Some Derashot for Simchat Torah

In these next few minutes, I’d like to talk about something that should concern us all after the intense days of awe experienced only a week and a half ago: that is, what does it mean to be religious? To unpack this question, we will look at it through the prism of this holiday, Sukkot.

We must ask a simple question. In a day’s time, we will be dancing with the Torah, all together here in Shul, on Simchat Torah. What is the connection between Simchat Torah, and Sukkot? How can it be that on the day celebrating the historical giving of the Torah, Shavuot, where the Jewish people are described as standing at a mountain, one nation, one soul, in awe at the revelation, and on that night we mostly sit and learn, eat donuts and drink coffee all night, yet on the holiday of Sukkot, on the celebration of having sat in huts, we get up and dance? It should be the opposite! On a simple level, our celebration is the finishing of the reading of the Torah, the full five books of Moses, and starting anew. But I think there is something deeper here, a closer connection to the holiday we find ourselves in.

Another question, somewhat more complex. Tonight starts the day of Shemini Atzeret, the 8th day of Sukkot. The difficulty in understanding this day is manifold. Just looking at the Torah, there are three times in the Torah that the shalosh regalim, the three major holidays of Sukkot, Pesach, and Shavuot, are mentioned. In only one place is Shemini Atzeret, in Leviticus 23, described as another day of rest added on to Sukkot. In the rest, it isn’t mentioned at all. Does this holiday exist? This is a great mystery, a whodunnit. The case of the missing Shemini Atzeret. Is it part of Sukkot, or completely separate, a “regel bifnei atzmo”, a holiday unto itself? This ambiguous and ill-defined nature of the holiday is the cause of much debate, going back all the way to the Talmud (for example Sukkah 64b). The question dealt with there is whether one eats in the Sukkah on Shemini Atzeret or not. The conclusion of the Talmud there seems to be a compromise, almost like the Talmud isn’t willing to pick sides about this, that we do eat in the Sukkah, but do not make a blessing for performing the mitzva. This is the way most conclude, such as Maimonides, the great medieval halachist, and Rabbi Yosef Karo, the author of Shulchan Aruch. However, there is a stream of Judaism, particularly many chassidic sects, who do not eat at all in the Sukkah on Shemini Atzeret. We can’t help but feel this holiday lacks structure, halachic rigor, as if the Sukkah shimmers in and out of existence at every angle like a holographic image. What are we to make of this seemingly ill-defined holiday we find ourselves in?

So, 1) What is the connection between Simchat Torah and Sukkot, and 2) what are we to make of Shemini Atzeret?

Using an idea of Rav Kook, I think we can answer these questions.

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of Palestine at the turn of the 20th century, was a dynamic and charismatic individual, and his writings span the gamut of Jewish literature. One of his works is a commentary on the aggada, the non-legal portions of the Talmud, called Ain Aya. In it, he uses the aggadas as jumping off points toward broad ideas about life, religion, and philosophy.

We find in Tractate Berachot 48a, an interesting aggada.

אמר רב נחמן קטן היודע למי מברכין מזמנין עליו

R. Nachman said: A boy [not yet 13] who knows “lemi mevorchin” to Whom we bless may be counted for zimmun.

According to this statement (although its interpretation is debated in later halachic literature), a boy before bar-mitzva age can participate in the blessing after meals involving bread, as long as he knows lemi mevorchin, who he is blessing, God.

The Talmud goes on to illustrate this with a seemingly strange story. Rabbah (with a heh) was the father of Abaye, and had adopted Rava. They’re all having family meal time, and Rabbah asks them a question: Lemi mevorchin, To whom are we blessing?

They reply as we would probably expect our children to reply: To God.

But Rabbah has a follow up question, a tough one. “And where does God abide?”

Their responses could not be more different.

Rava pointed to the roof; Abaye went outside and pointed to the sky. Rava - roof; Abaye -

sky.

