by Rabbi Sari Laufer
“I know that story!”
It’s a refrain I hear often, usually on Friday mornings when I am with our EC students. There are only so many stories a person can tell, and a folk tale is a folk tale, so it is inevitable that we—like our students—will hear a story that we have heard before. Sometimes, it is even by choice; how many times have you picked up a favorite book and read it again? Or, how many of you can STILL recite Goodnight, Moon—even if it has been years since your last reading of it?
Repetition is important; it is important for learning—we know this from early childhood education. But it is important for us too, as we age and grow. Repeating an experience gives us the chance to enjoy it more, knowing what is coming. Or, maybe it helps us see it from another angle, to behave differently. And sometimes, just as for small children, the repetition—of an activity, or an experience, or a story, helps us to assimilate into our lives, make it a routine, remember the lessons it came to teach.
Nowhere in our tradition is the purpose, and gift, of repetition so clear as on Simchat Torah, where we finish reading the Book of Deuteronomy and immediately begin with the first words of Genesis. “I know that story!” we collectively say. But we come back to it again and again, not because we think the words or the stories or the laws or the lessons will be different, but because we think (hope?) that we will. Hearing the stories over again, learning the lessons allows us to reflect on our own experiences, and perhaps lets us see the text—and ourselves—in a new light.
While we talk about Neilah, the final service of Yom Kippur, as the moments when the gates of repentance close, but actually, tradition teaches that Hoshana Raba, the day before Simchat Torah begins, is that final day of the cycle that begins on the first day of Elul. If you did not get all of your atoning and forgiving in before and during Yom Kippur, we learn, you have this extra time. All of this prepares us to enter Simchat Torah ready to celebrate (join us on Sunday morning at 9 a.m.!)—and to learn new lessons, and remember old ones.
The Israeli poet laureate, Yehuda Amichai, wrote these (possibly tongue in cheek) words about Simchat Torah:
The Jewish people read Torah aloud to God
all year long, a portion a week,
like Scheherazade who told stories to save her life.
By the time Simchat Torah rolls around,
God forgets and they can begin again.
Whether or not God forgets is a theological discussion for another time. But certainly, starting the Torah cycle over again is a chance to re-examine our own connections to the stories, to the lessons, to the Divine, and to our community. Simchat Torah gives us, in different ways than the High Holy Days, the gift of starting over. Even if we know the story.