On the opening Sunday of 2026, I performed my first wedding since the Bondi attacks of Erev Chanukah. The dancing was enthusiastic, as it always is at Jewish weddings, but I think I understood that enthusiasm with new depth.
Attending my contemporaries’ weddings in my 20s and 30s, and then as the officiating rabbi in the last ten years, I always enjoyed the dancing but was slightly bemused by it. Of course we were all happy that a couple had found each other, had made a commitment and were settling down, but was the energy and brio just a sign that young people were seizing the opportunity for a party and to let off steam?
Perhaps, but that does not entirely explain the centuries-old tradition of dancing to exhaustion, which embraces not only the young, and even – or especially – includes rabbis who are usually so restrained and serious.
The answer may be found in the paragraph from the Haggadah, “Vihi she’amda.” It was sung on the eighth night of Chanukah at the memorial event at Bondi Beach, and it tells us, “In every generation they rise up to destroy us, but the Holy One saves us from their hands.”
As I listened that evening, it struck me that this assurance, this statement of fact, does not refer to individuals. The people who wrote those lines, incorporated them into the Seder service, and who said them for hundreds of years lived with the imminent awareness and painful reality that God did not save individual Jews from their attackers.
“Vihi she’amda” only makes sense – it only speaks to a world where Jews die because they are Jews, and not to a world in which Jews are able to live undisturbed. What “Vihi she’amda” tells us is that however many individual Jews may be killed, the collective will survive; that is the “us” it is talking about. God will always save the Jewish People as a whole. Many will die, but the nation will never die, because God makes it so.
The consciousness that the Jews who are still here are only a fraction of those that might have been here were it not for repeated assaults was deeply ingrained in Jews of every generation. It is why there are synagogues called Shearith Israel, the Remnant of Israel, in all parts of the world, from Manhattan, where the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue has held that name since its founders fled the Inquisition in Brazil in 1654, to the Ballarat Synagogue in rural Victoria, Australia, opened in 1861. They knew they were the remnant; they knew that they were survivors; and they knew that dying as a Jew, for being a Jew, as a martyr, was a constant of Jewish history.
Every generation of Jews, until mine, born in the fleeting golden age between the end of the Shoah and October 7, 2023, understood this as a fact of Jewish life. It turns out that our golden age was not golden at all; it was fool’s gold. We thought that we had reached the end of history, and that the rules and realities that had applied for two millennia had suddenly evaporated. As we look back now, that was never likely.
Rabbi Sacks was prescient when he diagnosed antisemitism as a mutating virus: first they killed us for our religion, then for our race, and now for our state. It is possible to be very critical of Israel and still to wonder why Jews are killed in Europe, America, and Australia supposedly in response to Israeli behaviour, but Russians are not killed in these places because of the war in Ukraine, or Chinese people because of Tibet or the treatment of the Uighur Muslims. It is because in every generation there is a “reason” to kill Jews, and in every generation Jews die the deaths of martyrs.
At the funeral of his son-in-law Rabbi Eli Schlanger, Rabbi Yehoram Ullman illustrated this truth with a tradition about Rabbi Joseph Karo, the 16th-century scholar of Jewish law, who was assured by an angelic guide that he would have the merit to die as a martyr. It was taken for granted that martyrdom was one of the ways in which a Jew would die, and indeed that it was a privilege. For Rabbi Karo, that understanding was forged by the destruction of Iberian Jewry in the 1490s, but in still-living memory it was reasserted by the Holocaust, and now by October 7, 2023, and Erev Chanukah 2025.
I was lucky to have a few interactions with Rev Leslie Hardman in London 20 years ago. He was the army chaplain who entered Bergen-Belsen with the liberating Allied forces. A service he conducted in the camp soon after was filmed, and it’s his voice that can be heard declaring “Am Yisrael Chai” – the People of Israel still lives. There, surrounded by Jewish corpses, the point was not that individual Jews were alive; there were more dead than living. But the nation was not dead, and it was never going to die.
That is, I think, the meaning of dancing at Jewish weddings. It is a “Vihi she’amda” not in words but in movement. Just as the Cossacks arrived to break up the wedding in Fiddler on the Roof, all Jewish marriages take place in the shadow of destruction. Individual Jews die; there are always martyrs. But the nation is immortal, and a Jewish wedding is a sign of and a contribution to that immortality.
Another couple has come together; another generation is playing its part. In all likelihood, children will be born and take up the effort maintained by their ancestors, and that is why we dance, and dance so hard. We are dancing for a particular couple, but more than that, we are dancing for ourselves and our shared future. That is why the dancing was so powerful and so moving just three weeks after the Erev Chanukah massacre, why it always has been, and why it always will be.
Rabbi Dr Elton is the chief minister of the Great Synagogue, Sydney
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