Simchat Torah in times of tragedy: Balancing joy and mourning - opinion

On the night after my first Simchat Torah in Israel, rain began to fall.

My roommate and I, students, heard that there was an Israeli custom of dancing in the street after the Simchat Torah holiday was over. Hakafot shniyot.

In the summer, we had rented a quaint, unheated apartment in the picturesque Ahva neighborhood, near Malchei Yisrael Street, not far from Mea She’arim.

 At the time, the neighborhood was a mix of religious, ultra-religious and non-observant Jews, which charmed us. We followed the loud music to nearby Shabbat Square, where thousands were milling in the street, some dancing.

When the rain started, we recalled that we’d just started saying the Prayer for Rain in the synagogue that morning. We wondered if this always happened with such divine coordination.

Little did I know about the history of hakafot shniyot. The roots of the custom reportedly go back to Kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria of Safed, who instituted dancing at the end of the Simchat Torah/Shmini Atzeret holiday in the 16th century.

Four hundred years later, in 1943, Rabbi Yitzhak Yedidya Frankel, later to become chief rabbi of Tel Aviv, is credited with reviving the custom. He urged his congregants to dance around the Torah after Simchat Torah on behalf of the beleaguered brethren in Nazi-occupied Europe who could no longer dance. The congregants’ hearts must have been heavy with a mix of anguish and affirmation of devotion to Torah.

And so this year’s Simchat Torah, with its challenge of how to combine a holiday of joy with the horror of Simchat Torah 5784, was not without precedent.

AS THE holiday approached, just how to carry through the festive day aroused a lot of discussion among synagogue-goers. 

On one hand, some argued that we should not allow our enemies to take away a beloved holiday. Others worried that our unceasing mourning was eroding our personal and national resilience. 

Should we just go ahead with the holiday as usual, but in a modest and contained manner? How could we go ahead with any celebrations when Simchat Torah 2023 was the greatest tragedy in Jewish history since the Shoah, and 101 hostages are still in captivity?

A tribute to those who have fallen 

Could the dancing, like Rabbi Frankel’s approach at the time of the Holocaust, be a substitute for those who cannot dance and a reproach to those who want to destroy us? 

How can synagogues that are faithful to long-established routines make significant changes in prayer services?

Congregations struggled with these questions and came up with their own solutions, rethinking how Simchat Torah should now be marked. “What did your synagogue do for Simchat Torah?” became a common question in the days after the holiday.

Many congregations dedicated each round of the seven rounds of Simchat Torah dancing to themes related to the situation: remembering the hostages; honoring those killed; for the widows and orphans; to salute heroism; to support the soldiers. 

Some changed the number of rounds of dancing from seven to three, evidently a halachic option. 

Many went from silent circles to solemn singing, moving on to bolder and more defiant songs. Some read aloud the names of all the fallen in the Yizkor, memorial prayer.

From my swimming partner, I heard about the inspiring solution that was arrived at in the Nitzanim synagogue in Jerusalem. Nitzanim is a large, National Religious synagogue, established in 1988, first in a school and later in its own building in the Baka neighborhood. 

In recent years it has attracted many new immigrants from English-speaking countries.

The synagogue spiritual head is the esteemed Rabbi Shai Finkelstein, a Sabra who also served a community in Memphis, Tennessee, for 16 years. 

Rabbi Finkelstein appointed a lay committee of four congregants months before Simchat Torah to ponder and carry through a meaningful plan for the holiday.

Like many congregations, already on Yom Kippur the committee passed out the names of the fallen and murdered to the congregation to add to their personal memorial prayers in the Yizkor prayer. The names were recited aloud simultaneously at the beginning of the prayer.

But in Nitzanim, the congregants received more than lists of names. They received cards with the photographs of each of the hundreds of persons for whom they were reciting the memorial prayer. 

They were encouraged to focus on these specific faces to increase their bond with those whom they were including in their prayers.

As Simchat Torah approached and Yizkor would be repeated, tragically the pile of memorial cards grew higher.

“That was a very hard part, when we had to update the list, counting some 30 more names that had to be added,” said Natanya Jawno, the South African-born committee member who took on the responsibility of printing the cards.

But Simchat Torah was not just about memorials. “Nothing is the perfect answer,” Hadassah Fiedler, a committee member from Manchester, told me. “It’s so hard to integrate the mourning and the holiday joy for the completion of the Torah cycle to which we’re devoted.”

The Five Books of Moses have 5,845 verses that each contain a sentence, phrase, or independent thought. What if all 5,845 could be recited simultaneously, like the memorial names?

Nitzanim is a large congregation. Some 800 men and women would attend the Simchat Torah services. 

That wouldn’t be so many verses for each person. Of course, they would have to be printed out, too.

So, in addition to the memorial cards with the photographs, each congregant received a card of verses – no more than 10 on each.

“We started together reciting the first verse, ‘Breishit bara....,’ ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth,’ and then everyone read aloud, holding the card of Torah verses in one hand, and looking at the faces of those who passed away in the other. It was a sound that raised the rooftop and went up to heaven,” said Jawno.

“We also read the last verse together, ‘And in all that mighty hand, and in all the great and awesome deeds which Moses performed in the sight of all Israel.’ It was a tribute to the holy words and the holy souls.”Neither committee member I spoke to timed the reading, but they estimated that it took less than five minutes.

“It was our powerful cry to heaven,” said Fiedler. “Some may have felt it was a sound of celebration, while for others it was a shout of protest. We tried to be meaningful in our own small way.”

Jawno also said she thought they’d succeeded in making the holiday relevant for our current time.

Indeed, the impressive creativity displayed by synagogue-goers who came up with so many answers to the Simchat Torah dilemma while still honoring the Simchat Torah tradition bodes well for our religious future.

Earlier in the week, when I walked out of a sukkah gathering with Rabbi Ari Kahn, he paused to say something that has stayed with me since.

The Talmud teaches that the broken pieces of the first set of the 10 Commandments were placed in the Torah ark side by side with the second, whole, human-made tablets (Bava Batra 14b).

In one hand, the Nitzanim congregants held the photographs of the fallen; in the other, they held the verses of the Torah. Side by side.

We, too, honor the brokenness as we aim for wholeness. May the nourishing rains start soon.

The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is A Daughter of Many Mothers.