Joy of the Torah

Simchat Torah ignites jubilant celebrations.

By: Cordelia Longo

Photos courtesy of Joshua Samuels

Every year, people make seven processions around the Torah scrolls, the festivity filling their hearts with joy. They dance and laugh and sing all night long on the second floor of the Chabad Jewish Community and Student Center in Bellingham, Washington. 

Hadassah Conrad, one of the enthusiastic participants, was fairly new to the Chabad House last school year. Even so, they felt the same sense of community they were used to experiencing at their home synagogue. From finding people in classes to celebrating holidays at Chabad, the Jewish community always finds ways to come together. 

Conrad, 22 and a second-year transfer student, goes to both a conservative synagogue in Seattle, which is a two-hour drive from their hometown of Aberdeen, and the Chabad House near Western Washington University. For them, the holidays are fun no matter where they are. 

At first, Conrad didn’t want to go to the Rohr Center for Jewish Life, the Chabad House next to Western, because of how Orthodox and gender-separated it was. Nevertheless, they decided to go after a friend encouraged them to, and found part of their Bellingham Jewish community. 

Simchat Torah is a holiday dedicated to celebrating the Torah cycle. It literally means “joy of the Torah.” Every Simchat Torah celebration includes reading the last chapter of Deuteronomy and the beginning of Genesis– these are the first and the last books that make up the Torah, which has five books in total– to keep up with the Hebrew calendar. Simchat Torah’s neighboring holidays, Shemini Atzeret and Sukkot, are also joyous. This year, Simchat Torah falls on October 24. 

Though the Bellingham Chabad is different from the one in Aberdeen, where Conrad lived until they were 18, the spirit of the holiday is the same. 

“I really do think that Simchat Torah is one of those holidays, specifically within Judaism, that the entire purpose is to be filled with joy, and to dance without shame, unabashedly,” Conrad said. “And I think that carries over in any community that celebrates it with the true intention of joy.” 

Across Chabad Centers and synagogues throughout the country, this joy fills rooms and lights up faces. At Congregation Beth Israel (CBI), a Reform synagogue in Bellingham, Rabbi Joshua Samuels unrolls the Torah scroll every year on Simchat Torah. 

In Bellingham, the two places of worship are CBI and the Chabad House next to Western.  The Chabad House serves Jews of all backgrounds. 

While community members hold up the scrolls, Samuels points out stories from the past year of the synagogue’s studies. This scroll is heavy, and it must not touch the ground. At some synagogues, Torah scrolls are placed on long tables.

“Every single week, our community comes together to learn from the Torah. We read it, we treat it with utmost respect,” Samuels said. “And so, when you get to the end of it, it’s a reason to rejoice.”  

In addition, Samuels said, ending and restarting the Torah also marks the end of the high holidays, which is an intense period. Simchat Torah ends the season on a positive note. 

“The Torah is the centerpiece of the Jewish community, and so it’s nice to celebrate it. And remember what we’re doing. It’s our narrative, it’s our story,” Samuels said. 

Evidence for celebrating the reading of the Torah as a holiday dates back over 1,500 years, according to David Picus, a world religions professor at Western. However, scholars suggest that the tradition is even older than that, Picus said.

At every synagogue, the Torah is read in chunks, once a week, over the course of a year. 

“The restarting of the Torah cycle was regarded as something significant for a long time, but it didn’t take its modern form until the late medieval/early modern period,” Picus said. 

For Conrad, the modern form of this celebration takes place at the Chabad House and includes drinking with friends. The way Conrad sees it, the holiday is about the religious aspect, as well as gathering with the people they love. 

Simchat Torah celebrations do not have to happen in a room full of people, though that is frequently how it is done. Some people in Bellingham go to CBI, some go to Chabad and others, like Paulina Vinarsky, 20, celebrate on their own before sharing their traditions with others. 

