Background to the Tefilla

Simḥat Torah as the name of the ninth day of Sukkot roughly dates back to Babylon in the eighth century. It began as the convergence of two distinct customs. The first was the Torah reading of the day, namely the passage at the end of the Torah in which Moshe blesses the tribes (“This is the blessing,” Devarim 33:1). The other was the long-established custom of making a festivity at the conclusion of the study of a text – an order of the Mishna, for example, or the conclusion of a talmudic tractate (Shabbat 118b).

The day on which the Torah readings were completed was already known as Simḥat Torah by around the eighth century, and other customs rapidly followed. One was the practice of beginning the Torah anew immediately after the completion, so that the charge could never be levelled against the Jewish people that having reached the end of the Torah, they stopped, or even paused. Hence the reading of the beginning of Bereshit immediately after the conclusion of Devarim. The two honours of being called to read out the ending and the beginning were greatly prized, and soon became known by the name of Ḥatan, bridegroom – Ḥatan Torah for the former, Ḥatan Bereshit for the latter. By the eleventh century the custom had already been established in many communities to call up every adult male to the Torah on that day. Shortly thereafter, we developed the custom of collectively calling up kol hane’arim, “all the children.” The practice of Hakafot, walking around the bima seven times in procession holding the Torah scrolls, as was done with the Four Species on Hoshana Rabba, came later, originating in the mystical circle around Rabbi Yitzhak Luria in Tzefat in the late sixteenth century, at roughly the same time and in the same place that the service known as Kabbalat Shabbat was born.

Analysis

Simḥat Torah is one of the profoundest expressions of the Jewish spirit. The other festivals were either ordained by the Torah or, in the case of Purim and Ḥanukka, formally instituted to recall an event where the Jewish people were saved. Simḥat Torah, by contrast, emerged through a series of customs that rapidly spread throughout the Jewish world. It is what the mystics called itaruta deletata, an “awakening from below” – an initiative that emerged from the Jewish people itself. Through it, we recapture some of the joy and exuberance that marked the Simḥat Beit HaSho’eva celebrations in Jerusalem in Temple times. More than that: we turn the day into a wedding, in which the Jewish people is the groom, and the Torah the bride. As the Rabbis said, re-interpreting the verse “Moshe commanded us the Torah as the heritage of the congregation of Yaakov” – read not “heritage” (morasha) but “betrothed” (me’orata) (Devarim 33:4, Berakhot 57a). Never has a book been loved more.

The custom of reciting a long sequence of verses prior to taking out the Torah scrolls from the Ark (beginning with Ata Hareta/You have been shown) is first mentioned in the Maḥzor Vitry, a work emanating from the school of Rashi in eleventh-century France. This tefilla includes not only the verses usually said on Shabbat or festivals on taking out the scrolls, but also others added in honour of the occasion.