Simchat Torah, Terror, Tears, and Resilience

On the morning of last October 7th, which coincided with the festival of Simchat Torah, most Israelis became aware something was wrong when they heard the air raid sirens triggered by rockets Hamas fired at the country’s population centers, or received messages and calls from family and friends, sharing the initial fragments of what was known about the terror group’s takeover of communities near Gaza. For me, the news was delivered in an understated announcement by a local official in the small town of Bruchin, where my wife Jocelyn and I were celebrating the holiday with our son Chanan, his wife Rutie, and their three young daughters.

The centerpiece of the holiday is the seven rounds of rapturous singing and dancing with Torah scrolls at night and again the next morning. After having a wonderful time in the evening, I was enthusiastically carrying one of my granddaughters on my shoulders in the swirling circle of celebrants in the morning, in keeping with a widespread custom of involving children in the festivities. Unexpectedly, a woman from the town council stepped to the podium in the men’s section, called for silence, and announced that the country was in a state of konnenut l’milchamah, “on call for war,” and that one member of each couple should go home, get a cellphone (which they normally don’t use on the Sabbath or festivals), and be prepared for further developments. Not imagining the enormity of what was unfolding just over an hour’s drive away, I went back to the dancing, determined not to allow this somber note to interfere with my granddaughters’ joy.

As we were concluding the final prayers of the morning, I got a call from our 22-year-old son Shmuel, an officer in the Nahal infantry who was commanding forty young recruits finishing their training as combat soldiers. I knew something very serious was happening as we had never spoken by phone on a Jewish holiday. He asked if I knew what was going on, I answered that the country was “on call for war,” and he responded with words I’ll never forget: “We’re not ‘on call for war.’ Hamas has captured three towns near Gaza, we’re at war, and I expect that my platoon will be called up for the fighting in the coming weeks.”

What has happened in our family since then is representative of what has transpired in families throughout the country once it became known that two dozen communities and army bases near the Gaza border had been overrun and brutalized. Shmuel’s platoon joined the Israeli forces that entered Gaza a few weeks later and our youngest son David, who was likewise carrying out his mandatory army service, entered the war zone at the same time as a combat medic in an armored battalion. Since then, they have been in Gaza almost continually, fighting to defend Israel. Chanan, who had joined the reserves after completing his regular duty as a foot soldier more than a decade ago, spent the better part of this past year with his reserve infantry company, initially training and then taking part in the fighting in Gaza in three long stints. And so the last twelve months went by for our family, at times in a blur and at others in slow motion.

Then all of a sudden Simchat Torah was approaching and we had to decide where to celebrate this holiday whose joy would perpetually be mixed for us with the horror of Hamas’s atrocities and the ongoing tragedies of Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers killed or severely injured, and of hostages still held in unspeakable conditions. While it was tempting to stay in Jerusalem to join our own community’s marking of this sorrow-laden festival, I felt a powerful urge to go back to the same town and synagogue where we had been last year.

Above and beyond Bruchin being a great place to celebrate this holiday with young, idealistic families, I had an instinctive reaction that you have to respond to terror by refusing to allow its perpetrators to derail your plans. Going back to Bruchin for Simchat Torah felt like a small act of defiance and an affirmation that Hamas’s acts of barbarism and its leaders’ pledges to repeat them would not keep us away from our family. In addition, Chanan was back in Gaza, and I couldn’t bear the idea that his daughters would be deprived of the chance to join the circle of celebrants from a shoulder-top perch provided by a loving relative. There was also a deeper reason, which is that this Simchat Torah would be the most challenging one I had ever celebrated: we were called upon to be happy because it’s a festival and we cannot allow Hamas to steal it from us, but we had to be somber because we cannot forget the 1,200 people for whom we were marking the one-year yahrzeit and the thousands more whose lives have been lost or permanently scarred since then. There was nowhere I could imagine being better suited for that emotional duality than Bruchin, which had been the scene of such great joy the year before, as well as the place where profound sadness entered our lives.

