Simchat Torah

This Shabbat, we reach one of the several times in the Jewish calendar that our Reform community is a little “out of sync” with the rest of the Diaspora. While, for our co-religionists, Friday night to Saturday night will mark Shemini Atzeret, the eighth day of Sukkot, for us, Shabbat will be both Sehmini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. Put plainly, non-Reform Jews in the Diaspora celebrate eight days of Sukkot and we celebrate seven. This is also true of Passover and Shavuot where our Reform forebears did away with “yom tov sheni”, the extra sacred day, to put themselves in line with the custom in the Land of Israel.

Where did the extra day come from? In the Land of Israel, ancient times, the declaration of the first day of any given month would involve eyewitnesses seeing the new moon, the rabbinic court making a declaration, and then sending out messengers to inform other communities. There would also have been signal fires, but this system broke down because of the Samaritans, who would wave torches on hilltops to fool people into disrupting the calendar. As a result of this mischief and because messengers could take longer than two weeks to get to far-flung Disapora communities, the rabbis instituted an extra day for those communities so no one would be mistaken in when they celebrated the holiday.

Our movement’s luminaries, the early Reformers, at the Breslau Rabbinical Conference in 1848 made the decision that, because of the economic and other hardships imposed by yom tov sheni, they would end it so that communities could focus their spiritual efforts on a more meaningful observance of the first day.

Even as the Reform movement has reclaimed so much of tradition in recent years, why haven’t we added back the extra day of Sukkot, Passover, and Shavuot? For the same reason that our Conservative and Orthodox neighbours hold to it: tradition! As the Reform movement, we have our own unique traditions we have practiced and values we have cherished for over two hundred years. We have our own way of doing things that, on occasion, means we’re doing things a bit differently than our neighbours, but that is something to be proud of, which we should never apologize for. In our day and age, there is a kaleidoscope of Jewish practices, each drawing from tradition and interpreting our sources in their own way.

Will the Reform movement someday add back yom tov sheni? Maybe! The world continues to change and we change along with it. I am so proud to be a Reform rabbi at a Reform congregation where we have so many opportunities to engage with our tradition in meaningful and creative ways. I hope all of us feel that same sense of pride in carrying on the customs of our ancestors going back decades, centuries, and millennia.

Moadim l’simchah

Rabbi Michael Weiss