The Joy of Being Jewish: Simchat Torah This Year

So after Ezra finished his aliyah to the Torah, Anshe Sholom B’nai Israel Congregation in Chicago burst into singing and dancing. As I remember it, the dancing circle felt like it extended around the entire perimeter of the sanctuary. It was a moment. By that point, my dad was already moving more slowly, so I stayed with him at his seat. And I will never forget the tears in his eyes (they’re coming to me now, too) when he turned to me and said, “I bless you that you should experience the kind of joy that I’m feeling right now.”

Over the holiday season I read an article in the Jewish Review of Books entitled “On Torahs and Children” by Harvey Goldberg, a professor emeritus in sociology and anthropology at Hebrew University. Goldberg explores the thick associations in Jewish tradition between Torah scrolls and our progeny. In many communities, for instance, a wimpel–a decorated sash with which to wrap the scroll–was created out of the swaddling cloth used during a baby boy’s circumcision. Following Maimonides, many communities had the custom of bringing children to lick Hebrew letters covered in honey, so they might associate Torah with sweetness. The customary blessing for children is that they will grow up to a life of “Torah, huppah (marriage and family), and good deeds.”

And then, as Goldberg notes, there’s Simchat Torah. If my own synagogue is any reflection, children are absolutely central on this holiday. Parents and older siblings put little children on their shoulders during the communal dancing. Kids make special flags to wave. Adults pass out candy (a modernized version of the honey custom). And we reserve the penultimate aliyah of the entire Torah–Moses’s final blessings to the children of Israel–for kol hana’arim, a special aliyah when every child is invited up to the bimah under an impromptu chuppah of tallitot held overhead by grownups, after which everyone sings Jacob’s blessing to his grandchildren (Gen. 48:6). It is, without question, the most child-centered day of the year at shul.

Or perhaps it might be more accurate to say that it’s the most intergenerational day of the year–because it’s not simply about centering the children. It’s also about the children witnessing and experiencing their parents, grandparents, and other grownups singing and dancing. One good friend, a rabbi who is 70 years old, came up to me giddy with excitement to share, “I got to be the candy man!” Simchat Torah is as much for the adults who center the children as it is for the children themselves.

And, this year in particular, the intergenerational nature of the holiday encompassed the inclusion, within our celebrations, of both latent and explicit acknowledgements of our sadness. At our shul, we dedicated the sixth hakafah (song and dance set) to all those who could not dance this year because they were killed, injured, or kidnapped on, and in the year since, last Simchat Torah. Instead of dancing, we stood in a circle and sang songs of hope and courage, and a lot of us cried. It was important for our children to see that too, and for us to know that we could share it with them.

A Hasidic teaching of this season goes something like this: The destination of all the fall holidays, stretching as far back as Tisha b’Av or even the 17th of Tammuz, is Simchat Torah. The shofar of Elul and Rosh Hashanah, the fasting and praying and forgiveness of Yom Kippur, the sukkah and the lulav and the joy of Sukkot: all of it is but preparation for reciting the words from Deuteronomy 4:35 that open the special liturgy of Simchat Torah: “You yourself have been made to see, to know that YHWH is God; there is no other reality than Divinity” (my poetic translation).

There is, perhaps, a temptation to experience this teaching in a profoundly internal and individual way–deep in meditation in the woods, or sitting on a mountaintop. Yet I think the Hasidic masters themselves actually had in mind the kind of child-centered, multi-generational circus of Simchat Torah singing and dancing. It is precisely in the thickness of these communal bonds, in experiencing past, present, and future embodied and jumbled together, that I, at any rate, most fully sense the presence and reality of divinity. I think that’s the joy my father felt during the dancing at my nephew’s bar mitzvah: the awareness that the Holy One really is present and moving through us.

I was blessed with deeply experiencing my own moment of that awareness over Simchat Torah this year as I watched my youngest child, now 11, smiling and singing and dancing with his friends throughout the festivities (the candy still helps, too). At one point he found me and, with a beaming smile and not a hint of irony, said to me, “Abba: It is so great to be Jewish. If we weren’t Jewish, we wouldn’t have any of this!” I gave him a hug and a very happy kiss on the forehead.

Ashreinu: Even in a year like this one; even at a time when our worst traumatic memories as a people have been awakened; even in the midst of all the uncertainty and doubt and fear so many are feeling–what an incredible blessing is this inheritance of ours, what a privilege it is to be a Jew.