As good fortune would have it, our son Shmuel was out of Gaza on a short break and able to join us—symbolically important as it was his call the year before that had first made us aware of the war, and practically significant as he provided another (much stronger) set of shoulders on which to carry his nieces. He, Jocelyn, and I had of course been in Bruchin since the previous Simchat Torah, but the handful of changes at Chanan and Rutie’s home since last year struck me with particular force when we arrived this time. At the entrance was a doormat, a gift from Chanan’s battalion, saying Kamah tov shebata habaytah, “How good it is that you came home,” the family’s message to the returning soldier whenever he returned from the war zone. On the front door was an illustrated sign, drawn by his daughters, saying simply, Baruch Haba, Aba—”Welcome back, Dad.” Most beautiful was what waited inside: Chanan and Rutie’s fourth child, aptly named Menachem Tzion (“the comforter of Zion”), born a month after the war began and now nearing his first birthday—a poignant reminder that regardless of what our enemies do, we will continue to affirm life and grow our communities and our country, one precious child at a time.

I could not have asked for a better place to mark this holiday. In keeping with guidelines developed in Israel in recent months by public figures, rabbis, and educators, each of the seven rounds of dancing was dedicated to a particular ideal or to a group of people contributing above and beyond to sustaining the country. In Bruchin, the first round was to honor the Torah and the festival celebrating it, the second was for the State of Israel, and the third was for the IDF. During each of these, as Shmuel and I carried Talia, Neomi, and Ora, I was ecstatic to be dancing with them again and contributing to their happiness. But the joy would quickly give way to a feeling of sadness that their father was on duty in the Netzarim Corridor of Gaza, doubtless missing his family. That momentary sorrow was in turn replaced by the relief of knowing he was alive and well, and with God’s help would be back with his family, on a break from the war, in just over a week. This emotion, too, passed rapidly as I thought of all the children whose parents had been killed in the past year and who would never be reunited with them. And so it went, while all the while I continued dancing and smiling so that my granddaughters, too young to deal with this swirling mosaic of emotions, would experience only the joy of the holiday.

In the fourth round of singing and dancing, however, the floodgates of sadness opened up. It was dedicated to the hostages and their families, and jarringly for a holiday marked by perpetual motion, the dancing ceased. Standing in a circle, we sang over and over the hauntingly beautiful words of Acheinu Kol Beit Yisrael, a centuries-old prayer in which we plead to God, saying “Our brethren, all the house of Israel, who are now in distress and captivity, whether they are at sea or on land: May the Omnipresent have mercy on them, bring them from distress to relief, from darkness to light, from captivity to redemption, now, speedily, and soon.” The unexpected lack of motion felt to me as if time itself was standing still—which for the families of the hostages, whose pain is unfathomable, it surely has. I couldn’t see the other adults through my own tears, but I imagine there were not a lot of dry eyes to be found.

After we shifted gears and completed the three remaining rounds of joyous dancing, we moved to the Torah readings that furnish the reason for celebrating Simchat Torah. The holiday marks the completion of the annual cycle of studying, in weekly portions, the entirety of the Torah, the Five Books of Moses. The congregation first hears the final two chapters of Deuteronomy read from one Torah scroll and, after a brief pause, a second scroll is opened and the first 34 verses in Genesis, laying out the story of creation, are read. On this holiday, we are not only celebrating a milestone, the completion of reading the Torah as a community, but also marking our love of learning Torah, which does not allow us to wait more than a matter of minutes before we are drawn to start again from the beginning.

This year, though, the transition from the end of the Torah to its opening carried additional meaning. As poignantly explained by Rabbi Avi Poupko (in a Times of Israel podcast available here), Deuteronomy ends on a tragic note: the greatest leader the Jewish people has ever known, Moses, dies without having reached the promised land, and we are told that never again would a prophet arise as great as he. Yet we immediately pick up Genesis and read the story of creation, when the world is filled with hope, when God sees what he has created and declares it to be good—and in so doing, calls upon us to see the world that way and, in keeping with the command to imitate him, to do all we can to make it so.

Thinking about the Simchat Torah we just observed, I now appreciate it as the holiday celebrating resilience. This past year began with the most horrific day the Jewish people has known since the Holocaust. Looking back at the days, weeks, and months after last year’s Simchat Torah, we had to carry out the sacred work of recreating—rebuilding our unity as a people, our faith in the IDF as the defender of our nation, and our ability to deter our enemies in a very dangerous neighborhood. On Simchat Torah we embraced our sorrow, considered what has been done to bring light in the darkness, and cast our gaze forward in an optimistic spirit at the path before us. That ability to look squarely at tragedy and yet emerge with hope is, I believe, the essence of Simchat Torah, and the foundation of the resilience symbolized by this holiday and embodied by the people celebrating it.