Simẖat Torah

How do we hold Simhat Torah this year– a day of joy that became a day of mourning? What does celebration look like on a day of the yahrzeit of 1200 souls? How can we rejoice after a year of devastation and destruction, with a war ongoing and so much sorrow?

We gather this year with broken hearts and hopeful hearts. This year, our grieving and dancing is an act of mindful solidarity, an expression of active hope for a better future. Because hope is a core value, an action, a moral imperative– it must become part of our spiritual practice.

A Man In His Life: By Yehuda Amichai
A man doesn’t have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn’t have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.

And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history takes years and years to do.

A man doesn’t have time…

The truth is, we don’t have time for periods of mourning, and periods of celebration. We only have this time.

So please join us this evening in affirming our ability to hold both:

1. Remember. Light a candle (on yontif we don’t strike a match, but we can transfer flames from one candle to another). In our tradition, נֵ֣ר הי נִשְׁמַ֣ת אָדָ֑ם –the light of the Holy One is a reflection of the human soul (Proverbs 20:27). Please take a moment and light a candle to honor one of the many, many people whose lives were taken on Simhat Torah last year.

2. Create. We ask you to pick up a stone and bring it with you as you enter our sacred space this evening. On the west wall of the gym, we will design a piece of communal art, an expression of our anguish and our hope, and an affirmation that there is beauty, even in the heartache.

3. Dance! Please, dance. We have seven hakafot this evening. We’ll dance the first two with our children, full of innocence and possibility. We’ll dedicate the third to memory… we’ll spiral around the room and sit on the ground to lift our voices together. And then, as we enter the fourth, we’ll rise, with hearts full of hope for healing for the rest of the evening, until we complete the reading of the Torah at the end of Deuteronomy, and begin again at the beginning of Genesis.

Remember. Create. And dance. This is how we hold the impossible. Together, with love and with hope.