Two years ago, on Simchat Torah 2023, Jewish communities across Israel were singing and dancing with Torah scrolls when the sirens began. Within hours, over 1,200 people lay dead, hundreds taken hostage, and entire communities destroyed. The day meant for celebrating God’s word became synonymous with unthinkable horror. Yet this year, as we celebrate Simchat Torah again, synagogues worldwide will once more fill with dancing. The scrolls will be carried, the songs will be sung, the joy will return.
This response isn’t denial or numbness. It’s something far deeper—something encoded in the very DNA of Simchat Torah itself, a holiday born from catastrophe and sustained through centuries of devastation.
How does a people dance on the anniversary of a massacre?
Simchat Torah appears nowhere in the Bible as an independent celebration. The Torah commands Shemini Atzeret, the Eighth Day of Assembly following Sukkot (Feast of Tabernacles), but says nothing about dancing with scrolls or completing the annual reading cycle. During the exile, the celebration of completing and renewing the Torah reading became attached to Shemini Atzeret, transforming it into what we now know as Simchat Torah, the Joy of the Torah. Both Sukkot and Shemini Atzeret are called zeman simchateinu, the season of our joy, but that original joy had a clear source. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explained that the sukkah reminded the people of their miraculous survival in the wilderness and their subsequent arrival in the Promised Land. The Four Species demonstrated the agricultural abundance that flowed from living under divine blessing in their own territory. The joy of Sukkot was the joy of living in the Promised Land.
Then everything changed. The Temple burned. The land was lost. Exile scattered the Jewish people across continents and centuries. As Rabbi Sacks observed, they lost their home, their freedom, their independence, the priesthood, the sacrificial order—everything that had once been their source of joy. One of the liturgical poems recited during Ne’ilah at the close of Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) captured their devastation in a single line: Ein shiur rak haTorah hazot—”Nothing remains but this Torah.” All that survived was a book.
Yet precisely in this moment of total loss, Simchat Torah emerged. Without any biblical command or rabbinic decree, Jewish communities throughout the diaspora began singing and dancing with Torah scrolls, celebrating the completion and renewal of the annual reading cycle. Rabbi Sacks noted that they danced as if they were celebrating in the Temple courtyard during the Simchat Beit HaSho’evah (the joyful celebrations that accompanied the water drawing during the holiday of Sukkot), as if they were King David bringing the Ark to Jerusalem. They were determined to show God—and the world—that they could still be ach same’ach, as the Torah commands about Sukkot: wholly, totally, completely given over to joy.
Rabbi Sacks understood the magnitude of this phenomenon. He wrote that it would be hard to find a parallel in the entire history of the human spirit—a people capable of such joy at a time when they were being massacred in the name of the God of love and compassion. As he put it: “A people that can walk through the valley of the shadow of death and still rejoice is a people that cannot be defeated by any force or any fear.”
Rabbi Sa’adia Gaon, living in the tenth century, asked a compelling question: In virtue of what was the Jewish people still a nation? They had none of the normal preconditions. Jews were scattered throughout the world, living in different territories, speaking different languages and participating in different economic and political systems. Yet they remained, and were recognized as, one nation bound by collective destiny and responsibility. Sa’adia concluded: Our people is a people only in virtue of our Torah.
The Sages expressed this mutual relationship in a remarkable phrase about the Ark that contained the tablets: “It carried those who carried it.” Rabbi Sacks captured the meaning perfectly: “More than the Jewish people preserved the Torah, the Torah preserved the Jewish people.” It became their life and the length of their days, the legacy of their past and the promise of their future, their marriage contract with God and the record of an unbreakable covenant. As Rabbi Sacks wrote, they had lost their world, but they still had God’s word, and it proved to be enough. More than enough.
This explains why Simchat Torah was born during exile rather than during the period of sovereignty. When Jews had everything—land, Temple, political power—they celebrated the material blessings those things provided. But when they lost everything tangible, they discovered something that couldn’t be taken away. The scroll itself became their portable homeland, their eternal Temple, their unassailable fortress. Dancing with the Torah wasn’t nostalgia for what had been lost. It was defiance against those who thought they could destroy the Jewish people by destroying Jewish sovereignty.
October 7, 2023, attempted to destroy that defiance. The attackers chose Simchat Torah deliberately, targeting the moment when Jewish joy reaches its peak. They wanted to transform celebration into trauma, to make the holiday itself a trigger for fear and grief. They sought to prove that Jewish joy was fragile, that it depended on security, walls, and military strength—all of which could be breached and shattered.
They failed to understand what the architects of medieval pogroms, Crusades, Inquisitions, and Holocausts across centuries had failed to understand: Jewish joy doesn’t depend on circumstances. It flows from a source that predates sovereignty and will outlast every attempt to extinguish it.
When Nechemiah saw the people weeping as they listened to the Torah, realizing how far they had drifted from its teachings, he told them: “Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength” (Nechemiah 8:10). Rabbi Sacks saw in this verse the secret of Jewish survival: that joy isn’t happiness about circumstances but strength drawn from an unbreakable relationship with the divine word.
This year, when synagogues fill with dancers on Simchat Torah, they will carry more than scrolls. They will carry the memory of those murdered while celebrating this same holiday two years ago. They will carry the weight of families still shattered and communities still rebuilding. And they will dance anyway—not because the pain has lessened, but because Simchat Torah has always been about dancing through pain.
The holiday was never meant for easy times. It emerged during the darkest period of Jewish history and has sustained the people through every subsequent darkness. Rabbi Sacks’ insight rings true: “A people whose capacity for joy cannot be destroyed is itself indestructible.” This isn’t optimism or denial. It’s the lived reality of a nation that discovered long ago that when nothing remains but the Torah, everything essential remains.
The terrorists who attacked on Simchat Torah thought they were choosing the perfect symbolic target. They were right about the symbolism but wrong about the outcome. Simchat Torah has survived worse attacks over longer periods, and it emerged from each one stronger. The holiday itself testifies that Jewish joy doesn’t depend on security or sovereignty or even survival. It depends on a covenant that cannot be broken and a word that cannot be silenced.
So the scrolls will be carried again this year. The songs will be sung, the dances will continue, and the message will ring out as clearly as it has for centuries: We had everything and lost it, yet we still have everything that matters. We walk through valleys of shadow, yet we fear no evil. We are attacked on our holiest days, yet those days remain holy. We are a people that carries the Torah, and the Torah carries us. And nothing—not massacre, not exile, not centuries of persecution, not the darkest days we have yet faced—can separate us from that truth or destroy the joy it generates.
