It’s right there in the Torah. It’s a mitzvah to celebrate at this time. Deuteronomy chapter 16 teaches that on Sukkot, “ וְשָׂמַחְתָּ בְּחַגֶּךָ – you shall rejoice in your festival.”
Later the sages added another festive day to this special time: Simchat Torah, an opportunity to rejoice in our study of Torah and the collective wisdom of the Jewish people. We conclude our reading of the five books and then immediately begin again. We dance with our Torah scrolls in the loving embrace of our community.
But this year of course is different. We wonder: how are we are supposed to celebrate knowing there are still more than 100 hostages languishing in Gaza? How can we be happy when our soldiers are still at war, when loved ones and friends must rush to bomb shelters and safe rooms on a regular basis? And because our empathy is expansive, we also feel sadness and pain for the suffering of innocents in Gaza and Lebanon. How are we to rejoice during such a time?
Fortunately, the holidays themselves show us the way. Our joy in this season includes the opportunity to remember, to reflect, and to grow. And yes, even includes moments of sadness. In fact, traditionally, our Yizkor prayers of memory for our beloved departed are said right in the midst of this festival of rejoicing, of this z’man simchateinu.
The rabbis understood that simcha, true joy, must inevitably contain elements of sadness as well. When we rejoice in a mature and thoughtful manner, we bring with us an understanding and awareness of life’s richness and complexity. When we pause to reflect on the gift of life itself in a deep way, we bring with us an awareness of the reality of non-being, life’s opposite: death. When we give thanks for the gift of wisdom and for the freedom we still have to celebrate our Judaism openly and largely without fear, we carry with us the awareness that it has not always been so and might someday cease once again.
Our celebration this year will indeed look different but this is always the case, as no two years are alike. We continue to grow and evolve throughout our lives and thus every Simchat Torah is unique. The world continues to change with life’s blessings and curses. This year, we have the unfortunate shared trauma of what we have collectively experienced since our last Simchat Torah on October 7, 2023.
Here is my prayer:
Together may we find the joy to dance with our tradition, with our Torah scrolls, and with one another. Together may we find the wisdom to accept the reality that life has taught us again and again: joy and sadness are almost always intermingled. Together, even as we continue to mourn, even as we continue to fear understandably about the future, may we in this moment find the strength to rejoice even as we remember, even as we continue to mourn.
Shabbat shalom and Chag Sameach,
Rabbi Yoshi