Opinion

Time to grieve, time to dance

Cries of sadness and shouts of joy

In Short

On Simchat Torah, we will always be forced to reckon with the competing urges to mourn the Oct. 7 attacks and celebrate the holiday; this year, it's okay to let the weeping take precedence

A neighbor invited me to her annual Simchat Torah potluck picnic lunch. Her email invited us to be together again this year, so that “the kids can celebrate, while the adults cry.” I have heard this same refrain from everyone as the holiday approaches — the children need space to joyfully celebrate the Torah with candy and dancing, while adults can’t imagine feeling anything but grief on the anniversary of a massacre. How can we give our children Simchat Torah when the adults need Tisha B’Av? 

There is an emotional passage from the book of Ezra that recounts the moment of the rebuilding of the Temple. We might imagine this as a purely ecstatic and joyous experience for the Jewish people, but Ezra presents a more nuanced picture: One where the elders and the youth seem to have entirely different experiences simultaneously. 

Ezra 3:10-13 describes the scene “when the builders had laid the foundation of the Temple of the Lord”:  

They sang songs extolling and praising the Lord, “For He is good, His steadfast love for Israel is eternal. (Ki L’olam Chasdo!)” All the people raised a great shout extolling the Lord because the foundation of the House of the Lord had been laid.

On seeing the building of the Second Temple, all of the people shouted together — but their shouts were not the same. The next verse explains that:

The elders who had seen the first house, wept loudly at the sight of the founding of this house. Many others shouted joyously at the top of their voices.

The same moment elicits both weeping and shouts of joy. The verses don’t explain exactly why the elders are weeping, but we are told they are a generation who saw the First Temple and experienced that loss firsthand. We can only imagine the emotional intensity of having lived through the destruction of a Temple. What must that loss have meant to them, to see their holiest place desecrated and destroyed, to feel so completely powerless and lost? What do we imagine they were thinking and experiencing as they watched this new Temple take its place? 

The text highlights a gap between these elders who “wept loudly” and what we can assume are the younger generations who shout joyously. We might expect this dissonance would lead to rifts between the groups, perhaps making it hard for them to communicate and understand how two people could have such drastically different responses to the same events. This kind of generational discord certainly feels familiar to so many of us right now. 

Yet, perhaps surprisingly to us, not only do the cries of sadness and joy in Ezra not drive the generations apart, their voices blend together until they are indistinguishable:

The people could not distinguish the shouts of joy from the people’s weeping, for the people raised a great shout, the sound of which could be heard from afar.

The Hebrew for shouts of joy in this verse is “kol t’ruat ha’simcha” — the word teruah, the name of one of the calls of the shofar, evokes for us the ambiguous and yet entirely emotion laden cry of the shofar. It is the same sound that can be both a call for war and a call for freedom, a sound of weeping and of holy celebration. This is the kind of blended cry that was heard when the voices of young and old came together at the dedication of the Temple. 

This is what I imagine our voices will sound like on Simchat Torah this year, in our homes and at our synagogues. There will be shouts of joy from our children as they dance and celebrate the sweetness of Torah, and there will be cries of sorrow from the elders who saw something that cannot ever be forgotten. 

But of course it won’t be that simple. Not all children have been shielded from the worst of this war, and while many children carry an innate ability to find joy even amidst darkness, others don’t. And some adults will indeed find moments of joy and simcha (happiness) during the holiday.  As much as we want our children to have room to celebrate, we may also want them to know that something big and hard has happened to the Jewish people. We will need to ask ourselves: How do we transmit the story to our children without transmitting the trauma? 

In a poem about a young woman delighting in the beauty of Korea today, the poet Suji Kwock Kim addresses this complicated goal of transmitting memory without forcing the next generation to relive something hard. Amidst a giddy, joyous celebration of Buddha’s birthday, she reflects on her elders who witnessed the country at its lowest. They are the generation, 

whose spirits could not be broken, 

whose every breath seems to say: 

after things turned to their worst, we began again, 

but may you never go through what we went through, 

may you never see what we saw, 

may you never remember & may you never forget.

Perhaps this is what the elders in the time of Ezra thought as they watched the Temple built again. Perhaps this is what we will say to our children as we watch them dance and sing this year on Simchat Torah. We will make space for their joy and to their shouts we will add our cries. 

Together we will scream: Hoshia Na, save us! Answer us! 

The book of Ezra tells us that the shouts and the cries, the tears and the joy blended together and were indistinguishable, but Rashi offers a different and darker take. He teaches that the weeping actually overtook the sounds of joy and that the sound of the tears was heard far beyond that of the rejoicing.

Those listeners did not recognize the voice of the shout of joy, because of the voice of the people’s weeping, for the rejoicing people were shouting with a great shout, and the voice of weeping was heard farther and farther away.

When I am honest, I must admit that Rashi’s reading sounds more appropriate for this year. This first year, we can and probably should let our weeping overtake the sounds of the joy of the children. That is appropriate. This year we need to allow the tears to flow and in the words of Rashi let “the voice of weeping be heard farther and farther away.” 

Those of us who witnessed the Simchat Torah massacre, in person or through our screens and in our hearts, will remember and we will weep again each year. In future years there will be more and more children who weren’t there, who didn’t see, and who I pray will someday bring an unbridled joy back to this holiday of Simchat Torah. Over time, perhaps the sound of the weeping will recede and we will again find the ability to shout together for joy. 

Rabbi Avi Killip is executive vice president at the Hadar Institute, where she teaches as part of Hadar’s faculty and is host of the “Responsa Radio” podcast.