You played every note perfectly.” Rubenstein replied, “Madame, any competent pianist can play every note perfectly. What I do is play the space between the notes.” The inclusion of the these verses is meant to remind us that we need to play both.