V’Zot HaBrachah/Sukkot/Simchat Torah: An Auspicious Time of Year

Coming after Succot, a holiday of lulavs and etrogs and camping out in our backyards, the date of Simchat Torah seems unrelated, even arbitrary. Why do we celebrate Simchat Torah? We finish and re-start reading the Torah—but what’s the big deal? Why do we have this festival?

One could answer, if we hold a siyum after finishing a book of the Torah or a massechta of Gemara—a party celebrating our studies—all the more so, kal vechomer, that we have a festival when we finish reading the whole Torah.

This answer, however, is not valid, because it misses the very premise of the question. The question isn’t asking why celebrate it at all, but rather, why celebrate it then.

One could answer, Simchat Torah is celebrated when it is because it is within a week of that date that one cycle of Shabbat parsha readings ends and another begins.

This answer is even more foolish than the first, however; it, too, is blind to the meaning of the question. If we never doubled up parshiot (as we often do with parshiot such as Tazria-Metzora and Behar-Bechukotai, reading two parshiot in one week), or if we doubled them up more often, or if we divided the parshiot differently, or if we even started sometime else, we would finish the Torah readings at a completely different time of year!

Why, then, Simchat Torah, on the 22^nd (or 23^rd outside of Israel) of the seventh month? Why now, of all times?

The Torah commands us at the end of the seventh year, the year of shmita, on the holiday of Succot, when all the Jewish people are gathered at Beit Hamikdash, to read the Torah out to everyone.

This is an important commandment, and it says a lot about Judaism. We are not a religion which gives the power of religious knowledge to the clergy; rather, every citizen should know our laws. However, it is difficult for a simple farmer to set aside the time to learn to read and to sit down and read the Torah. God’s solution to this is that once every seven years, we are guaranteed the opportunity to hear the Torah for ourselves.

Nowadays, however, this is much more problematic. Although selections of the Torah were read in Jerusalem on the Succot following the shmita year, much is not the same. First of all, in the absence of Beit Hamikdash, precious few Jews make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem three times a year; precious few Jews gather to hear the Torah read. Furthermore, I am baffled by how it was ever possible to read all the Torah in one day, aloud to a throng, now as much as then.

Because it is simply not feasible to read the entire Torah to all the Jews in the world, we need some way to keep our collective awareness of Torah alive. So at the end of Succot, we celebrate the Torah; we finish reading it and we start again to symbolize the entire cycle, to read the entire Torah in spirit if not in fact.

I like to think that what we lose in completeness we make up for in frequency; although we don’t read the entire Torah in a day as did the kohanim of old, we hold this celebration every year, to keep the Torah in our hearts and in our minds even when it is not shmita.

We finish reading the Torah, hold a great celebration—and we begin again.