In the dance of Simchat Torah we can find our unity as a people

These last two years have also jeopardised the public unity of Anglo-Jewry, which I recently saw reach a breaking point at a London vigil for the hostages in Gaza. Whether or not their words of support for the idea of a Palestinian state were the right ones for the wrong moment, it was painful to see the two leaders of the Progressive Jewish community heckled off the stage mid-speech.

In Israel, the very fabric of Jewish nationhood has been at risk of tearing apart, pulled in opposing directions between the Zionist left and right.

Yet Simchat Torah’s celebration of the completion of the annual Torah reading cycle refuses to give us wings to fly away from the turmoil and now, perhaps, from the challenges of its resolution. Instead, it gives us feet to take to the floor – whether standing or seated in a wheelchair –and dance.

As the Arizal would say, Israel is, from head to foot, with all its different limbs and functions (and opinions) one body. Dancing as one body on Simchat Torah, the unity of the Jewish people becomes an event; its reconciliation at once historical and eternal.

And this is why, on Simchat Torah, the reading cycle ends without closure. Moses is dead. He will never enter the Land. His grave, dug by God himself, in the valley of the land of Moab, somewhere near Beth-peor, will never be visited by a single Jew. Yet, as such, the Jewish story remains eternally open to its own futurity.

There is no absolute chronological order in Torah (Pesachim 6b). Its reading immediately begins again with Genesis 1, with the dawn of pure possibility. By Creation’s first morning, a variously scattered Jewish people have been gathered back into unity, into the space and moment where its past, present and future coincide.

Women who did not, and do not, dance with the Torah scrolls on Simchat Torah are not thereby excluded from the joy. Rivke bas Me’ir Tiktiner’s almost forgotten 16th-century Simkhes Toyre Lid or song for Simchat Torah is a model of theological inclusivity. By the closing vision of the song, “pregnant women, children and all others”; “boys and girls”, and “young and old” have joined the men: the whole Jewish people is, she says, going as one in God’s light, singing their praises to the one Creator in one voice.

An echo of Rivke’s song, and of the footsteps of all the Jews who have ever gone as one in God’s light, was surely heard at Simchat Torah in the Vilna ghetto, on the October 11, 1942, when Zelig Kalmanovich, a renowned linguist, was honoured with the first hakafah.

That night, he wrote in his journal that dancing in that desolated former synagogue had united him with every generation of the whole house of Israel. Kalmanovich was deported to an Estonian forced labour camp where he died in 1944. But on Simchat Torah he had danced into the historical eternity of the Jewish people. It was from within its circles of ends that are always beginnings that he knew that he and the whole Jewish people would live.

So that even as Kalmanovich’s own story was reaching its end, he was dancing back, as it were, to Rivke and the women singing their Simkhes Toyre Lid and dancing forwards towards the young Soviet Jews who would gather in the streets of Moscow on Simchat Torah to dance into a freedom yet to come. And those Soviet Jews were dancing with us in 2025 and with the Nova ravers who, on Simchat Torah 2023, would never get to “dance to the end of love”, as Leonard Cohen once put it, in their own, alternative, way.

There is now cautious joy across the Jewish world, in anticipation of the imminent release of all the hostages. But if Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah are not to be forever overshadowed by their date – the second anniversary of Israel’s most savage massacre; the yahrzeit of over a thousand murdered Jews, then we must honour the memory of its dead by accepting the Torah’s invitation to dance beyond our differences to a place where the obstructive “but” of dispute becomes, once more, the “and” of conversational flow.

On this day, we must turn neither to the left nor to the right of our political convictions, but dance as one people to the beat, and to the end, of love.

Melissa Raphael is professor emerita (Jewish theology) at the University of Gloucestershire and Leo Baeck College

Photo: Dancing with the Sefer Torah on Simchat Torah in Netanya, 2010 (Getty Images)