Simchat Torah: A History in Four Acts

“The dance was absurd, and the dance was the truth.”—Rebecca Goldstein, “Properties of Light”

These are not dancing days. The year and a half we have been through—isolated, frightened, and uncertain—has exhausted us, made us brittle, broken our joy. While for some, the idea of dancing may be a welcome respite from our recent difficulties, for others the possibility does not exist. Dancing requires a recognized sense of freedom and willful abandon. This year, it requires an “all clear” from the health authorities, or at least a way we can dance safely. How, in an unfolding age of continuing pandemic, are we supposed to rise out of our chairs and dance?

It’s an impossible question, but one that we are undoubtedly compelled to answer as we approach the holiday of Simchat Torah. And, as in many cases, some questions are best answered through story.

In an effort to respond to such a complex question, here is my story, the short history of Simchat Torah in this one Jew’s life.

Boston, 1978

I grew up in a Jewish affiliated but unobservant family. Our identity was strong and positive, but other than a Yom Kippur meal, Hanukkah candles and a brief Passover seder, our Jewish practice was not a priority. When I went to college in the late ’70s, I experienced a pull toward spirit and practice that launched me into an orbit of more mitzvot, more Jewish learning, and an enthusiasm that has yet to abate.

One of the transformative moments that stands out to this day was my first Simchat Torah. Prior to that great evening, I hadn’t really heard of it (truthfully, I hadn’t heard much about Sukkot either, but that discovery will have to wait for another time). But my new, more observant friends kept telling me that Simchat Torah is not to be missed, and the greater Boston community college students made it a pinnacle event every year. 

There was a small observant congregation in Somerville, off a side street that didn’t get much traffic most nights. But for this one evening, all the Jewish collegians in the entire Boston area would gather outside the synagogue, which loaned the hoards their Sifrei Torah to share. On that raucous road, hundreds of Jews in their late teens and early twenties swirled around the street, singing Jewish songs at the top of their lungs, and whisking a collection of Torah scrolls with them. Total strangers, sweating with enthusiasm, clasped shoulders they didn’t know and would never see again. 

To top it off, the rabbi of the congregation, a short, old-world Orthodox rabbi, stood on a pillar of the building with a bottle of Slivovitz brandy, which he repeatedly poured into the open mouths of dancing Jews swirling past him. Some of it even made it inside their mouths. The smell of dance, of sweat, Jews and drink pervaded everything. After dancing much of the night, I staggered home. I don’t remember ever being happier.

My joy was only increased at breakfast the next morning. I recall the horror on my roommate’s face. Clergy pouring booze in worshipers’ throats violated every fiber of his scrupulously Protestant body. He insisted I was making it up. But I knew I had come home.

New York, 1984

A decade later, and life has moved. I am now a rabbinical school student, living in Manhattan, and Elana is a law student at Columbia Law School. This was the age of fascinating in-house conversations about the law she was learning, and my racing to find the Aramaic term for the same legal concept, or a Talmudic passage dealing with the same jurisprudence. In a very real sense, the contours of American and Jewish law face very similar challenges, and they often respond along parallel tracks. Except for one night every year, when the differences between the two systems could not be more stark.

A diverse crowd of different observances, orientations, races and ages all swirl together in a praise of Torah that starts in our feet, works its way up through our legs, and erupts in our arms and throats. We become, for that precious evening, a living organism that dances Torah into the world. 

We dance in a blocked-off street adjoining Congregation Ansche Chesed, a vibrant synagogue with a diverse collection of overlapping minyanim (prayer groups) on the Upper West Side. Like the scene in Boston, hundreds of young Jews gather from every part of Manhattan and other boroughs. Participants shoulder Torah scrolls from inside the synagogue’s many Arks out onto the street, and an evening of enthusiastic dancing and singing ensues. A diverse crowd of different observances, orientations, races and ages all swirl together in a praise of Torah that starts in our feet, works its way up through our legs, and erupts in our arms and throats. We become, for that precious evening, a living organism that dances Torah into the world. 

And sometime during the evening, Elana and I laugh at the mental experiment of such an event at Columbia Law School. Can you imagine a group of law professors and their students taking out the books of Statute Law, dancing and singing them through the corridors of the School and spilling out onto the street? I can’t either.

We dance our Torahs in an act of gratitude, reaffirmation, and because we know in our bones that it is, literally, “a tree of life to those who cling to it.” 

Indeed, it is hard to imagine ANY other people loving their lawbooks the way we Jews love ours. We see our halakhah, law, as more than behavioral mandates and constraints. As the Psalmist knows, “they are our life and the length of our days.” It is literally our love of mitzvot and the joy we derive from Torah that has sustained us thus far, and will carry us through. We dance our Torahs in an act of gratitude, reaffirmation, and because we know in our bones that it is, literally, “a tree of life to those who cling to it.” 

So we cling. And we dance. 

Mission Viejo, 1995

Fast forward some twenty years. I am now a rabbi in south Orange County, at a wonderful bustling synagogue in Mission Viejo. Our twins were about 3 years old and I had taken a break from being one of those rabbis who keeps running around the room trying to get recalcitrant parents to leave their post by the wall and actually join in the dancing. I scoop up my daughter, Shira, hoist her onto my shoulders, and off we go, swirling around with the Torah, her preschool buddies, and our beloved congregation family. She clutches my ears for dear life, but every time I pause to look up, she is grinning, insisting I pick up the pace again.

