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Simchat Torah 5785


On the Thursday between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, in the middle of the ten Days of Awe, we traveled as a family to Soest in Germany to bury our children’s maternal grandmother. She died at the age of 73 after a very short illness. The funeral service was on the Friday, and we drove back the same day, arriving just in time for Kol Nidre. Liliane, or Mimi as we called her, was their last connection to their deceased mother. She was a warm and loving person, totally devoted to her grandchildren. We visited several times during her illness, but it was hard for the kids to see her deteriorate. In the end she asked us not to come again, because she wanted the kids to remember her as she was and not as a sick emaciated person in a wheelchair.  

 

The service was sober and secular, and Liliane’s ashes were transferred in a beautiful urn to a beautiful columbarium in a beautiful cemetery in Bad Sassenberg where she had lived with Opa Herbie. The kids mourned in their own way. I was surprised by their ability to experience such intense sadness, yet moments later to laugh and get on with life and friends and school and judo and skating and student jobs and all the activities that had been briefly interrupted by the death of someone they loved so dearly.  I envied them. As adults we find it so difficult to let go of death when it visits us. For many of us it never seems to leave and all we can do is get used to its presence, to give it a place in our lives. Death and life go hand in hand.

 

As a people, we were visited by death on Simchat Torah last year, October 7th, death of the most horrible and unimaginable kind. It will stay with us forever and we will never forget. Unaware of the extent of the horror that was taking place in Southern Israel that morning, we danced with the Torah scrolls in this same space last year and we celebrated life. As news filtered through later that day, our world changed, and we all changed with it. We started to count on October 7th, to count the days, to count the hostages, to count the deaths… and our counting continues.

The Torah is our Etz Chayim, our Tree of Life, our source of joy with its roots deep in the reality of our world, deep in the אדמה adamah the messy soil of God’s creation, in which decay is transformed into life and growth and nourishment. The Torah is our Tree of Life rooted in the earth and we live as Jews in its branches. And we are commanded in the Torah to count and count again. God loves us and wants us to be numerous. So we count… how many members do we have? How many are we in Belgium, in Europe? In Israel, in the world? Each one of us is precious and God wants us to keep a tally. To count. We count our tribes, and heads of tribes, and armies… We count days too, from Pesach to Sukkot, from the first of Elul to the first of Tishri, from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, and we count the candles on Chanukkah… We are a counting people, and we count our days, we count our dead, and we count our hostages.

 

On Simchat Torah, we commemorate death and celebrate life.


Rabbi Brian

 

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