Why is this Simchat Torah different from all other Smachot Torah?

This may seem like the wrong question at the wrong time, but it’s not. With October 7th a week away, Israelis are discussing how they are going to honor the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ savage attack on innocent Israelis that ignited what has become the longest war in modern Israel’s 76-year history.

The High Holidays, beginning with Rosh HaShanah and ending a month later with Simchat Torah, are normally the time of year for personal introspection. On Yom Kippur we spend 25 hours looking inward at our personal failures from the previous year. Then, after the introspection is over we celebrate Simcha Torah. It is literally the time when the newly created, biblical nation of Israel went to meet its Creator. It was there, on Mount Sinai, in approximately 1300 BCE, that Israel received its set of instructions for how they would go forward and repair the world. And it is the framework Jews have normally followed ever since.

The problem is that this year Simchat Torah will be anything but normal. 

We are grief stricken. We are traumatized. We are very angry. We are exhausted. We are still coming to grips with what a nice day October 6th, 2023 was. How willfully blind can eight million people and a world-ranked army be? Don’t bother answering; we will be discussing that question for at least the next 50 years.

Walking to synagogue on October 7th, 2023 it was very clear that something was wrong. First the sirens sounded at 06:30 in the morning. Next there were men who would normally be in synagogue ppreparing to dance on the streets with the Torah scrolls, throwing their olive drab duffle bags into their cars and driving away. And there were doctors outside our synagogue still wearing their prayer shawls and talking in hushed voices on their phones. Then they also left the synagogue for who knows where. 

All through our neighbourhood young men who would normally be sleepily walking to synagogue were in their uniforms dropping into the sanctuary to say good-bye to their parents before they left. Left for where? It still was not completely clear to many of us what was going on.

Simcha Torah, as its name translates to, “happiness of the Torah”, is normally a time of undiluted joy. It’s a time for new beginnings and optimism. It’s been that way for more than 3300 years. But not anymore. That train has left the station and it isn’t coming back. 

Most of those young men didn’t know where they were going either. My son walked into the kitchen in his uniform saying: “I’ll probably be back tomorrow.” Ha. That turned out to be the misstatement of the day. My other son, also in his uniform, was dropping his brother at his base before driving to his own base. 

It was only later in the day that the impact of what had happened that morning started to dawn on us; Not to mention the absurdity of the “see-you-tomorrow” comment eight hours earlier.

Within a day, the funerals began. The first one was actually like a hard punch in the solar plexus. I must have read the announcement five times because I could not fully absorb the message. A boy who grew up with my son. His first friend in nursery school. A wonderful young man. A loving family. Now a captain in an elite army unit, he bent down to help one of his soldiers who had been shot, and then he was gone. 

If he had been the only one, maybe we could have mentally found some rationalization that we could live with. Mental calisthenics are very powerful during war. Within two weeks my adult children had been to more funerals than some people attend in a lifetime.

Now here we are one year later. We are not really sure what this October 7th is going to look like. Twelve hundred innocent souls murdered, severely abused and taken hostage. At least one suicide because a young man watched from the bushes as his friend was dragged away and he could not save her. There are hundreds of seriously maimed soldiers whose lives have changed irrevocably. The number of soldiers killed is still climbing. 

Why is this Simchat Torah going to be different than all others? We are not the same people that we were a year ago. Simchat Torah will never again feel like the happiness of the Torah. Going forward it will trigger the most painful memories for all caring Jews of this generation. This Simchat Torah isn’t going to be like any other Simchat Torah in history and we pray there will never be another like it again.