Simchat Torah

At home, I have a leather bound, German-Hebrew Bible.

It was my grandfather’s. He got it from his synagogue, in the town of Hildesheim, as a gift to honor his becoming bar mitzvah. Many years later, on Kristallnacht, my grandfather was forced to march through the smoldering ashes of that same synagogue.

For many of us, Jewish life, if we look at our family stories, is characterized by all kinds of disruptions and fractures – pogroms, forced displacement, and more unique to our contemporary experience in America until recently – assimilation and erasure, the pressure to look and act like everybody else to not inconvenience others with our need to eat differently, or not take Sabbath rest in exchange for success and the promise we’d be safe.

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But the Torah tells our story as if it’s a seamless cycle without disruptions: during the upcoming holiday of simchat torah, Jews literally run in circles around the Torah – rejoice that ends turn into beginnings. It’s all one story, this triumphant story of ours: V’zot habracha, we chant – this is the blessing of God’s man, Moses, bidding farewell; Bereishit, we continue, “in the beginning.”

But we all know life’s not like that.

And according to the rabbis, Torah’s not like that either: God tells Moses he will die before entering the Promised Land. It doesn’t go well. Moses pleads for hours, begs heaven and earth, to intervene on his behalf. Finally, exhausted, Moses accepts his fate on one condition: that God to honor him in Moses’ final moment by — rather than having any of God’s messengers do it on God’s behalf — taking Moses’ soul, Godself.

So, the Torah says, “Moses’s life came to an end al pi Adonai – at the mouth of God.” God draws near to Moses, takes Moses’ last breath with him. Breathes in as Moses breathes out.

On Simchat Torah, we read the end and the beginning of the Torah in one breath, so to speak – as one unbroken story. This leads scholar and poet Esther Schor to argue that “the creation of the world is God’s shiva for Moses.” For seven days, God holds God’s breath – carries inside of Godself Moses’ life force, until finally God forms the first human from earth, blows into this its nostrils the breath of life God took from Moses: the last breath Moses breathes out thus becomes Adam’s first.

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We all carry our people’s legacy inside of us like this – like one uninterrupted story, the end of one becoming the beginning of another. After many years of assimilating into German society, our family was disrupted, torn; the life my grandfather lived in Germany came to an end. His name was changed, Americanized. Yet…I carry his original last name as my middle name: not, Shurman, the version he received at Ellis Island but Schürmann. I carry his story in me, his life force.

So, over Sukkot and into Simchat Torah, as we celebrate the same holidays our people have celebrated place to place, generation to generation, let us we bring new life, new beginnings, to the sacred story of our ancestors: to people whose names we may never know, and those whose names we carry inside of us — as close to us as our very breath.

And let us say: Amen.