Simchat Torah, which we’ll celebrate together this Friday night, is one of my favorite holidays. I love how it holds so much: joy and playfulness as we dance with the Torahs; awe as we work together as a community to hold up a completely unrolled Torah and look at its words; and the promise of new beginnings. On Simchat Torah, we welcome our community’s newest learners, and we chant the Torah’s final verses and opening verses one after the other, almost without pause.
Unlike our other fall holidays, mentions of which can all be found in the Torah itself (albeit in much earlier forms — Rosh Hashanah as a quirky shofar holiday, Yom Kippur as a day of rest and nebulous “self-affliction,” and Sukkot as one of the three major pilgrimage festivals of the year), Simchat Torah is a relatively “new” Jewish holiday — it came into being as we know it now in the Middle Ages. This is probably at least partially because it took Jewish communities around the world hundreds of years to fully standardize a cycle of reading the entire Torah in one year. Simchat Torah, the holiday of restarting the Torah, couldn’t have been invented before this standardization.
But once the annual Torah cycle was standardized, what seems especially neat and notable was how communities chose to characterize the day on which we begin again. Simchat Torah literally means “joy of Torah” — it’s a time of celebration. Learning, in Jewish tradition, isn’t just useful or meaningful: it’s also (we hope) joyful, a source of fun, and inspiration. And Torah itself (the five Books of Moses and also “Torah” as in the entire Jewish wisdom tradition, past present and future) isn’t only a source of obligation: it is also a source of celebration, and possibility. On Simchat Torah, as a community, we embody the joy that Torah can bring to our lives.
We also embody the way that Torah needs all of us, our whole community, in order to be present in our lives and in the world. When we unroll the Torah after dancing with it, we could hypothetically put it on a long table or similar — we’d still be able to see it, and chant from it. But instead, very gently, on Simchat Torah, we each play a small part in holding it up. And it’s light work, when we all do it. Thousands of years of tradition and memory and hope and possibility can always be brought into our lives and the world. It just takes all of us lending a hand.
One of my deepest hopes as a rabbi is for every person who wants a relationship with Torah, with Jewish tradition and Jewish community, to feel empowered to seek it. To know that it’s never too late to start, or pick something up wherever we last left it. And to know that each of us are needed, exactly as we are — we all have unique things to learn and teach and do in the world, small-t torah (teachings) that only we can offer.
So I hope you’ll come dance with us this Friday night, as we embrace the joy and the promise and the hope of our tradition — physically and viscerally, and more abstractly too. Together, we can begin again.
Chag Sameach, and Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Alexandra Stein