Rabbah apparently was impressed with these answers. He says to them: Both of you will become great rabbis. This, he says, is the popular saying: “Botzin botzin me’katfei yadei” - Every pumpkin can be told from its stalk. He meant he could tell from these somehow amazing answers that they had the makings of great people.

How are we to understand this story?

Rav Kook, commenting on this, writes that humans have a natural yearning for the divine. But this yearning, this seeking, this feeling of something bigger and grander than ourselves, can take two very different paths. Some find God in definitions and measurements. They find structure in stricture. This personality can be called “the scientist”. The scientists looks at the physical world, clarifying the properties of everything, seeing how everything fits into categories and definitions. The same kind of person studies the Torah, create categories and examines its halachic system, and through that he cleaves to God.

For some people, however, seeking logic and definitions are not enough for them. They want to think ideas loftier than that, to imagine with a kind of higher sense. They don't limit themselves to specificity within definitions. They want to reach higher than what can be expressed, they want to speak in the language of feeling, the heart's language. They are the prophets and poets. Yet, somehow this rising up, says Rav Kook, also causes them to stay grounded. Through this lofty inner sense, they recognize that there's a need, an obligation towards the perfection of humanity. They come to realize that humanity's perfection comes through them upholding definite definitions, meaning the Torah's halacha. They realize that the only way to achieve this lofty ideal is through the anchor of the real world. This is why we find that the prophets of the Bible, instead of meditating as hermits on an island, are driven to improve the lot of man in this world, to fix that which has been broken in society and to mend the seemingly irreparable damage wrought by cruelty and injustice.

Says Rav Kook, Rava was asked whom we bless, and he answered according to his scientist personality. He was a person who found God in the details, whose inclination was towards diligence and industry in the confines of the particular. This manifested itself even in his youth, to find peace of mind in the shade of the tent, to use this to bring himself towards a higher purpose. He pointed to the ceiling, to definition, categories and limits, the comforts of logic and scientific rigor. That’s where God is. In the Halacha, the Torah.

But Abaye went outside. Abaye, the poet, though he was broad-minded, though his inner understanding reached higher than any confine, though it was against his inner nature to attempt to express an answer to a question like "Where does God abide?", he went outside and pointed to the heavens, pointed to somewhere vast, an endlessness.

He went outside. Pointed toward the vastness of the divine, yet his feet stayed firmly planted on the ground.

In the debates of Rava and Abaye, hundreds recorded in the Talmud, the halacha almost always accords with Rava, for Rava was a roof-man, he concentrated on the halacha and all its logic and categories. But Abaye was pulled toward the ineffable, he could not be considered the expert halachist in the sense Rava was.

There is a beautiful idea here, one that we should apply to ourselves when we seek out God, especially coming out of the days of Awe. For the last seven days, we have sat in a temporary hut outside. When we are asked, “Lemi mevorchin”, we can point to our Sukkah roofs, but we must realize that we are required to see the sky and stars through them, the vastness beyond our halachic mindsets. We realize the roofs of the sukkah are but temporary.

On Shemini Atzeret, we see this realized in full. Our sukkahs shimmer. Perhaps we sit in them, and perhaps we don’t. This doubt, this ambiguity, inspires us to reach beyond the logic and definition in our everyday lives. When we come back home, out of our Sukkot, on Simchat Torah, we should take this lesson with us. We celebrate the Torah, the halacha as religious Jews. But we also remember the lesson of the shimmering sukkah, the ambiguity and inability to express ourselves in the face of the Ein Sof, of eternity. Simchat Torah is there to remind us that by realizing there is an infinity beyond us we reach toward, we are pulled back to the present by realizing how much fixing of the world needs to take place. Sukkot is the perfect time to celebrate the Torah, to celebrate our connection to it, and its place in our community.

Through this, may we all strive to be the scientist and the poet, the religiously bound yet spiritually boundless, as we celebrate these last days of Sukkot together.

