Holidays

 Betsy Platkin Teutsch

Aren’t the fall holidays over yet?

Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah (celebrated for two separate days outside of the land of Israel, and only for one day in Israel and in many liberal communities throughout the world) comes at the end of Sukkot and so serves as the grand finale to the fall holiday season. Shemini Atzeret – the “eighth day of assembly” after the seven days of Sukkot – is mentioned in the Torah as a separate holiday.

If Sukkot is the cautious “season of our joy,” Shemini Atzeret (the official name for both days) heightens both the sense of vulnerability, and the no-holds-barred sense of celebration. Though it is seemingly a “tag-on,” Shemini Atzeret is a festival in its own right. And, although its function and meaning in ancient times are not entirely clear to us, its contemporary liturgy includes tefillat geshem, the first prayer for rain [in Israel] in the new year, along with Yizkor, the seasonal remembrance service for those closest to us who have died. Whereas the traditional version of the prayer for rain – a crucial resource in an agrarian economy – refers to our biblical forefathers and their relationship to water (and invokes their merit on our behalf), contemporary liturgists have rewritten this liturgical poem to highlight biblical women’s strong connections to water.

Beginning possibly in medieval times, the second day of Shemini Atzeret became the occasion for “simchat Torah,” celebrating the “joy of Torah” as the Torah-reading cycle is wrapped up for the year at the end of Deuteronomy and immediately started again at the beginning of Genesis. On both the evening and the day of Simchat Torah, congregations dance with the Torah scrolls (in seven sets of hakafot, or circuits), with unrestrained singing and dancing standard for the day.

Until recent decades, this joyous dancing and close contact with the scrolls was reserved for men and boys. Now, even many Orthodox congregations – in which women generally do not participate in public Torah readings –bring scrolls to the women’s section in gender-divided sanctuaries, so that the entire community can have the experience of intimacy with these most sacred symbols of Jewish learning and of our relationship with God. Some modern Orthodox communities make this possible – as well as the custom of every adult having an aliyah, an opportunity to make the individual blessings over the Torah reading – by having separate women’s services in which women can enjoy the honors reserved for men in a traditional Orthodox service.

In these communities – as well as in the majority of congregations in North America in which women’s equal participation in religious services and Jewish learning is increasingly a given – Simchat Torah is an occasion on which Jewish women are especially aware of how far we have come, with our unprecedented access to and engagement with serious Torah study and teaching of all kinds. Our dancing and singing reflect our special joy in and appreciation of our relationship with the Torah and all that it represents – including our own responsibility to become students, teachers, and creators of Jewish learning and Jewish texts.

Rabbi Susan Fendrick