What’s With All the Dancing?!

Tis the season to be dancing! It’s Simchas Torah. Sunday night in Israel they’ll be dancing. In the Diaspora we dance on Sunday night in solidarity with Israel. Monday night we’ll dance again for Simchas Torah and in Israel they’ll dance Hakafot Shniyot (post holiday in solidarity with us). Then on Tuesday we’ll close it out with day time dancing and closing out the reading of the Torah.

Lots of dancing.

In Chabad with the Rebbe, the dancing of the solidarity wasn’t symbolic, it was full on. Dancing hours on end. Simchas Torah dancing started at 1 am and went on until the wee hours of the morning and then picked up again at 10:00 Simchas Torah day!

Lots of dancing.

So what’s with all the dancing?!

There are different ways to express our connection and love with and for G-d. Think of it as different Divine love languages. We follow G-d’s commands throughout the year, Kosher, Shabbat, etc. We spend days in intense communion on Rosh Hashanah. And we abstain from physical involvement and pleasure on the Holy day of Yom Kippur.

Simchas Torah is a custom, spontaneously offered by Jews throughout the ages. (The day itself belongs to the Biblical holiday of Shmini Atzeres, but the celebration of the Torah and the dancing is custom, not even Rabbinic decree.) It is offered not out of a sense of obligation but out of a deep sense of love. We don’t abstain, we engage. We engage with our feet lifting the entire body with all of its year round complexities (emotions, intellect).

Our dancing feet shout out to G-d, we love You, we are connected with You, we are dancing with the Torah wrapped up because we know our connection to You through Torah transcends even the Torah’s wisdom, we are ONE!

This is it! This is the entire celebration of Simchas Torah. It’s a moment of Oneness that transcends even the Oneness of the moment of Neilah.

It is for this reason that the Chasidic Masters teach that we bring down into a very physical manner all the blessings we activated on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It is this Dancing that evokes G-d’s response in a manner that nothing else, no other expression of this entire season is able to accomplish.

So get your dancing shoes on, and get ready to bring down the great blessing!

L’chaim, I hope to see you this Simchas Torah?!