The High Holidays

Shmini Atzeret & Simchat Torah

Two days that get spoken of as one. A quiet festival of lingering, with Yizkor and the prayer for rain — and then a night of carrying Torah scrolls in circles until people are hoarse.

Two days, not one

The autumn run ends with two festival days that people habitually run together and that are genuinely different from each other.

Shmini Atzeret, the twenty-second of Tishrei, is in the Torah. Its name means “the eighth, a holding back”, and the classical reading of it is affectionate: after seven days of a festival with seventy bulls offered for the seventy nations of the world, God asks the Jewish people to stay one more day, just the two of us. It is a small, quiet holiday, and it is a separate festival in its own right rather than the tail end of Sukkot.

Simchat Torah is not in the Torah. It is the name that attached, over centuries, to the day the annual cycle of Torah readings is completed. Outside Israel that is the twenty-third of Tishrei, the second festival day. In Israel, where there is only one day, everything happens on the twenty-second at once.

Shmini Atzeret

Three things happen on it.

• Yizkor. The memorial prayer for parents and close relatives, said on Shmini Atzeret morning after the Torah reading — one of only four times a year. For many people this is the reason they are in the building. In most Ashkenazi communities, Chabad included, those whose parents are both living step out while it is said. See the Yizkor page.
• Tefillat Geshem, the prayer for rain. From this day until Passover, a line asking for rain is inserted into the daily Amidah. It is introduced with a full liturgical poem, chanted in the High Holiday melody by a leader wearing a kittel — a jarring flash of Yom Kippur in the middle of a cheerful week, and deliberately so. The agricultural year of the land of Israel starts here.
• The sukkah, one more time. Outside Israel the custom is to eat in the sukkah on this day, but without the blessing over dwelling in it — because the day is not Sukkot, and yet the doubt about the calendar that produced the second festival day in the first place has to be respected. Practice around the evening meal specifically varies between communities; when in doubt, do what the household you are eating in does.

In most Ashkenazi communities, including Chabad, the first round of hakafot is held on the night of Shmini Atzeret — so the dancing begins a full day before Simchat Torah does.

Simchat Torah, and what hakafot are

Every Shabbat of the year, a portion of the Torah is read in shul, working through the Five Books in sequence. On this day the last portion of Deuteronomy is finished and the first of Genesis is begun, immediately, without any gap at all.

The way that is marked is hakafot: circuits. Every scroll comes out of the ark. Verses are said — Atah horeisa, a chain of lines about the Torah being given — handed round the room so that many people get one. Then the scrolls are carried around the bimah, seven times, and between each circuit everybody dances.

In practice, one circuit takes as long as it takes. The music does not stop. In a Chabad shul the niggunim are specific and mostly wordless, some of them associated with particular Rebbes, and the same six or seven tunes come back around the room all night. People take a scroll for a lap and hand it to somebody else. Children get lifted up. There is a l’chaim, usually several.

Hakafot are held three times: the night of Shmini Atzeret, the night of Simchat Torah, and again on Simchat Torah morning.

In the morning

• Everybody who wants an aliyah gets one — the reading is repeated as many times as needed, which on a busy morning is a lot of times.
• Kol HaNe’arim: all the children under bar mitzvah are gathered under one large tallit held over their heads like a canopy, and blessed together with Jacob’s blessing to Ephraim and Menashe. This is usually the loveliest ninety seconds of the year and it is also, reliably, chaos.
• Chatan Torah — the person honoured with the final verses of Deuteronomy, in which Moses dies looking at a land he does not enter.
• Chatan Bereishit — the person honoured with the opening of Genesis, read immediately afterwards from a second scroll.

Why we dance

The honest answer is that it is not obvious. Nobody is dancing because they have understood something new; most people in the circle could not tell you what was in this week’s portion. What is being marked is not comprehension. It is belonging — the fact of having a Torah at all, and of having got round the whole thing again.

Which is why the dancing is done holding the scroll closed. It is not read on Simchat Torah night. A scholar and a person who cannot read a word of Hebrew hold exactly the same object in exactly the same way, and from six feet away you cannot tell which is which. That is not a sentimental gloss added later; it is the structure of the evening.

There is also the timing. This is the end of five weeks that began with the shofar and went through the fast, the hut, and the willows. Whatever that whole stretch was for, this is where it lands: not in resolution but in a room full of people who are pleased to be there.

If you are coming for the first time

• Come at night. The evening is the part people mean when they talk about Simchat Torah.
• Come late if you want. Hakafot run long, and arriving in the middle of the third circuit is completely normal.
• You will be offered a drink. Take it or do not; both are fine. Anyone driving afterwards should say so and will be handed a soda without comment.
• Wear shoes you can be trodden on in. Genuinely.
• No phones or photographs — it is a festival day, with the same restrictions as Shabbat. This is the one night of the year people most wish they could film, and nobody does.
• Bring the children, at whatever hour. Flags, sweets, and being carried around on somebody’s shoulders are all part of it.

And then it is over

Simchat Torah ends at nightfall and the next morning is an ordinary weekday. The sukkah comes down. The Torah cycle restarts at Genesis that Shabbat. The Chassidic teaching about this stretch is that the ordinary weeks that follow are the point — that whatever was collected over the autumn is meant to be spent in the winter, which is a less glamorous idea than the dancing and probably the more serious one.

This year’s times and arrangements are on the Simchat Torah page and the calendar. Everyone is welcome, there is no ticket, and if you have never done this before, tell somebody at the door and they will make sure you are pulled in.

Questions people ask

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