Why We Dance on Simchas Torah
On Pesach, we ask, “Why is this night different from all other nights?”
The answer is clear. Pesach looks back. We remember how Hashem took us out of Egypt, tell our children where we came from, and relive the beginning of our history as a nation.
On Simchas Torah, there are no Four Questions.
Perhaps that is because Simchas Torah is looking in the other direction. It is not only about what we have learned and what we have received. It is about what comes next — the Torah we still have to learn and the future we still have to build.
On Pesach, we open the Haggadah and read. On Simchas Torah, we close the Sefer Torah, wrap it in its mantle, hold it close to our hearts and dance with it.
Why do we dance with a closed Torah?
Because now it is time to move.
We dance with our feet because our feet represent movement and effort. We have completed one cycle of Torah, but we are not finished. We have to begin again and make the effort to continue learning.
No matter how much Torah we have learned, there is always more to learn. Even the greatest talmid chacham stands before the endless depth of Torah with more to discover.
The Torah is a morasha — an inheritance — but it is an inheritance that requires effort and amalus to acquire. What we learned yesterday gives us strength, but we cannot live today on the food we ate yesterday. Each day requires renewed effort.
And there is a remarkable lesson in the words of Chazal: Aron nosei et nos’av — the Aron carried those who carried it.
We may think that when we devote ourselves to Torah, we are carrying a burden. In truth, the Torah carries us. The effort we put into holding on to Torah gives us the strength to continue and to face whatever lies ahead.
We see this in some of the darkest chapters of our history.
In Auschwitz, on Simchas Torah, prisoners gathered in a dark barracks without a Sefer Torah. One man began to cry: “How can we dance without a Torah?”
The Klausenberger Rebbe put his arms around a young boy who had managed to hold on to his faith even in that terrible place. He pointed to the child and said that he was their living Torah scroll.
And they danced around him.
The Nazis could destroy Torah scrolls, but they could not destroy the Torah that remained alive in the heart of a Jewish child.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, in 1941, starving Jews pooled their last pennies to bribe a guard to obtain one single esrog.
Weak and hungry, hundreds of people stood in line for hours in a hidden alley, waiting for their turn to hold the esrog for a few moments and make the brachah.
That esrog did not fill their stomachs. But the effort they made for a mitzvah lifted their spirits above the walls of the ghetto and gave them the strength to endure.
Even when almost everything had been taken from them, they could still make an effort for a mitzvah. They could still hold on to Torah.
That is part of the meaning of Simchas Torah.
When we reach the end of the Torah, we do not stop. The moment we finish the final words, we roll the Sefer Torah back to the beginning, to Bereishis, and start again.
We can never really “finish” the Torah. Every ending is a new beginning.
And we are not the same people we were a year ago. We have faced new challenges, learned new things and grown. The Torah has not changed, but we have.
So when we begin Bereishis again, we can discover things we did not see before. The same Torah is there, but we are coming to it as different people.
That is why we dance on Simchas Torah.
We are not dancing because we have finished the Torah. We are dancing because we are beginning again.
We close the Sefer Torah, hold it close and dance with it because there is more to learn, more to do and more to build.
And as we carry the Torah, we remember the words of Chazal:
Aron nosei et nos’av.
The Aron carries those who carry it.
Chag Sameach.
