Joy on Simchat Torah

For the last three years, it’s been hard to approach Simchat Torah unambivalently.

Until 2023, it was a time of pure joy. In my shul, the dancing is somehow both wild and reverent; it’s literally Torah-centric because there’s a sefer Torah at the center of each circle. It’s loud and exuberant; we really can feel the floor shake beneath our stamping, kicking feet. The music’s always a niggun, played over and over and over until it seems like the world is nothing but that whirling music.

It’s the culmination of Elul and then the chaggim, of the solemnity of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and the physicality of Sukkot and Hoshanah Rabbah. It’s a release from the obligation of those days and the desire to stay with them just a little longer.

But in the United States, Simchat Torah was the day after October 7. We knew that something terrible had happened, although we did not know the breadth and depth of the horror. During the next three years our awareness of the horror increasingly has been tempered by life as normal — life as hope — resuming. And that’s a good thing.

Grief is too powerful, terrifying, and destabilizing for most people to be able to live within it for very long. That leads to madness. Instead, we keep letting hope in, at first little bits at a time, and then more and more, without letting go of grief.

I know, from my own personal experience of grief, that it can sandbag you. You can avoid it when you avoid the places you know it might lurk — birthdays, anniversaries, places or colors or songs or kinds of food. But sometimes it’s a hole right on the path in front of you, covered so that you don’t see it until you’re in it.

Then you’re in a dark, airless, slimy hole. The walls are mud. You can’t climb them. You can’t get out. You know that you’ve been abandoned there for life. And then, somehow, you are out. You don’t know how. You don’t know why. You don’t know for how long. But you do know that you can take pleasure in the light and the air. You can breathe.

Grief is like that.

We as Americans have felt grief at Simchat Torah before. My community, on the Upper West Side, used to dance in the street that evening, and we’d sometimes venture out of the building in large circles in the morning as well. But that was forbidden after September 11.

That memory has faded, but the 25th anniversary of that massive act of evil has brought it back, where it mixes with the more recent memories of the massive act of evil that was October 7. All that death.

But still, as the stories in this week’s paper show, there is hope. We do not live in the shadows. We mourn and we grieve and then we dance and then we go on and we live.

We wish our readers joy on this Simchat Torah.

—JP

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