The High Holiday season just ended. A spiritual, emotional and communal journey through Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot culminated in the holidays of Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. Simchat Torah, though it is so close to the holiday of Sukkot on the calendar, is actually a separate holiday and has become part of the celebrations of Shemini Atzeret. On Shemini Atzeret we put down the lulav and etrog, many of us step back into our homes from our sukkot (huts) and we focus in on one crucial area: Our relationship to God.
The great medieval commentator on Torah, Rashi, quotes the Midrash in explaining the reason for one last holiday of the season. Why is it not enough to conclude the season with the last day of Sukkot? Why one more holiday? Rashi offers the following:
This is analogous to a king who invited his children to feast with him for a certain number of days, and when the time came for them to leave, he said: “My children! Please, stay with me just one more day; it is difficult for me to part with you!” (Rashi on Leviticus 23:26)
In the rabbinic imagination, God experiences angst about the departure of this special time in the year. God’s children, all of us, will take leave of this focused holy season and rejoin the normal routines of work and leisure. God begs of us to stay just for one more day and thus Shemini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah, are born.
On Simchat Torah Jews throughout the world take hold of the most precious physical manifestation of our faith, our Torah scrolls, and dance with them. In joyous song we join hands with one another and celebrate the gift of Torah and the Giver of that Torah. As we dance around in a circle the faces of our neighbors, friends and family become blurred in the action of the moment. How each person understands her or his Judaism, how she or he connects to God and to tradition becomes secondary to the collective unity we experience surrounding our collective Torah. Who we are on Simchat Torah are members of the same family, bound up together in a collective destiny and a shared fate. What we each believe and how we individually practice is lost in that brief spark of time that Simchat Torah provides us.
