For me, Simchat Torah is now forever fused with Yom Kippur, or rather, to be precise, the Yom Kippur War.
Last year, before it became the Simchat Torah — Oct. 7 — that it turned out to be and forever will be; “the day we were attacked and the worst day since the Holocaust and the day the war began,” it was just mere days since the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War.
After the late holiday meal and post meal chatter and shmoozing, I stayed up extremely late reading a booklet dedicated to the Yom Kippur War’s anniversary. It was replete with historical articles, but also personal perspectives of people sharing their real-life memories.
One of the repeated motifs was the shock factor, and how the sacred Yom Kippur prayers were interrupted by young soldiers quietly departing, setting their tallit, their prayer shawls, aside, in exchange for military regalia; rushing urgently to their military bases.
War. On Yom Kippur. As Am Yisrael stood, fasting, praying, enveloped in white, steeped in a different realm — unaware, as our enemies attacked mercilessly. The fate of the Jewish people hanging in the balance.
Piercing my post Yom Kippur reading was the siren that cut through my sleep. Initially, i was confused. It felt like I was dreaming and perhaps re-enacting some of what I had read.
Pretty quickly I pivoted, understanding that this was no dream about 1973, but a reality unfolding right here in 2023.
Just this time, it was a different holiday. It was Simchat Torah.
And forever, these two holidays, are now historically linked and intertwined in their historical destiny.
Surprise attacks.
As we would later learn, this time, within Israel itself, grisly barbaric savage attacks the likes of which we had not seen in generations, and whose brutality seemed to belong to a different more primal animalistic undeveloped era of human history. Yet it was upon us. In 2023.
It all felt like a thunderclap out of the blue, hitting us with a force, a jolt, like nothing my generation had ever before experienced.
Like on Yom Kippur in 1973, within hours, prayers were interrupted. Young soldiers were called up. The whir of cars driving rising from the normally silent Sabbath observed streets.
Towards late afternoon as the day deepened, one of my nephews whispered to me, “It’s bad . . . there might be some kidnappings involved . . . a lot have been killed . . . possibly up to 70 . . . ”
The horror.
We were still comparing the terrible news to our Oct. 6 perspective of tragedy.
Simchat Torah. The word joy is literally part of the name of the holiday itself.
And yet, famously, Kohelet, the Book of Ecclesiastes which we had just then read and again now this year have just read, poignantly expresses how to everything there is a season.
There is a time for everything and a season for everything under the heavens
A time to be born and a time to die
A time to plant and a time to uproot
A time to kill and a time to heal
A time to tear down and a time to build
A time to weep and a time to laugh
A time to mourn and a time to dance . . .
A time to tear and a time to mend
A time to be silent and a time to speak
A time to love and a time to hate
A time for war and a time for peace
Traditionally, on Simchat Torah, it’s “a time to dance.” In fact, there are usually seven exuberant encirclements of dancing around the Torah.
Yet instead, on this day, we were encircled with responding in “a time for war.” And those encirclements of war, of funerals, of shivas, of weeping, of anguish, only continued to encircle us throughout this past year since that painful Simchat Torah one year ago.
But within these encirclements were also moments of “a time to dance.” The euphoria when captives who were taken on Simchat Torah were then released, we danced, we cried with tears of joy.
This past year has turned out to be a bit of a manic year, filled with peaks of tremendous highs of joy and relief, amidst the overall and very steep depths of pain. As it turned out, at times it felt like instead of the orderly poem in the Book of Ecclesiastes, there was a collision of “seasons” and of “A time
. . . ,” where different contrasting emotions and moments bleeding one into the other, “seasons” no longer so clean-cut or compartmentalized, in the way the famous Ecclesiastes poem delineated them.
A year ago, on that day, prayers ended at 4:30 in the afternoon. With people getting wind of something terrible unfolding — yet not at all yet grasping its scope, songs of prayer and pleading were tucked in between the official dancing encirclements, the hakafot, as they are called, so that the prayer service was stretched much later than normally.
As this one year Simchat Torah anniversary approaches, things are still very raw over here. We are still at war. And as someone serving said to me today, “In fact, we are only at the beginning, with Iran still . . . ,” his voice trailing off never completing his sentence, leaving it hanging in the air.
This same person was the cantor for the high holiday prayers, at a secular kibbutz, this past Yom Kippur. He noticed someone young, a young woman in her twenties, breaking down repeatedly each time Kaddish was recited.
