A meditation on Simchat Torah
CBI – Boca – 2026

Rabbis, like families, all experience a kind of emotional whiplash. So many of us have stories about a death in the family only to have a simcha, a joyous event, a few days or weeks later. I think we have all seen it or experienced it. A family in one of my congregations once had, in the very same week, a funeral and a bris. Can you imagine? On Tuesday they stood at a graveside and placed earth onto the casket of their grandfather and then, on Friday, five days later, they stood in a living room and welcomed his great-granddaughter into the world and into the covenant, her tiny fists closed like she was already holding onto something.

The same week. Not the same year, not “some months apart so we could catch our breath” — the same week. You could almost hear the mother saying in a half-grieving and half-delighted tone, “Rabbi, I don’t know whether to wear black or bring a casserole.” I have had these conversations and my answer is often something like this: “Bring the casserole. Wear whatever you already have on. Life is not asking your permission to do both at once.”

Grief and joy do not stand politely in line waiting for their turn. Sometimes they arrive together, unannounced, tracking mud on the same welcome mat. The old man’s chair was still warm, so to speak, when the new baby’s blanket was already being warmed in the dryer. And somehow — somehow — a family may not experience this as cruelty. They will experience it as an affirmation that the universe seems to be saying: nothing here ever really just ends. Something is always, quietly, also beginning.

Which brings us, of all places, to a scroll of parchment being carried around a sanctuary at a dizzying, joyful, slightly undignified speed — because that, my friends, is exactly what Simchat Torah is.

Here is what happens. All year long, week by week, we read through the Torah — the Five Books of Moses — a portion at a time, like installments of the longest, strangest, most argued-about novel in human history. And on Simchat Torah, “the Joy of the Torah,” we finish it. We read the very last verses of Deuteronomy: Moses dies, the people stand at the edge of the Promised Land, the story ends on a mountaintop with a man who never got to cross over.

And then in a dramatic next act, we don’t close the scroll and put it away with a sigh of accomplishment of having finished the Torah. No. We either roll it back or bring out a second Torah. Right there. Same breath, same moment, sometimes the very same reader still standing at the lectern. We start the Torah again with the first word of Genesis — bereishit, “in the beginning” — and we begin reading again.

And then we celebrate. We march with the Torah, we dance with it. Actual dancing, actual scrolls, actual very off-key singing, in synagogues from Jerusalem to Johannesburg to wherever you happen to be watching this. It is, if you’ve never seen it, a genuinely strange and joyful sight — grown adults twirling in circles holding what is essentially a very heavy, very holy, very awkward-to-dance-with book.

Why on earth would you do that? Why not just take a breath first? Why not let the ending be an ending for at least a week?

Because, chaverim, that’s not how endings actually work. Not the real ones. Endings don’t end…they are signposts to new beginnings.

Look at the first word we read after Moses’s death: bereishit. We all know it means “in the beginning, or ‘in a beginning’ or ‘when God began to create.’ You get the idea. But there is something a bit deeper in that one word.

Look at the letters. Bereishit isn’t built from a root that simply means “start,” like flipping a switch from off to on. It’s built from reish-alef-shin — rosh — meaning “head,” “first,” “top.” Bereishit doesn’t just mean “the beginning” in some neutral, calendar sense, like January 1st. It means “at the head of” — as in, this is the head of something whose body is still unknown, still unfolding, still to be discovered. A head implies a body that hasn’t grown yet. A beginning, in Hebrew, is not the opposite of an ending. A beginning is what an ending looks like from the front.

The medieval commentator Rashi opens his entire commentary on the Torah by asking why Genesis begins with the letter bet — ב — and not alef, the actual first letter of the alphabet. Why start on the second letter? And one answer the tradition offers, playfully, midrashically, is this: bet is a closed letter — closed on top, closed on the back, open only toward the front. Meaning: don’t waste your breath asking what came before this or what is ultimately above us or below us. Rashi is teaching us, through this midrash, face forward. The story you can actually walk into starts here.

So when Moses dies on the mountain at the end of Deuteronomy, staring at a land he will never enter — that is not, in the Torah’s own logic, the last word. It cannot be. Because the very last letter of Deuteronomy and the very first letter of Genesis, read together, spell a word: lev. Heart. The sages noticed this centuries ago and could not let it go, and neither can I. The Torah ends and begins in the same breath, and what it spells when you refuse to separate them is heart.

Where in your life have you closed a scroll — a marriage, a career, a friendship, a body that no longer does what it used to, a year that nearly broke you — only to discover, if you were paying attention, that another scroll was already unrolling underneath it? Where have you mistaken a bet for an alef — mistaken “this is closed” for “this is over,” when really it was only ever closed on three sides, wide open toward whatever’s next? It doesn’t happen all the time and there are times when it takes a lot of time to emerge from despondency. But, often, a future begins to unfold in ways that you could not have anticipated or foreseen.

A grandparent may not have gotten the chance to meet his great-granddaughter. Moses did not get to cross the Jordan. Neither ending was fair, exactly. But neither ending, it turns out, was final either — because an ending, in this tradition, is simply where a beginning stands with its back to you, waiting for you to notice the open side.

So let’s go back — bereishit, we begin again — to that grieving, yet dancing, family. Black clothes on Tuesday, casserole dishes and a bris on Friday. I think about people like that that I have know and served on every Simchat Torah, dancing with a scroll that has nowhere else to go but back to its own first word. 

So here is what I want to leave you with, wherever you are watching this — in a sanctuary, or on a phone in a kitchen, or half-listening while you fold laundry: You are not finished. Whatever scroll you closed this year — grief, or failure, or an ending you didn’t choose — I want you to hear this, in two languages, so it lands in whichever one your soul happens to be listening in tonight:

Baruch ata b’reishit — blessed are you, at the beginning. Not despite the ending. Because of it.

You are not finished. You are, again and again, only ever at the beginning. Bereishit. Go. Dance a little, even off-key. Something may unrolling underneath you already and is calling you to begin reading.