Drash for Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah 5787
Shemini Atzeret is kind of the middle child of the Sukkot holiday cycle. It is a separate holiday that comes after the final day of Sukkot and before Simchat Torah.
The word Atzeret usually means assembly, but in the context of the holiday it is understood to mean something like to retain or hold back.
It is a day of restraint after the end of the long holiday of Sukkot. And a day of preparation for Simchat Torah.
But it is one of the four days of the year on which we recite Yizkor.
In Israel, and in many congregations of the diaspora, Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah are celebrated together, as we are doing here this morning.
It is because of the combination of the two that the liturgy today includes both the joyous atmosphere of Simchat Torah and the more somber liturgy of Yizkor.
Simchat Torah is the child that gets all the attention.
It is a holiday of joy and of happiness.
But it is also, and most importantly, I think, a celebration of continuity.
We read in the final words of Deuteronomy that “never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses … and then we turn back to the beginning, Bereshit bara Elohim et ha’shamayim v’et’ha’aretz.
And so, we experience the words of Torah as a continuous voice.
Some understand it as the silent voice of God that speaks in every moment from Sinai, some hear it as the recorded voice of our tradition, some understand it as a message from inspired hearts.
Just two and a half years ago in this congregation we celebrated the completion of new Torah scroll. Many of us here this morning were able to participate in some way in its creation. And the clergy and the soferet who wrote the scroll for us used the process as a powerful teaching opportunity.
We learned a lot about Torah scrolls. We learned that it takes 65 or 70 sheets of calfskin or lambskin to make a scroll. That each page usually has three columns of text, that each column has 42 lines.
There are typically 248 columns of text and, except in 4 cases, each column of text begins with the letter vav, which means “and” which creates a subtle message of continuity even from one column of text to the next.
Those are characteristics of the Torah scroll as an object, as a physical repository for the words of our tradition.
But we know that the word Torah can have many meanings.
What strikes me today is the difference between The Torah as the physical object, and the Torah that is created by our engaging with its words. We’re commanded to la’asok b’divrei Torah, to engage with the words of the Torah.
I ask myself which is the Torah that we are celebrating today.
And, of course, the answer is both.
We celebrate the physical object for its sacredness. For its significance to the tradition and religious life of the Jewish people.
But it is the Torah that is created by our engagement with the words that maintains the continuity of Judaism as a living religion.
The ancient world thought in terms of cycles. And we heard of that cyclicality in the words of King Solomon, which Cantor M—— chanted on Sukkot morning.
“Only that shall happen which has happened. Only that occur which has occurred. There is nothing new beneath the sun.”
And it is true that when we read the last words of Deuteronomy, we know exactly what words come next in Bereshit. The words of the Torah scroll don’t change.
But we really don’t know what Torah we will create this year as we engage with those words.
Because we bring our new selves to the old words, and our new selves exist in a new world. That combination of old and new produces something that, however subtle, has never existed before.
We have lived another year, and we’ve experienced its joys and its sorrows. We’ve gained and we have lost. We have been healthy and we have been ill. We have been hopeful and dejected.
We’ve experienced the things that the aging King Solomon wrote so movingly about in the scroll of Kohelet.
Three years ago, we celebrated Simchat Torah here on the morning of October 7. When our service began, we knew that something was happening in Israel. But we didn’t really know the extent of the horror until later.
We’ve lived the aftermath of that awful day for three years. And I, for one, have been horrified at the extent to which many around the world have blamed the victims. They have blamed those brutally killed on that day; they’ve blamed the hostages and even blamed their families.
In a grotesque inversion of reality Israel itself has been deemed at fault.
And in a way I would not have anticipated, the rest of us—the Jews of the diaspora—have become a kind of collateral damage.
We’ve learned that anti-Semitism has a persistence that, it seems, is made even worse by the existence of a Jewish State.
The persistence of that dark force is nearly as remarkable as the ability of the Jewish people to survive it.
One of the songs we sing as we celebrate these days was made popular in 1965 by Shlomo Carlebach during the movement to free Soviet Jewry. Am Israel Chai, which translates “the people Israel lives.”
With a minor modification to the Hebrew, we could convert that declaration to an imperative—People of Israel, LIVE.
Or, The People Israel MUST LIVE.
Because without Jews, Jews who engage with the words of Torah, what we have is an object.
An artifact. Beautiful, but essentially lifeless.
The Torah tells us, choose life. It is we who bring life to the Torah.
On Yom Kippur Rabbi A—– mentioned Abraham Joshua Heschel’s book “God in Search of Man.”
I do think that God continually searches for us, and allows us to search for God, through the words of the Torah, and it is that continuity, the continuity of that relationship, that we really celebrate today.
The Torah scroll alone is not the Torah. The scroll needs us. To give continual new life to the words.
The Book of Deuteronomy ends with the word Israel, and Genesis begins with “in the beginning.”
The Talmud tells us all beginnings are hard. But Pirke Avot tells us that we are not free to desist from the work.
It is a new year, and it is for us to create new Torah, and to rejoice in it as both a gift to treasure and a means of creation.
We share with God the responsibility for ongoing creation.
May we answer the call of Torah with the joy of this day, and may we answer the call—People of Israel, Live!—with the strength and resolve, hazak v’Amatz, that God commanded of Joshua in today’s Haftarah.
Shabbat shalom and chag sameach,