Yaakov Raskin | Finding meaning and joy on this October 7 anniversary

WITH THE High Holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in the rear-view mirror, we now approach the festivals of Sukkot and Simchat Torah, two of the most joyous holidays on the Jewish calendar. Sukkot is known in our holy texts as “the time of our joy”, celebrating G-d’s divine protection, while Simchat Torah – the annual renewal and restart of the 52-week Torah reading cycle, literally translates to “Rejoicing in the Torah”. Simchat Torah is the Jewish holiday most associated with joy, and we celebrate with an all-night singing and dancing session to embody the joy found in Jewish life and practice.

However, on October 7, 2023, the Simchat Torah festivities were covered by a dark cloud. Two years ago, the people of Israel experienced a massacre worse than any in living memory, where 1,200 people were murdered in cold blood, and hundreds more were kidnapped, maimed and scarred for life. This day left a lasting trauma for Jews everywhere, and two years later, people around the world are asking themselves how we can possibly feel joy on Simchat Torah when our hearts are still heavy. The question on most people’s minds is, How can we dance again?

The answer, perhaps, lies in an unexpected place – in the very objects that connect dancing with mourning — our shoes.

From the first time G-d spoke to Moses at the burning bush, telling him to remove his sandals, to the Jewish practice of tying our left shoe before our right, shoes and footwear hold immense significance in Judaism.

TORN SLIPPERS AND BROKEN HEELS

Just three months before my father-in-law Rabbi Zusha Wilhelm returned his soul to his Maker, he shared the following story with me about the connection between Simchat Torah and shoes. There was once a time when angels, who were roaming around heaven after the holiday of Simchat Torah, found it littered with torn slippers and broken heels. They were normally accustomed to seeing Jewish religious objects like Torahs, tefillin, prayer shawls, and other sacred objects, and were taken aback by these shoes.

The angel Michael was sitting, sorting through the tattered shoes, fashioning them into a crown. Puzzled, they asked what this crown was for. Michael answered that while the most powerful angel would usually weave crowns from our prayers, Michael would fashion an even more glorious crown from these worn-out slippers. These were remnants of pure joy — made by people dancing with such happiness that their shoes fell apart. This would be a crown made not from words of devotion, but from the physical expression of pure joy.

Shoes, however, carry a darker symbolism in Judaism. They are silent witnesses to the 1.5 million Jewish children who perished in the Holocaust. They have now also come to represent the tragic loss of the young victims of October 7, who were dancing at the Nova music festival when they were violently gunned down.

Rabbi Yisroel Zev Gustman, a revered Yeshiva principal who survived the horrors of the Holocaust in the Vilna Ghetto, could never forget his son’s shoes. Rabbi Gustman witnessed his son Meir executed in his arms, and all he had left was his tiny pair of shoes. In a desperate act that haunted him for the rest of his life, Rabbi Gustman traded away Meir’s shoes to buy some food, giving away the only token he had to remember his son. “Every night, before I go to sleep, I see the shoes,” he shared with his students.

Years later, when he moved to Israel and saw the young people dancing on the streets, celebrating in song and dance. A rabbi who happened upon them one year asked the rabbi why he spent his valuable time watching children when he could be working or studying Torah. Rabbi Gustman explained, “We who saw a generation of children die, will take pleasure in a generation of children who sing and dance in these streets.”

These parallel meanings of shoes — of tragedy and joy, of dancing and mourning — converged last year in an extraordinary story of triumph and resilience.

Two survivors of the October 7 attacks, Gali Segal and Ben Binyamin, got engaged just a week before and were celebrating their engagement at the Nova music festival. They were escaping past gunfire and falling rockets when they hid in a roadside bomb shelter with other festival-goers. However, a terrorist lobbed a grenade inside, killing and injuring everyone inside.

MIRACLE

In what can only be described as a miracle, both Gali and Ben survived. However, by a tragic coincidence, they both lost their right legs in the explosion. After months of rehabilitation, they were fitted with prosthetic limbs. They eventually walked down the aisle and are still married today.

Their wedding celebration was bittersweet. It was a celebration of their love, but also of their shared tragedy. Each step Gali and Ben took on their prosthetic legs was a quiet act of defiance, of saying to the world, we will dance through the loss, we will persevere despite the hardship.

Ben and Gali teach us how to dance again at this year’s Simchat Torah. We dance not with the same reckless abandon as before, but with a recognition of what has kept our people going for thousands of years. That despite tragedy, we keep going. We dance even though a part of us is missing. We dance even though we are deeply wounded.

That is the Jewish experience – to persevere in face of impossible odds; to dance with broken legs and broken shoes; to see that being ‘holey’ isn’t a punishment, but a way for us to experience true holiness. We dance even when the world tells us to sit down. This year, we dance not because we’ve forgotten, but because we remember. We dance because that’s what the Jewish people have always done.

And somewhere in heaven, the angel Michael watches each step – each moment of bittersweet joy – just as he did in the Baal Shem Tov’s tale. He is saying to everyone who made the ultimate sacrifice: “Your death was not in vain. Look below — they’re still dancing.” And he blesses everyone still on earth to transform their tears into triumph, their grief into purpose, and their tragedy into celebration. May we find that sense of joy this year.

We invite you to join Chabad of Jamaica in celebrating Sukkot, beginning this year on Monday evening, October 6, and continuing through to October 13. The joy will carry straight into Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, from the evening of October 13 until nightfall on October 15.

To be part of the festivities, please reach out to us at info@JewishJamaica.com.