The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
Today, I think we are all being asked to have a first-rate heart.
If you are anything like me, your feeling today is… complicated. We are here to celebrate Simchat Torah, the moment of greatest joy in our calendar. It is a day for unbridled happiness, for dancing with the Torah, for celebrating the unending cycle of our story. And there is real joy. Today we celebrate the return of all living hostages held by Hamas for agonizing 738 days. It is a moment of light we have prayed for, a cause for genuine, heartfelt Shehecheyanu.
And yet. How can we not feel the shadow? Today is a day of memory, the second yartzeit, the second Jewish anniversary of a horror that tore a hole in our world and in our hearts. We hold the joy of return alongside the searing pain for those we lost, and the collective trauma of a nation that is not yet whole.
So, how are we supposed to feel? Are we meant to put the grief in a box and force ourselves to dance? This tension feels unbearable. The demand to simultaneously hold so much grief in our hearts and be happy is, quite often, too much.
But I want to suggest today that this feeling of living in the simultaneous realities of joy and pain is not a modern confusion to be solved, but a sacred inheritance to be embraced. It is the very essence of these holy days of Shmini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. We are not doing it wrong. We are doing it exactly as our tradition taught us.
This holiday has duality built into its DNA. The great medieval commentator, Rashi, in his note on a verse in Leviticus that talks about Sukkot and Shmini Atzeret[1], captures the bitter-sweetness of this day with a beautiful parable. He imagines God as a king who has feasted with his children for seven days. As they prepare to leave, the king says, "קָשָׁה עָלַי פְּרֵדַתְכֶם”, "Your departure is difficult for me. Please, stay with me for just one more day." Think about that image. The great party is over. The crowds are gone. There is a sadness in the departure, a feeling of an ending. But in that sadness, there is a pull for one last, intimate moment of connection. It is both an ending and a precious extension. It is joy laced with the melancholy of parting.
This duality is also written directly into our Torah service today. In a few moments, we will reach the very end of the scroll. We will read of the death of Moshe, the greatest leader and prophet we have ever known. Midrash Tanchuma on the portion V’Zot haBerachah does not soften this blow. It describes Moshe’s final moments with heartbreaking detail: a leader who dedicated his entire life to bringing his people to the promised land, only to be told he can see it, but never enter. It is a moment of profound, national grief. It is an ending steeped in tragedy.
In response, we do not sit in mourning or reflect in silence. Instead, without pausing even for a breath, we roll the Torah back to its beginning (in our case, we will stake a second scroll). From the death of Moshe, we leap to the birth of the universe. From "in the sight of all Israel," we go to "In the beginning, God created…"
Why is this movement necessary? Sefer Yetzira teaches that the end is bound up with the beginning, and the beginning with the end. It is not a straight line from sorrow to joy, but a circle. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks notes that the Torah ends with a lamed and begins with a bet, spelling lev, the heart, when we join the end with the beginning. Our tradition physically forces the moment of greatest loss to touch the moment of greatest creation. It commands us to hold both realities—endings and beginnings, grief and hope, together in one heart.
This is the spiritual work of our time. We are being asked to live in that lev.
The father of Modern Orthodoxy in the United States, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, argued that this type of tension is core to the human condition. In his famous essay, Majesty and Humility,[2] he describes how we constantly oscillate between feeling powerful, creative and in control—and feeling frail, humbled and utterly dependent. We are, he taught, both at once. Today, we feel this with every fibre of our being. The majesty of our survival, our traditions, our resilience, our people dancing in shuls around the world. And the profound humility of our vulnerability, our pain, our brokenness. We do not have to choose which one is true. Both are true.
To demand anything else is to ask for a faith that is not fit for the world we live in. A robust, living faith makes space for the mess, for the contradictions, for the tears that fall as we sing. Today, our faith asks us to pay attention to everything, to the light and to the darkness.
And so, we begin again. Creation emerges from tohu va’vohu, a swirling chaos. A beginning is an act of courage, bringing light and order out of the mess.
That is our task. We are not starting again from a place of quiet and calm. We are being asked to begin again in the middle of the tohu va’vohu of our own time. We must create our future not in denial of the chaos, but directly from it.
Which brings us to the dancing. The dancing of Simchat Torah is not an expression of simple happiness. It is a declaration of faith. It is our ultimate act of defiance. Our enemies wished to write an ending to our story on October 7th. They brought darkness and chaos. And our response? We gather. We remember our greatest loss. We acknowledge our pain. And then, we pick up our story, our Torah, we hold it close, and we dance. We dance for the hostages who are home. We dance in memory of those who can no longer dance with us. We dance to declare, to the world and to ourselves, that the Jewish story, the story of life, will not have an ending written for it by our enemies.
So today, I ask you to embrace the impossible complexity of this moment. Let your heart be big enough to hold it all. Let the joy be real. Let the grief be real. Hold them together in the lev that connects the end to the beginning. And in that unstable, uncomfortable, holy space, let us find the strength to create, to begin again, and to dance.
Chazak, Chazak, v’Nitzchazek. From strength, to strength, may we all be strengthened. Amen.
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