“If you speak with many people who are alienated, remote, from Yahadus, they feel their lives to be empty and meaningless…. When I speak to them I ask: Why not come in closer to Yahadus? It might solve many problems which are insoluble by psychiatry.”
So said Rav Yoshe Ber Soloveitchik during a shiur in 1974.
On Simchas Torah, we dance energetically with our shuls’ Sifrei Torah. Why? What’s all the excitement about? What are we celebrating?
Jewish thinkers over the centuries have provided different answers to this question, but in the 21st century perhaps we can suggest that we celebrate the gift of meaning on this day.
Much of the post-modern, secular West is adrift. People work, but to what end no one really knows. They question whether life has any purpose and thus hesitate to bring children into the world (the average fertility rate in Europe is currently 1.53 – well below the replacement level of 2.1).
Already in 1942, the philosopher Albert Camus famously wrote, in all seriousness: “There is only one really serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” Unsurprisingly, the number of people who go to therapy has skyrocketed in recent decades. For life without meaning is dissatisfying to the soul. Your average therapist of course can’t resolve this existential angst, but people don’t know where else to seek answers. Certainly religion can’t be the solution, can it?
But, in fact, it is. Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch writes: “Man is perplexed, without support, and helpless without [the] Torah in his hands, which explains to him his innermost being and his destiny, and secures for him the help of his Creator, the Creator of his world. The Torah fills man’s innermost need.”
G-d did us a great favor. “Mimino eshdas lamo” (Deuteronomy 33:2). With His right hand of mercy, He gave us a “fire transformed into Law.”
And so today, rather than us walking around aimlessly like insects trapped under a barrel (as we would have, says the Alter of Novardok, had we not said yes when G-d held Mt. Sinai over us “like a barrel”), we stride with purpose and direction, confident in the path forward.
How then can we not be exuberant on Simchas Torah?
Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch(1808-1888) – head of the Jewish community in Frankfurt, Germany for over 35 years – was a prolific writer whose ideas, passion, and brilliance helped save German Jewry from the onslaught of modernity.
Elliot Resnick, PhD, is the host of “The Elliot Resnick Show” and the editor of an upcoming work on etymological explanations in Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch’s commentary on Chumash.