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Rabbinic nicknames are powerfully meaningful. Take for example, the rabbinic word for marriage, kiddushin. Every Jewish marriage has the groom saying to the bride under the wedding canopy, “Harei At Mikudeshet Li” - “Behold, you are betrothed to me.” Now, the Torah itself does not use this word, kiddushin, but uses a word related to acquiring - yikach, “ki yikach ish isha”, to show the seriousness and pledge of commitment like a business deal, a give and take, a promise of mutual responsibility for each other. But why did the rabbis change the name of marriage, from yikach, to kiddushin? Is there a broader meaning the rabbis were trying to bring to the fore?

The Talmud itself asks this question in the beginning of Tractate Kiddushin. What did the rabbis try to relate with this name switch? “D’Asar La Akulei Alma K’hedkdesh” - That she is like something holy, consecrated, forbidden to everyone except her husband. What powerful imagery! A husband must see his wife as a piece of the Holy Temple, belonging to that of God! Is it any wonder that the rabbis of the Talmud understood Solomon’s Song of Songs, which describes a wonderful relationship of love between a man and a woman, as being a metaphor for our relationship to God Almighty? Is it any wonder that the Talmud records Rabbi Akiva using using Temple names for that book, calling Song of Songs the “Holy of Holies”, the most innermost and sanctified place of the Temple? Is it any wonder that the Talmud Gittin 90b thinks of the imagery of the Temple when it says that when a divorce occurs, the altar of the Temple sheds a tear?

There is tremendous meaning in this rabbinic switch, this new nickname for marriage! The relationship between husband and wife goes from a business transaction (though that has meaning of its own), to a communion with something close to godliness! The Holy of Holies!

That is just one example. There is another example of this I would like to speak about concerning the holiday we have been celebrating for the last week, that of Sukkot. What is the name of Sukkot in the Torah? It’s easy to know, we have been saying it in our Yaaleh Vyavo prayer - “Chag HaSukkot”, and sometimes the Torah also calls it “Chag HaAsif”. Yet, the rabbis of the Talmud changed the name. When the Talmud refers to Sukkot, it calls it simply, “Chag” - celebration. As if this is the most quintessential example of a holiday. What were the rabbis trying to relate with this new nickname? What did they see in Sukkot that makes it the most fundamental form of celebration?

Perhaps if we look at the first mentionings of “chag” in the Torah, we can catch a glimpse of what the rabbis had in mind.

This is the scene. God tells Moses to go to Pharoah and to ask to Let My People Go. But it isn’t an outright request to be freed from slavery. Moses says in Exodus 5, So says God, Let my people go just for three days “vayachogu li bamidbar”, so that they may celebrate me in the desert. Pharaoh, for his part, asks “Who is this God?” And refuses to let them go. But this celebration mentioned by Moses remains a mystery. What is the nature of this planned celebration in the desert?

We find out the answer to this later in the story, when God promises to bring an eighth plague, a plague of locusts. The people of Egypt cry out to Pharaoh to just let the Israelites go, for Egypt is destroyed already. Pharaohs response is to ask Moses, so maybe I should let you guys go. But, he ask, who and what is going to go out there anyway, for your celebration? And in Exodus 10:9, Moses answers, “Binareinu u’v’zikneinu nelech”, our young and old will go, “ki chag hashem lanu” - for it is a celebration of God for us.

My grandfather, Rabbi Chaim Zev Bomzer, may the memory of the righteous be a blessing, notes that the phrase here is not that it is a celebration to God, but rather, “chag hashem”, God’s celebration. There is something in this verse that makes God happy, makes him celebrate, so to speak. What is it?

The answer, he says, is the phrase earlier in the verse, when the young and old come together, when they walk together. When the seemingly unbridgeable gap of generations is joined, when youths walk with their elders toward redemption - that is what makes God want to celebrate.

