Simchat Torah 5786

Simchat Torah 5786
Oh, how we danced, we laughed, we sang, celebrated, snacked and schnapped — it was Simchat Torah! Still, on Tuesday night, even with the exuberance and levity, even with the Torah scrolled to the very end (which is actually a new beginning), I felt a pall hovering over the chapel.

We are grateful that the living hostages have been returned to begin what will likely be a long process of healing to whatever degree possible for each survivor and his respective family. Of the 20 points in the Plan, we can check off 1. ceasefire, 2. release of hostages, 3. release of prisoners, 4. resumption of the daily caravan of aid to Gaza.

We must be hopeful that the other 16 points will follow. I don’t play poker, not even just for fun. I don’t bet. The odds of even most of this plan working? Slim at best, unless those leaders who spoke up now step up with effective pressure, resolve and resources.

Last year, a few months into the seemingly interminable period of anguished conflict, Ellie and I starting wearing “Bring them home” hostage dog tags, daily changing a piece of tape with the number of days since October 7. On day 739, we faced a challenge: the living hostages were repatriated the previous day; 24 bodies remained to be located and returned. Do we stop counting? Do we continue updating the number even if it takes months to recover them all? And if some end up never being returned…?
Ellie’s response to the dilemma was to stop the original count at 738, while continuing the second count from 739. We hope that soon we will no longer need to count at all.

On Wednesday, Simchat Torah, we read and discussed a d’var Torah by Dr Sara Horowitz that spoke to the “cyclicity” of reading the Torah over and over without pause. Dr. Horowitz describes that “It is as though the Torah was not a scroll read linearly from beginning to end, but a Möbius strip, a geometrical form whose inside becomes its outside, so that there is no real beginning
and ending.”

Doing so, wrote Dr Horowitz, reflects our ability to accept the realities of today while also yearning to live the mythic memory of the Garden of Eden, when an “easy intimacy” existed between the first humans, between humans and the world around them, between the world and the Divine.

I hope that Israel — and Jews everywhere — will be able to realize at least some of the Edenic hopefulness of this moment.