Simchat Torah is the last celebration of the Jewish High Holiday season. Created in Babylonia during the early middle ages, it is a holiday that marks the end of the yearly cycle of reading the Torah with end of Deuteronomy and then beginning the new cycle of reading with Genesis 1 once more.
The late Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, in the last collection of his work that was published in the year that he died, has a wonderful poem about this celebration:
The Jewish people read Torah aloud to God
all year long, a portion a week,
like Scheherazade who told stories to save her life.
By the time Simchat Torah rolls around,
God forgets and they can begin again.
(From "Open Closed Open," translated by Chana Block & Chan Kronfeld)
In this poem, Amichai reverses the usual rationale for reading the Torah. Jews normally think of the Torah reading as a way to constantly remind them of God's saving acts, the covenant with God and its commandments and the rich stories of our ancestors. In this poem Amichai is saying that the real purpose is to remind God of God's activities in the world as a way of keeping God interested in keeping the Jewish people alive. This is a wonderful and humorous inversion of an important Jewish practice and makes for great poetry if not for logical theology. It is a kind of "sacred parody" that Jews have often used to deal with the disconnect between what should be and what is in the world.
But the Torah reading is really about reminding us, not God, about who we are, where we came from, what we believe and what we should do to change the world. So every year at Simchat Torah we finish reading the book of Deuteronomy and begin again with Genesis.
And I believe that we need to be reminded of Creation even if one might think that spring is the better time. And while Passover in the spring does have its Creation elements, Sukkot was and is primarily a Creation festival, celebrating both the bounty of the fall harvest and need for the winter rains to ensure the fertility of the land. And the fall also reminds us of the cycle of life as much as the spring. Without the ending of fall, the beginning of spring cannot come.
When the fall harvest occurs, our ancestors might forget where it really comes from. After all, when your stomach is full, you might not be thinking of being grateful. As we are warned in Deuteronomy 8:10, 14, 17:
When you have eaten your fill, give thanks to the Lord your God for the good land which He has given you ... beware lest your heart grow haughty and you forget the Lord your God ... and you say to yourselves, "My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me."
Now, we in the developed world don't have to really notice what season it is and worry about the harvest. We can always just go to the store and keep things in our refrigerators. Our real reminders are mostly commercial ones: back-to-school sales, Columbus Day sales, Halloween candy, Thanksgiving sales, Christmas catalogues. We have mostly lost a sense of seasons, except perhaps for a change of clothes or moving air conditioning to heating. We are surrounded by the technology of our own power and forget the ultimate Source of that wealth.
So we need be reminded of Creation; the story of Genesis 1 does not have to be read in a literal way to keep its power and impact. It is a story of the emergence of order from chaos and a process of the expression of meaning in the universe. The priestly authors of Genesis 1 saw the number seven as the number of perfection and harmony and embedded it in many ways in the Hebrew text. There are seven days of Creation. There are seven words in the first verse and 14 in the second to cite just a couple of examples. One scholar has suggested that the original context of Genesis 1 was as a piece of liturgy in the Temple in Jerusalem, chanting the appropriate words each day of the week. Within this setting, Genesis 1 is a hymn not only of what was but what should be: a world of perfect harmony and peace.
One of my favorite reminders of the coming of fall is a Japanese maple in our front yard. The leaves turn in the fall from a dark green to a glorious blazing red -- a final burst of light before they fall off and the tree sleeps in the winter.
Like Scheherazade we tell stories to keep ourselves alive -- truly alive to the rhythms of Creation of which we are so intimately part of. So I will celebrate Simchat Torah and hear again the chanting of the Creation, look at our tree and pray that the world will come to be what it should be.
Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster: A Just Harvest for Sukkot
Simchat Torah - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Simchat Torah 2011 - Sukkot & Simchat Torah
Simchat Torah - Jewish Holiday of Simchat Torah
Killing every person in a city, or giving unmarried women and female children to a conquering army
can hardly be read with a sense of wonder and respect.
I love it that you can find enlightenment and truth in both Christian and Non-Christian all religions.
Hear that Fundamentalists?
In the 13.7 billion years since the origin of our universe, no one, absolutely no one, as ever brought forward any verifiable and falsifiable evidence that supports the existence of any god who created any universe or any life in it. Until then gods and creation are simply myth and superstition.
If you want to see the origin of the universe, turn on an old TV with a tube and do not connect to any antenna or cable and you will see the white snow on the screen which is nothing more than the cosmic background radiation of the big bang 13.7 billion years ago.
Get off my lawn!
Either creation is right and everything is around 6000 years old or evolution is right and the universe is about 13.7 billion years old.... though i'm not to sure how creation explains all those dinosaurs running around 65 million years ago.
maybe this comment about blogs by rabbi fits here : does the mideast exist, does OWS exist... ;
the nation of Isreal exists; if it is a secular nation does it have a claim to a holy land ; is it obedient to its covenent witht the Lord
is there a official nation wide Sabbath day
those who read every blog by a rabbi have they heard the word mideast or america mentioned
what does religion mean in daily life outside the place of worship is there a place outside the place of worship
is there no ususry
if the mideast exists are Rabbis engaged with the roadmap for peace
christianity says christ exists christ lives
do Rabbi's engage in that dialoque on an interfaith basis
For those who claim Islam is intolerant, Babylon sponsored Talmudic academies and Yeshivas from the Tannaic through the Geonic periods (300-1300 AD). Babylon also became THE center for Jewish diaspora jurisprudence and theological arbitration during the Arsacid and Sassanid empires and the time of the Caliphates. The Talmud Bavli was also developed in Babylon.
(Raises hand) That would be me. I claim Islam is intolerant.
Note: "is". Not "was" or "always will be". Why does az0th think examples of historic tolerance are relevant to the state of things today? He should be naming some Talmudic academies and Yeshivas sponsored by *today's* Islamic states.
In the book JESUS THE LAST NEPHILIM it is noted the Babylonians took their information from the very first and great civilization of Sumer.
'The Nephilim were on the earth in those days,and also afterward. Genesis 6;4
You know, every few months, in National Geographic or on one of the cable TV shows, they run a piece about a new species that they've discovered like in the Amazon, on an isolated island or some other obscure place. What I want to know is how did Noah know about that?
'splain me that!
Lot supposedly lived in Sodom long before the Babylonian captivity.
Please get your bible straight.
The Talmudic tradition that Hillel the Elder advanced before Jesus of Nazareth was born recognized that, and Jesus did too, even though Paul and the gospel writers didn't realize that, and many of current followers don't realize that.
Modern academic scholarship and research has helped many of us realize it, though. And, regarding that, http://cjcmp.org is a good site to start learning about interfaith dialogue, if you haven't already.