It was this thought that drove him to decry the existence of the “youth minyan”, youth programming for prayers, when the congregation is divided between the older members and the younger. Why, he asks, can’t prayer form an intergenerational bond? He saw this as a sad development. He envisioned the synagogue, and religious life, as a link between all. Needless to say, that message should still resonate with us.

The joke goes that an old synagogue in Cleveland had just gotten a new rabbi, and his first service at the shul was on Simchat Torah. Used to rowdiness by his congregations during Simchat Torah, he wasn’t terribly bothered that when the Shema prayer was said, half the congregants stood up and half remained sitting, and the half that was seated started yelling at those standing to sit down, and the ones standing yelled at the ones sitting to stand up. But when the same thing happened at services on the following Shabbat, he knew something was wrong.

The rabbi, educated as he was in the law and commentaries, didn't know what to do. He asked the president and board members about the shul’s tradition for the Shema, but they couldn’t answer. Then someone suggested that the rabbi consult one of the original founders of the shul, a 98-year-old man. The rabbi went to the man’s nursing home with a representative of each faction of the congregation.

The person representing those who stood during the Shema asked the old man, “Is it the tradition to stand during this prayer?”

“No, that is not the tradition.”

The one representing those who remained seated asked, “Is it the tradition to sit during Shema?”

“No, that is not the tradition.”

“But,” said the rabbi to the old man, “the congregants fight all the time, yelling at each other about whether.....”

The old man interrupted, exclaiming, “Yes, yes: THAT is the tradition!”

All these people here tonight, joining together for a celebration of Torah, that is our tradition.

Perhaps the tradition of togetherness was what the rabbis saw in Sukkot. It is a “chag ha’asif”, a festival of gathering, and although the Torah saw that as referring to an agricultural gathering, the holiday transformed even in rabbinic times to emphasize the ingathering of all people to the Temple, to celebrate the Simchat Beit Hashoeva, the water libations and the hopes for a good rainy season this year. We take the four very different species together, representing all the different types of Jews. We make our dwellings outside, so we can see our neighbors and say hi, so we can welcome the outside world in. Tonight, we will dance with the Torah, all together. All ages will be present, dancing and singing around the rock of our religious life, the Torah. We form a link, a circle, one youthful hand on the shoulder of those wise in age, and vice versa.

It is the quintessential chag, the true holiday experience, one that even makes God happy.

Let us walk together, young and old, toward redemption, and let us form a circle together when we dance together this Simchat Torah. And we should see the Messiah in our days, bimheira byameinu amen.

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The last chapter of Mishnayot Sukkah deals with the different “watches”, the “mishmarot” of the priestly class who would offer the sacrifices of that time in the Holy Temple for the Sukkot holiday. After detailing all the different mishmarot, we are told, the very last line of all of Mishnayot Sukkah, that there is one exception, the mishmar of “Bilga”, the family mishmar named after their father, Bilga. They are very different from the rest, in three main ways. Normally, each priestly family served in the Holy Temple for a week. At the end of the week, the incoming and outgoing families would divide the lechem hapanim (showbread) between themselves. Usually the incoming family would divide it in the north of the Temple courtyard, while the outgoing family would do so in the south. The Bilga family always had to divide their share of the lechem hapanim on the southern side. Additionally, each family had its own ring affixed to the floor, in which the head of the animal was enclosed to hold it down during slaughter. Each family also had their own cubbies for storage. The Bilga family’s ring and cubby were permanently closed, forcing them to borrow these needed items from the other priestly families; because of this, they suffered great embarrassment.

Why is this? The Talmud, at the very end of the entire Tractate Sukkah, gives an explanation (among others) of this mysterious statement in the Mishnah. There, it tells the terrible tale of Miriam, the daughter of Bilga the Kohen who, as soon as she saw that the Greco-Persians had overtaken the city of Jerusalem in the fall of the second Temple, immediately apostatized, and went and married one of the Greek commanders. Moreover, when the Greeks went in to desecrate the Temple, she went to the Altar, kicked it, and said, (and I quote), “Wolf! Wolf! For how long will you devour the money of Israel, and not protect them in their time of distress?”