In speaking with her after the prayers, she shared, “I was born in Kibbutz Be’eri. Many of my childhood friends have been murdered. . . Also, my role in the IDF, it’s informing families of loved ones who have been killed in battle . . . ”
While the miracles we have recently witnessed are enormously inspiring, they are interlaced with tragic news, day by day, of precious truly heroic young soldiers — whose faces and personalities we’ve come to know and feel close to — dying before their lives even began.
The anguish of the hostages is a national albatross that weighs Israel down. Even without formally intending to, or making a pilgrimage to what is now knows as “Hostage Square,” the plight and visages of the hostages is inescapable, as you drive down the streets or almost everywhere public you turn, you see signs reflecting their fate and their faces. Your eyes lock eyes with the agony of the hostages relatives as you might be in the car at a red light and they are right outside your car window protesting.
So many aspects of our prayers that up until last Simchat Torah, I read and internalized on a philosophical level, have throughout this past year in this new post-Simchat Torah 2023-Oct. 7 world, become literal. Whenever I would read the reference to captivity in prayers, for example after the recitation of Psalms, I would decode it to mean, not to become captive to negative energy, as we call it the yetzer hara, the evil inclination. Actual captivity en masse? This was the stuff of the Middle Ages! Prayers that evoked violent savage attack? This was the stuff of the past, of pogroms in faraway lands . . . Or so I thought!
The philosophical idea of the sukkah symbolizing the fragility of life and that of a temporary dwelling, it was a profound idea that cultivated compassion, awareness, faith and perspective. Yet, this past year, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced from their homes, en masse.
These are no longer just philosophical concepts, but literally, circumstances brought to life.
It feels like considering these concepts as mere philosophical ideas, were a luxury of a post-Simchat Torah 2023-Oct. 7 world, that now express their actual definitional meaning.
On Simchat Torah, the day we celebrate the completion of the cycle of chanting the entire Torah, the Haftarah that is read, is from the book of Joshua, when Joshua is charged with entering the land of Israel and leading the Israelites into the land. The Book of Joshua continues where the last of the Torah left off.
As Joshua is on the cusp of entering the land and carrying out his mission of leading the Jewish People into Israel, G-d repeatedly encourages Joshua with — in Hebrew, a two word collocation —“chazak v’ematz,” be strong and be resolute. A two word compound that has since become a common phrase of encouragement in our tradition and culture.
It’s sourced in words offered before Joshua embarks on his journey into the land of Israel. And is annually read on Simchat Torah.
It’s these two words of chazak v’ematz that ever since last Simchat Torah, as we were time and again encricled with so many different moments of grief and sorrow, that I tried to hold onto.
As we approach this painful one year anniversary, after a year of so much suffering for so many, I can only hope that this coming year’s hakafot, encirclements, upon the Jewish People, and of the land of Israel, will only be encirclements that will weave and envelop us all in healing, strength, safety and, as the very name of the holiday Simchat Torah includes, joy. And, a year holding many moments of, in Ecclesiastes’ words, “A time to dance,” the literal custom of Simchat Torah, to dance seven encirclements, hakafot, around the Torah.
For now, I continue to approach this one year anniversary and beyond with the powerful two words G-d encourages Joshua with prior to his entrance into the land of Israel. Our generation, after the exile of millennia, we are here now. We are blessed to be here in Israel, with the ability to defend ourselves.
Joshua needed to hear those two words back then, and we still need to hear them today.
Chazak v’ematz.
Be strong and be courageous, as we continue to pray for the success of our soldiers, for our hostages to return home immediately, for the end of suffering of all innocents, and for Israel to continue prevailing.
One of the powerful melodious phrases of the Yom Kippur davening is in its inaugural prayer, Miyom Kippurim ze, v’ad Yom Kippur haba . . .” the cantor chants. “From this Yom Kippur until the following year’s Yom Kippur . . .”
It’s like this sacred day is chosen as the time marker, as the brackets of our year, and everything that happens between these two particular points, is what matters, is what is consequential.
This year, the words that resonated this framing for me and swirled in my mind were, “Mi Simchat Torah ze v’ad Simchat Torah Haba . . . ” For this year, it’s almost like the defining goals posts were shifted, this once.
In a sense, after this year, when I think none of us will ever quite be the same, it feels like this past year had been re-framed with new brackets.
I can only hope that this “time for war” will also be re-framed — and recede. For this year’s post Simchat Torah to greet us with G-d granting us the manifestaion of the words we just read from the Book of Ecclesiastes: “A time to heal . . . A time to laugh . . . A time to mend . . . A time to build . . . And a time to dance.”
May it be so, in our time, soon.
Chazak v’ematz!
© IJN 2024