Every year since she was 15, Vinarsky has used a 1999 leatherbound Jewish Publications Society Tanakh, a handheld version of the Torah, to read the first portion of Simchat Torah. Her father gifted it to her and told her she must never write in it.  

Vinarsky’s father is an Atheist Jew and her mother is Russian Orthodox. Though she became religiously Jewish at 15, she has always had a connection to her father’s Jewish heritage. To her, the Torah is like a retelling of family stories. 

“I think there’s always someone in the family who makes family trees, who collects stories, who collects pictures of their family. I do that in my family, I am that person,” Vinarsky said. “To me, it’s just another way of having and being able to make a family tree and having those stories, just in written form.” 

Vinarsky, who completed her second year of studies at Western, babysat for one of the Chabad’s rabbis last year on Simchat Torah; she did not join others on the actual holiday. As a previous member of the Hillel of Western, she took the group through her tradition, reading the first portion of Genesis from the leatherbound book. 

Vinarsky believes that celebrating the holiday is not only a way to express her joy but also to express the entire Jewish culture’s joy. 

“Especially last year, when the Kanye West tweets were happening, people in our community were highlighting Jewish joy, and Simchat just means joy, so… Simchat Torah and Shemini Atzeret are just another way to express our Jewish joy in the face of antisemitism,” Vinarsky said. 

All members of the Chabad House and CBI feel this joy throughout the night, even if they haven’t always celebrated the holiday. 

At first, Elias Canterbury, 21 and a fourth-year at Western, didn’t want to actively seek out other Jewish people on campus, because he worried they would be too religious compared to him. However, he got to know people in Professor Sarah Zarrow’s Jewish history class during his freshman year. 

“I didn’t grow up with a significant Jewish life. You grow up, and the main thing is ‘you’re a Jew, you know what Shabbat is, you know what Passover is,’” Canterbury said. “And that was really the extent of it. Coming here and really having a thriving lively Jewish community has really been the thing that intensified it.” 

Canterbury’s favorite part of Simchat Torah is holding and dancing with the scrolls at Chabad. To him, this is like becoming the legs of the Torah. 

“To some extent, you are guiding it and being guided by it and taking it and giving it a life that it, as a physical scroll, normally doesn’t have,” Canterbury said.  

Carly Harris, 21 and a third-year at Western, still remembers their old synagogue’s Simchat Torah celebration in Denver, Colorado. Seeing the Torah unrolled was their favorite part of the holiday. 

“Seeing it sprawled out over a room that’s 50 feet long and everyone’s holding it, everyone’s looking at it, and everyone’s making it the center of attention,” Harris said. “It feels like that is the celebration that a scroll that beautiful deserves.” 

Harris attended Simchat Torah at the Chabad House near Western a couple of years ago. Though the unrolling of the Torah and the rabbi pointing out stories does not happen at Chabad, as it does at CBI and Harris’s old synagogue, it is still what Simchat Torah means to them. 

In some Conservative and Reform synagogues, genders are not separated, Conrad said. At the Chabad House, a divider separates the two sides. 

During Simchat Torah at Chabad, the women cook near the entrance, Harris said. The men speak Hebrew to each other before everyone prays.

“There are an immense amount of Hebrew words for joy,” Canterbury said. “Not just joy as in, ‘I’m happy for myself, but kind of like an awe-filled joy.” 

Even though Conrad had only been at Western a month before Simchat Torah, they found community in their fellow Jewish peers. In fact, the people they met weeks before Simchat Torah are now some of their closest friends. 

“The rabbi who’s made one-too-many ‘L’Chaim’s will start singing and dancing and just truly exhibiting the joy,” Conrad said. “L’Chaim” means “to life,” and people often say it as a toast. “The end goal is to dance and celebrate with the Torahs and just really be in that space of joy and celebration and elation with your community.” 

And so, every year, the Jewish community in Bellingham celebrates the ending of the Torah cycle and the starting of a new one. It is one more year of friendship, of growth, of learning, of a thousands-year-old tradition.