Beloved friends,
This Friday, we begin our celebration of Simchat Torah the eighth day of our Sukkot festival. This is the day that we bring to a close one annual cycle of Torah reading, and immediately begin a new one. This means that we read the last portion in the book of Deuteronomy, V’zot Ha-beracha, and begin reading anew from the book of Genesis, Bereshit. Many wonder why this particular day was chosen. A good argument could be made for this transition to occur at Rosh HaShanah. What better way to celebrate the beginning of the new year, than with the beginning of a new year of Torah reading?
In the Torah itself, Moses is commanded by God to gather the children of Israel, every seven years, during the sabbatical years. At this gathering, Moses is to read the entirety of the Torah to the Israelites. Certainly, this was a way to continue to build community and to connect the Israelites to Torah and to God. The gathering was to take place during Sukkot. Assuming that at the end of seven days the mission was complete, the eighth day became a celebration. Today the celebration is Simchat Torah.
We engage with Torah in a never-ending cycle. Each year we have the opportunity to see the Torah with fresh eyes, and to see how it continues to inform our lives as we grow. There is a beautiful teaching that connects the cycle of Torah reading by using the last letter of the last word of Deuteronomy and joining it with the first letter of the first word of Genesis. When we take the lamed of Yisrael and join it with the bet of Bereshit we get the Hebrew word lev, which means heart.
This means that each year we have the opportunity to deepen our connection to Torah, taking the words very much to heart. This is very much what the quotation from the prophet Jeremiah, our congregation’s namesake, refers to, as it is engraved on the front piece of the reading table in the Schreibman sanctuary. “I have placed My Torah in their midst, and written it upon their heart.” God says to us, “Here is my Torah. It is my gift to you. Within it, you will find instructions on how to be a blessing and build communities of blessing. Now it is up to you.” Each year it is up to us to not only take the words to heart, but to also make them a part of who we are. To literally write the words of Torah in our hearts.
May this Shabbat, made even more sacred by our celebration of Torah, find us taking to heart the ethical teachings and precepts of Torah and using the ritual of our Simchat Torah observance to bring us closer to one another and to the realization of the ideal set forth by Jeremiah: “I [God] have placed My Torah in their midst, and written it upon their heart.”
Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach,
