Simchat Torah: Dance Me to the End of Love

I remember the time when I carried the sefer Torah on some festive day in the Jewish calendar and I felt like David dancing before the Ark. My first experience of the deep love of Torah was on the face of a man who was cradling it to his cheek as he sat and held it on the bimah.

I see that love more in the faces of men. I hear the men who sing lustily at minyan, I notice the men who attend regularly, some so quietly, and the men who make a special effort to attend for a yahrzeit. I have known the passionate faces of the founders of this congregation and I have known some of their deaths. I see that love, also, in the faces of the gabbaim (sextons) who, business-like, bop on up to the bimah for Torah readings, and in the face of the men, constant and true in service, who hand out aliyot (honours), though some women do it, too.

I have recently seen men who have embraced a male convert and stayed with him and nurtured and mentored him throughout the cycle of Jewish days. I have also known male converts who went Orthodox because they were not embraced and mentored. Men provide the fun in Purim shenanigans, they build the sukkah, whip out the Torah seferim on Simchat Torah for the rest of us to hold and raise and spin. They barbecue, and make drinks to increase our joy. Even in this egalitarian, Conservative shul, it is the men who sustain the heart of religious devotion- and joy.

Women wander in and wander out. They quietly sustain us with food at kiddushim and onegs (celebratory meals), make all of our simchas truly abundant, and our beings replete, support the bowed and the stricken, without a face, and without fanfare. They provide scholarships. I have not seen a single woman from the group ever mentor a convert. I have never seen a female convert embraced and nurtured and mentored in temple by the women. If you are a woman you can serve and you can be domestic, but there are almost no women to mentor you intellectually or ritually or halachically unless it is domestic. Few women dance with the Torah. Few women shake the lulav. Few women (make that 1 or 2) wear tefillin. I have served behind the table. But I have also danced with the Torah.

Most of what I have known or learned has been from the faces of men. In Israel, men prayed together at the Kotel (Western Wall). Women prayed separately, reciting the Psalms or whatever. How passionate those women were! How intense and focussed! But, still, isolated unto themselves, apart. I think it must be my fault for not noticing the women. Some of them also sit together at services but they are more likely to ask you to serve at an oneg than lead prayers.

Having said all that, have I missed their faces? Do the women cradle the sefer Torah to themselves in other ways? My experience hasn't been terribly enlightening in that area. I think I must be missing something.

Tomorrow evening, erev (eve of) Simchat Torah, I so look forward to grabbing a gorgeous Torah scroll and parading it up and down for smiling faces to touch and to kiss, and dancing away. Oddly, I carry with me the faces of all the men I have seen dance with utter joy and utter embrace. I am waiting for the faces of many women. The public face, the public expression matters deeply; I long to see the connection. Because as far as I know, Simchat Torah describes the faces of all the true dancers I have known who would never dare say it even to their wives (and, sometimes, their husbands), yet somehow can express it all to G-d :

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
~Leonard Cohen