The rabbinic ingenuity behind Simchat Torah
Simchat Torah, the celebration of completing the annual cycle of the Torah reading, has no roots in the Torah itself. So how did it come about? In the time of the Mishnah and the Talmud there were two main centres of Jewish life, in Babylon and in the Land of Israel. There were different traditions of Torah reading in each centre. The reading of the Torah over one year was the practice in Babylon. But in Israel they had shorter Torah readings and it would take between three and threeand a half years to finish the complete cycle. (Many liberal communities today follow a triennial cycle where the Torah is read over three years, but unlike the historical practice, modern systems don’t read the Torah consecutively.)
It follows that Simchat Torah was not celebrated in Israel as there was no annual completion of the reading. Simchat Torah is a festival of the diaspora.
Fitting the reading of the Torah into one year isn’t as easy as it seems. The Torah is divided into different sections known as parashot. There are 54 parashot which divide the Torah into sections with more or less a single theme. But the number of weeks each year changes.
The Jewish calendar is a combined lunar/solar calendar where a full lunar month is occasionally added to compensate for the difference between the lunar and the solar cycles. The number of weeks each year can change considerably. In addition, when a festival lands on Shabbat, the weekly reading is replaced by a special reading for the festival. As a result, the number of weeks in which the regular reading is read depends on which days of the week the festivals land. To compensate for missing weeks, the reading needs to be adjusted during the annual cycle for that specific year.
There are different ways of making this adjustment. Sometimes this was done by combining two readings together to give a single reading. Sometimes it was done by dividing one reading in half and spreading it over two weeks. There is still evidence of this history in our Torah readings today. Sometimes a combined parashah is very long, which indicates that these were two separate readings that were combined. Sometimes a single reading is very short, which shows that historically this was one parashah that was split in half.
While originally the adjustments were made on an ad-hoc basis, over time different systems evolved for fitting the Torah reading into a year. Rav Saadia Gaon, an eighth-century Babylonian scholar, had a triple parashah in his tradition. He suggested that instead of just combining two parashot, it was possible to read three readings over two weeks, reading one and a half sections each of those weeks. His system did not survive to modernity.
To further complicate matters, one-day festivals in Israel become two-day festivals in the diaspora. That means that in the diaspora it is more common for a festival to land on Shabbat, and as a result, sometimes the reading in Israel is different than the reading here in the diaspora.
Many of us have experienced coming to Israel and discovering that they are a week ahead. As there are many considerations on when to combine a parashah, the reading can be out of sync for as much as two months!
But in the end, it always comes together. When we arrive at Simchat Torah, we are always in the right place at the very end of the Torah.
For me, this complicated yet ingenious system of organising the annual reading of the Torah is more than a mathematical task. It holds within it the wisdom and the genius of generations, who grappled with how to make our tradition work in the real world.
It reminds us that the challenges we face in our lives are rarely new; that generations past have already grappled with many potential problems and have found solutions to them. The tradition preserves these solutions and encodes them into practice.
When we reach the end of the Torah and lift it high into the air in celebration, we are reminded that it is not only the cycle of Torah readings that is governed by tradition; we ourselves are embedded in that tradition. Our own lives also go through regular cycles. As we go through the annual cycle of the year, we have our ups and downs, face challenges and find ingenious solutions to make it work.
Simchat Torah is not only about the Torah. We are also launching into a fresh New Year, guided and protected by the wisdom of our tradition, and yet open and willing to face the challenges of the year ahead.
As we go through the annual cycle of the year, we have our ups and downs’
Rabbi Weiner is the director of the European Masorti Bet Din