While Psalm 30 promises that God can turn our “mourning into dancing,” as we prepare for Simchat Torah this week, this year the tradition of dancing with the Torah scrolls feels like too big of a leap.
Last year, as traditional communities were dancing in synagogues across the globe, an all-night dance party called the Nova Music Festival took place in the south of Israel in the fields of Kibbutz Reim. More than 3,000 young people took part in that exuberant celebration of life, dancing without scrolls but with no less joy. The dancing continued until dawn, when Hamas terrorists stormed the event, murdering over 380 – one-third of the 1,200 people brutally killed that day, many of whom were first subjected to brutal rapes. Forty-four of the revelers were taken to Gaza as hostages along with over 200 from the other communities along the Gaza border. Some are still languishing in the underground dungeons of Hamas.
While many have suggested that we should observe the day this year with somber rituals of remembrance rather than with dancing, I believe that it is also entirely appropriate to dance. The year of mourning is over, which does not mean that our sadness is gone, but that we must find ways to move forward. Dance is arguably the oldest form of ritual, an elemental expression of life through movement. As a former dancer and choreographer who also did graduate work in ritual dance at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, I know that dance is often the most powerful way to express emotions that even words and music cannot capture. Some communities will dedicate hakafot, the traditional circling with the Torah scrolls, to the memory of those murdered on October 7th. Some will observe moments of silence amid a more subdued holiday observance.
However, as we remember the unfinished lives cut short while pouring their souls into dance, there’s something defiant about dancing this year. In response to the callous slaughter of our people by terrorists, we must not allow Jewish life to be perpetually stilled.
Mia Schem embodies that defiant spirit. She danced through the night at the Nova Festival until she was kidnapped by Hamas and taken to Gaza, where she spent 55 harrowing days in captivity. She later got a tattoo with the words “We will dance again” above the date 7.10.23. Her Instagram post said it all: “The pain and the fear, the hard sights, the friends who won’t come back, and the ones we have to bring back. But we will still win – we will still dance!”
There used to be a discothèque right on the beach in Tel Aviv called “The Dolphinarium,” where a suicide murderer placed a bomb that killed 21 Jewish teenagers and wounded 120 in June 2001 during the second Intifada. Outside the disco, there was a hand-written sign that read: ”Lo nafsik lirkod — We won’t stop dancing.” That was the defiant spirit that helped sustain our Israeli siblings in the aftermath of that horrific attack over 20 years ago, and it feels important – if not essential – to summon some of that same courage today.
Merce Cunningham, my teacher and one of the giants of contemporary dance, captured some of the ineffable power of dance, stating, “You have to love dancing to stick to it. It gives you nothing back, no manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.”
Whether one dances with Torah scrolls in a synagogue or in the manner of last year’s Nova Festival, let us make it clear that: “Lo nafsik lirkod — We won’t stop dancing!”