It is Simchat Torah again.
The day of joy. The day of dancing with the Torah, of ending and beginning.
And again, it comes to us through the smoke and dust of war.
In the coming days, hostages will return home.
Some will walk back into their parents’ arms.
Some will be carried back wrapped in flags.
All of them bear the weight of "what" these two years have been,
Years that have torn through families, homes, faith, and hearts.
And we are told: v’samachta b’chagecha.
You shall rejoice in your festival.
But how do we speak of joy now?
Because this year, joy and pain arrive together.
They do not take turns.
They meet in the same moment,
a mother crying in relief beside another mother crying in grief.
One life returned, another lost.
Both held by the same sun, the same wind, the same prayer.
Maybe this, unbearable as it feels, is what it means to be a Jew:
to hold two truths that do not reconcile,
to bless what has been restored and mourn what cannot be repaired,
and somehow to live in the space between them.
The Torah calls this week z’man simchateinu, the season of our joy.
But it never said joy would be simple.
Maybe joy was never a feeling at all.
Maybe it is the courage to stay present, to keep breathing,
to keep lifting one another even when the heart is breaking.
Two years ago, on Simchat Torah, the music stopped.
This year, it will begin again,
not in triumph, but in defiance.
Not because we are healed,
but because life itself refuses to end.
We will dance again, gently, fiercely,
with tears still on our faces,
with names still in our mouths,
with arms that know both the weight of loss and the miracle of return.
Joy, this year, is not celebration.
It is remembrance, breathed alive.
It is the knowledge that the Torah does not end,
that the story continues,
that even on broken ground, we are still here,
holding everything,
and still choosing life.
The scroll turns, as it always does, to Bereshit.
Back to the beginning.
But beginnings are never what they seem.
They rise not from calm but from chaos,
from the earth tohu va’vohu, wild, void, unformed,
darkness upon the face of the deep.
And still, a breath moves there,
a whisper of something that refuses to disappear.
That breath, maybe that is where joy hides.
Not in the light itself, but in the act of calling for it.
In the human voice that, even now, dares to say let there be.
We cannot command light any more than we can command joy,
but we can reach toward it,
and in that reaching,
we become part of its making.
And the breath moves.
Still.