“Rabbi, is my sister even Jewish anymore?”
It’s the kind of question I sometimes hear.
“She doesn’t keep anything. She doesn’t go to synagogue. She doesn’t really do anything Jewish. Judaism just isn’t part of her life.”
Of course, the answer is yes. A Jew is always a Jew.
But this week, as we complete the entire Torah on Simchat Torah, the Torah itself gives us a much deeper answer.
In V’Zos HaBracha, the final parsha, we read:
“Torah tzivah lanu Moshe, morasha kehillas Yaakov” — “The Torah that Moshe commanded us is the inheritance of the congregation of Yaakov.”
Rashi explains the word morasha, inheritance, with an unusual phrase: “We will grasp onto it, and we will not abandon it.”
But why does an inheritance need to be grasped?
An inheritance is yours automatically. You don’t earn it. You don’t even have to appreciate it. It simply belongs to you.
The answer can be found in another kind of inheritance described in the Torah.
When the Jewish people entered Israel, each family received an ancestral portion of land. A person could later decide to sell that land. For decades, someone else might live on it and farm it.
But when the Jubilee year arrived, the land came back. You could sell it, but you could never permanently sever your connection to it.
That is the kind of inheritance the Torah is to every Jew.
At Sinai, the Jewish people declared Naaseh V’nishma - we will do and we will hear. We experienced an extraordinary closeness with Hashem.
But then came the Golden Calf.
The Tablets were shattered. The relationship seemed broken. Yet the Jewish people could not remain there. Moshe returned to the mountain. The people returned to Hashem. And on Yom Kippur, Moshe descended with the second Tablets and Hashem’s forgiveness.
There is something beautiful about a relationship when everything is going well. But there is another kind of strength, in a relationship that has been challenged, strained and then rebuilt. Now you know how deep the commitment really goes.
And that brings us to Simchat Torah.
After the entire journey - Sinai and the Golden Calf, closeness and distance, broken Tablets and second Tablets, failure and return - we reach the end of the Torah and discover:
We are still holding on. And the Torah is still holding on to us.
That is the extraordinary joy of Simchat Torah.
It is not only the joy of receiving the Torah. It is the joy of discovering that the Torah is ours. It is an inheritance that no mistake, no distance and no detour can ever take away.
And a joy like that can’t remain only in our minds.
It has to reach our feet.
So this Simchat Torah, dance. If you have a Torah scroll to dance with, hold it close and dance. If you don’t, pick up a Chumash or another Torah book - and dance with your Torah. Dance with your children — each one a living Torah, another link in an inheritance that has traveled through thousands of years and will continue into the next generation. Or simply dance with the knowledge that you possess something that is yours forever.
This Simchat Torah, let’s give that everlasting relationship the extraordinary joy it deserves.
Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach! ... See MoreSee Less