When the sages saw this, says the Talmud, they penalized the entire mishmar group that they would forever have this threefold penalty of dividing in the south, having a set ring, and a locked cupboard.

A question that immediately comes to mind is how can an entire mishmar group, an entire family, be blamed for the sins of just one person? The Talmud is also concerned about this. The Talmud answers that this is a case of monkey see, monkey do, so to speak. She only did what she was taught at home. The line of the Talmud goes, “What a child says in the marketplace, it heard from its parents.” She left home, intermarried, and blasphemed God’s providence, because she heard her parents talk this way, and live this way. But, the Talmud objects, that only makes her parents culpable. Why is it that the entire mishmar is penalized? And it answers enigmatically, “Woe to a wicked person, woe to his neighbor. Joy to a righteous person and joy to his neighbor.”

How are we to understand this story? And why is it that Tractate Sukkah should end with this terrible story? Is it random, or is there a message to be derived from this? And do we not still feel the twinge of unfairness at an entire mishmar being punished randomly for this?

1. The connection between Sukkot and Chanukah with the victory of the Hasmoneans (see II Maccabees 10)
2. The fact that Sukkot is the most universlaistic of the holidays (70 sacrifices for the 70 nations, Neztiv in Bamidbar says that Solomon read Kohelet on Sukkot because it spoke to a worldwide human-religious problem - only uses the general word for God elohim, also the prayer for rain affects everyone). Since its univeralistic, we may be tempted to convert to complete cosmopolitans, people of the world, who can take in all cultures andhave no true central identity. We may think we can be Miriam, daughter of the kohen Bilga, who can marry a Greek and still go to the altar, still be concerned for Jewish problems even as we abandon it for another value system. The story is put here to remind us that Sukkot unites the Jews more than it should unite the world, and its important to hold onto our religion in the face of the nations.
3. We learn an important lesson from the punishment. “Oy lerasha, oy leshcheno”. The entire mishmar gets punished for a bad egg or two. But more importantly, the gemara sees fit to end with the verse having nothing to do with the proof, “Tov letzaddik tov leshcheno.” Meharsha suggests the gemara simply wanted to end on a good note. But maybe the lesson, and why this is connected to sukkot, is that we go outside, to the world, and we can hear our friends next door. We are more influenced by them. When we join with good friends, we become better. The mishmar of bilga, having some bad roots in their culture, needed to be more influenced by the other mishmar. So their cupboards and rings were locked. They had to go to others for help, say hello, talk to them a bit. They had to divide in the south, as people were leaving, so that they may see them and socialize. If theproblem was bad influence among themselves, then the solution is to bring good influence in. This is a lesson of extreme importance for after the days of awe. Not only that, but the arba minim symbolize all types of jews. The only way to bring in others who are more estranged from Torah is to be better neighbors, good friends. The mishnah in pirkei avot states that Hillel said, Be like the followers of Aaron, lover of peace and pursuer of peace, and bring close people to Torah. The famous explanation of Aaron as a pursuer of peace comes from Pseudo Rashi on Avot, who says that Aaron would go to people who were fighting and tell them the other one wants to apologze. He’d get them together in a room and they would apologize to each other. However, it’s hard to imagine this would actually work in real life. It also doesn’t explain the last clause, “and bring people close to Torah.” I like the Rambam’s explanation more, that if he saw someone was falling away from Judaism and wasn’t doing well religiously, he would befriend him. When you have Aaron as your friend, you feel the guilt of disappointing your friends. It leads people back to Torah and mitzvot. It is significant that it is Aaron, THE kohen, who is the leader of this movement. He would befriend people who needed a good influence, who needed guidance and understanding, and that is what the sages wanted Bilga to do.