Dancing with Torah
The last Jewish holiday of the season arrives Thursday night, with the wonderful name “The Joy of Torah”, Simchat Torah. It is a celebration of the strands of ancient teaching that twine through each Jewish community like spiritual DNA, expressed in so many different ways yet reminding us of our shared heritage.
Although Torah appears to contain history, and although the interpretation of Torah and reception of Torah can be viewed through the lens of history, Torah is not history. It is a wellspring of collective ancestral memory, and an instrument through which we might hear ruach elohim, God’s wind-voice whispering instruction for how to live a holy life.
Through mitzvot (sacred Jewish practices), through teshuva (repair and return), through am yisrael (building just and loving connections with each other), Torah promises that we can transcend the limitations of past experience so that history doesn’t become destiny. The deep joy of Torah comes from imbuing us with moral agency - with what Shai Held calls a stance of “possibilism” that although change is hard, we are in fact capable of it.
But this holiday of celebration of Torah became entangled with historic tragedy last year on October 7, when Hamas launched a brutal attack on Israelis during Simchat Torah. The joy of Torah is now caught up in great pain, anger, fear, and desire for vengeance. How are we to make sense of the liberatory joy of Torah colliding with the experience of trauma, and the ongoing fear that we are stuck in the cycle of violence - history becoming destiny? Should we refrain from joy? Should we double down on the possibilities of Torah precisely because despair is so easy?
At our Kavana observance of Simchat Torah this year, we plan to dance with the Torah scroll, holding it close and feeling held by our tradition.
The Chassidic master Rebbe Nachman once taught:
Sometimes, when people are happy and dance, they grab someone standing outside [the circle] who is depressed and gloomy. Against his will they bring him into the circle of dancers; against his will, they force him to be happy along with them.
It is the same with happiness. When a person is happy, gloom and suffering stand aside.Yet greater still is to gather courage to actually pursue gloom, and to introduce it into the joy, such that the gloom itself turns into joy.
A person should transform gloom and all suffering into joy. It is like a person who comes to a celebration. The abundant joy and happiness then transforms all his worries, depression and gloom into joy. We find that he has grabbed the gloom and introduced it, against its will, into the joy.
I do not care for Nachman’s nonconsensual dance metaphor - I think too often when we are in the midst of grief or depression, the feeling of being forced into a “happy space” just strengthens the emotional state instead and adds to it a burden of loneliness as well.
But I do appreciate the insight that real joy is complex. It isn’t a shallow happiness where suffering is ignored or from which sadness is exiled. Real joy involves intentionally moving towards suffering, and reintegrating it into our larger emotional lives. In the heart-dance of the human condition, it all belongs. The experience of transformation isn’t simply that of “mourning into dancing” (Psalm 30), where mourning disappears, but the type of vital fullness we experience when the mourning enters into the dancing alongside joy.
During our hakafot (dancing with the Torah), we will invite all who attend - people, emotions, gratitude and despair - into the sacred circle. And maybe, just maybe, some seed of new possibility might be planted, for trust and connection, for safety and for peace.
Chag sameach,
Rabbi Jay LeVine
