Kesher Talk

Don't talk of love -- show me now. It seems hard to think of a better time to begin blogging than right after Simchat Torah. That's when all the ceremony, all the services, all the stuff that starts the year finally ends and lets us get on with it. (Yes, I know that Simchat Torah was two days ago, but I figure that as long as I still feel it in my calves it still counts.)

That, at any rate, is what I thought when I first wrote this; seasonal changes, moon cycles, all that nature stuff. But nooo..... There's still the tech stuff. There's nothing like deciding that you're finally going to do this, then writing, then editing, then posting, then waiting -- then getting an indescipherable error message.

But onward.

Simchat Torah's the time when all the words finally end, all those words that make wonderful sense to you if you've been lucky enough to have your life go according to plan, if no nightmare has disrupted it. It's astounding how we Jews, with our history of tragedy and loss and disruption and pogram, have managed to create a liturgy that rarely acknowledges that. Instead we pound ahead with cause and effect, with the cycle of the year somehow spiraling toward eventual redemption, with Unetaneh Tokef promising us that despite all the grotesque ways in which we might die somehow goodness might change that. (It doesn't.)

That's when Eliza Doolittle come to mind. "I get words all day through, first from him, now from you -- is that all you blighters can do?"

But then there's the comic relief the rabbis brilliantly thought to insert on Yom Kippur, with Jonah inside the belly of the fish, kvetching; sitting under a vine, like Job, but whining. (And how odd to sit in shul on the afternoon of the holiest day of the year realizing that Job and Jonah play out Karl Marx's dictum of tragedy repeating itself in farce.)

And then there's Sukkot. Eating in a sukkah is wonderful, but because I am no doubt terribly prissy and overrefined the primitive wonder of asking for rain by marching around waving a large discolored uni-testicalled penis is lost on me. I giggle, I flee, I can't march. Is that all you blighters can do?

And then -- Simchat Torah. We dance for hours and hours and night and then again the next day, from morning until afternoon. We're no longer in the street -- there's nothing like providing that target-rich an environment -- but we crowd the shul and whirl and jump and sing and twirl as the band plays louder and louder. It's not what you'd really call dancing -- it's basic Israeli dance steps combined with lots of running and jumping in place and banging into people -- but it's sweaty and thrillling and wonderful. There are finally no more words. There is nothing to try to believe, nothing to pretend to believe, nothing to wish to believe, just the sounds and the whirling. I wore a black-and-white silk skirt with gored insets that twirled all around me; I loved watching it.

At the end, when all the hakafot were done and the last reading was done and the Torah was turned and the first reading was done, my daughter and husband and I were given the honor of carrying the three scrolls around the room and back into the ark. We walked down the center of all those people, like the spinal cord going through vertebrae, as they all kissed the Torah and many of them kissed us as well. I looked at them -- among them were many of my best friends, other people I'd like to know better, and still others who I know entirely well enough, thank you -- and realized that this is my community. There could not possibly be a more loving way to begin a year.

posted by Joanne @ 10/21/2003 07:00:07 AM