As I dance with my little girl, I recall a conversation with my now departed Grandma Dotty, Dorothy Berlin Friedman. My grandmother grew up in Odessa in an observant family. When she learned that Elana and I had erected a sukkah in our Mission Viejo backyard, she exclaimed, “I didn’t know people still do that! I used to love our family sukkah in Russia. And I still remember dancing on my father’s shoulders for Simchas Torah!” 

In a flash, I remembered her memory, as my daughter and I danced a foursome with Grandma Dotty and her father, my great grandfather. What an unexpected set of partners: two in this world and two in the next, two from the Old World and two children of the new. Despite the differences of time and place, we were dancing together in a bond that links the generations and heals any breaches during the intervening decades. Berlin. Friedman. Artson. We Jews were made to dance. And Torah creates the music that lets the generations frolic and twirl in an endless chain of love.

Los Angeles, 2019

Progress again to the last happy Simchat Torah, which was also the best. We are members of IKAR, a community (and, for us, a lifeline) we dearly love. Were it only for this one memory, that love would be more than justified.

The noise is deafening. The enthusiasm is so thick you can touch it. And so is the love.

IKAR’s Simchat Torah is the stuff of legend. Thousands of Jews, most of them in their twenties and thirties, gather in a giant gymnasium to dance the night away. Social Justice themes weave through the words of Torah in between hakafot (sessions of dancing), and at any given moment, hundreds of people are dancing and singing in the cacophony and stink of a crowded room. The noise is deafening. The enthusiasm is so thick you can touch it. And so is the love.

Into this blaring chaos, the Artsons always come for renewal and a short visit. Not for us the long evening and endless dance. The noise itself fixes a limit on how long we can stay. Jacob, my son, wrestles with his deep love and gratitude to this community that welcomes him so beautifully, all of who he is, and his unique challenge managing noise, crowds, and excitement. We generally make it through the first one or two hakafot. Jacob and I and Elana and Shira link hands so we don’t lose each other, and we tend to join the slowest circle of dancers at any given moment. 

I need to back up and tell you that many people with autism have some special focus that commands their deepest attention and passion. For Jacob, that has always been Torah. Even as a little boy, he would sing Torah, play Torah, take twigs to line up and chant Torah. It is not unusual for him to run in front of an open Aron Kodesh (Ark) to dance before the Torah even if no one else is dancing (at IKAR, people smile and thank him for the inspiration). He has been known to jump out of his seat and dance in front of the Hazzan during a Torah service, a moment of Hasidic ecstasy that reminds us all how we’re supposed to feel when the Torah is shared.

Because Jacob so loves the Torah, it is particularly challenging for him to hold one. He worries he’ll get too excited. He doesn’t want to damage the scroll. He is aware of how his enthusiasm can get in the way. 

But in 2019, no one at IKAR cared. Some kind soul walked over with a Torah and handed it to Jacob. And, equally miraculous, Jacob responded by embracing the Torah with a hug so strong that it is only reserved for one’s true love. Jacob clung to that Torah, as hundreds swirled by. Many people shouted words of encouragement, support, and delight to Jacob as they whirled past. When one congregant came over to ask to take a turn with the Torah, one of IKAR’s wonderful rabbis swooped in from nowhere and gently guided her to a different scroll so Jacob could hold on, and dance. 

Jacob’s smile was electric that night. All who were present knew that it was a holy moment. The spark of his precious soul igniting the flame of Torah, the lover and the beloved in a dance that stretches all the way back, through Manhattan and Boston to Odessa and beyond. Back and back, to Jerusalem, to Sinai.

We return, now, to the question of how, in the wake of a continuing pandemic, we can find it within ourselves to rise out of our chairs and dance.

Especially in these COVID days, the lure of Simchat Torah is an invitation to hold on and to dance until the mood can catch us and lift our souls to match our feet. We dance first, rejoice later.

Yet how can we not? Especially in these COVID days, the lure of Simchat Torah is an invitation to hold on and to dance until the mood can catch us and lift our souls to match our feet. We dance first, rejoice later. The joy will flow from the motion we share, a recipe of swirling Jews, lipid Torah, sweet flowing melody, and enough community to bind. These ingredients have the power to elevate us beyond the current moment, above our constricting fears.

In a time when we are, none of us, okay, we need the tradition to push us to the center of the dance floor. Like a rabbi nudging ambivalent parents to abandon hovering at the room’s edges, pushing them to join the dance, our tradition asks of us the same. Rejoice before the Holy One. Follow your fellow in the begrudging circle of the drafted and half-hearted as we transform into the people who refuse to let our sorrows define us, who repel the world’s bigotry by dancing it away, who confound the skeptics and the philosophers by responding to the acid of their critique by hugging the Torah tightly. By dancing.

Children of Israel, heirs to such an ancient and powerful romance, the time for dancing is here. Again. It has saved us in the past, and it will save us now. In the spirit of being mindful of the fact that we are not yet beyond the boundaries of the pandemic, maybe this means dancing alone, or via Zoom, or outdoors, or in a way that is distanced yet intimate. Within the parameters your safety requires, take up the Torah, get out of your seat, and dance as if your very life depends on it. 

Depend on it.

Rabbi Dr. Bradley Shavit Artson (www.bradartson.com), a Contributing Writer for The Jewish Journal, holds the Abner and Roslyn Goldstine Dean’s Chair of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies and is Vice President of American Jewish University in Los Angeles. He is also dean of the Zacharias Frankel College in Potsdam, Germany, ordaining Conservative rabbis for Europe.