Simchat Torah

Simchat Torah, "rejoicing of the Torah", celebrates the completion and immediate recommencement of the annual cycle of Torah reading. Falling on the twenty-second of Tishrei in the Land of Israel and the twenty-third in the Diaspora, coinciding with or following Shemini Atzeret at the close of the Sukkot season, it marks the point at which the last verses of Deuteronomy are read and, without pause, the opening of Genesis is begun again, so that the study of the Torah is shown never to end.

Its observance is the most physically exuberant in the synagogue year. All the Torah scrolls are taken from the ark and carried in seven processions, the hakafot, around the synagogue with singing and dancing, often spilling out of doors; the honour of the concluding and opening readings is given ceremonially, and in many communities every adult, and all the children, are called to the Torah. The festival is a relatively late medieval development, formalising a joy attached to the reading cycle, and in the modern period it has taken on added meaning: under Soviet rule it became a night on which Jews gathered publicly to affirm their identity, and it remains one of the happiest evenings of the Jewish year.

On 7 October 2023, which fell on Simchat Torah that year, Hamas launched a large-scale attack on southern Israel, killing and abducting many civilians, an event that occurred while Israeli communities near the Gaza border were marking the holiday's usual joyful observance, and the coincidence of the date has since made Simchat Torah, for many Israeli and diaspora Jews, permanently associated with that day's events alongside its older and originally unconnected liturgical meaning as the completion and restart of the annual Torah reading cycle.

Israeli and Jewish communities have responded to this new association in varying ways in the years since, with some communities incorporating memorial elements acknowledging the attack into their Simchat Torah observance and others deliberately maintaining the day's traditional joyful character as an act of continuity and resilience, a live and still-developing question within different communities about how, or whether, to hold together the holiday's ancient theme of unbroken joy in the Torah with a devastating and very recent historical event that now shares its calendar date, a tension this entry notes without prescribing how any individual community should resolve it.