Spirit and Story Archive

Welcome to Spirit and Story, where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the contours of our contemporary spiritual journeys. Every other week you will find something new and (hopefully) engaging here!

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Dance Lessons

By Jennifer Krause

Just a few months ago, during Fleet Week in Manhattan, thousands of U.S. Navy sailors traded their deck shoes for subway tokens and flooded the big city. Their uniforms were the color of a first dusting of snow, bringing the hot summer temperature down a few degrees with the very thought of the winter they inspired. I was fortunate that day to have grabbed a coveted seat on an uptown train during rush hour. While wondering what I had done to merit this good fortune, I looked up and noticed one of these visiting seafarers trying (and failing) to keep his balance. As the subway lurched and hesitated like a thought struggling to become a statement, the sailor was doing his best to stay vertical. It seemed odd to me at the time – to see someone so accustomed to tilting, bobbing, and swaying on the water having such a hard time getting his sea legs on this subterranean ship.

The sailor’s subway dance of sorts reminded me of a story that is told of the great Hasidic rebbe, the Baal Shem Tov. On the evening of Simchat Torah, the Baal Shem danced with his congregation. He hugged the Torah to his chest and whirled round and round, spinning with delight. After a while, he stopped. He set the Torah scrolls down and began to dance without them. In that moment, one of his closest disciples shouted above the singing and clapping, “Now our master has laid aside the teachings we can see and is dancing with the teachings he has taken inside of himself.”

In just a few days, we will celebrate Simchat Torah. Like the Baal Shem Tov, we will take turns holding the Torah scrolls, lifting them high in the air and pulling them close. On Simchat Torah, the scrolls’ dance cards will be full from start to finish. They will be passed from arm to arm like a newborn, and cradled with as much love and pride as they were by the Baal Shem. To dance with the scrolls is a particular honor on Simchat Torah because normally we do not get to be so close. Often our time with the Torah scrolls is limited to a distant gaze at the open ark, or a brief kiss mediated through a prayer book or the fringes of a tallis. Yet as we crowd around to touch and kiss them, devote zealous attention to safeguarding their beauty and sanctity, and circle round them waiting for our turn to have the honor, we must ask ourselves: What is the Torah that we do not hold next to our bodies, but rather embody in all that we do and all that we are? What is the Torah of our lives that cannot be seen, the Torah with which we dance through the everyday?

Unless we ask ourselves these questions, we might easily forget that it is what we do every day in the New Year to come that will tell us whether we really know how to dance with Torah. The moment we let go of the scrolls and begin to let Torah take hold of us, the second we allow Torah to be more than that which is visible and external, is the moment the real dancing will begin. If we convince ourselves that Torah is a physical object, wrapped around spindles or bound in a book, then Torah will remain like a sailor spit out onto dry land – a little lost and out of balance. And unless we learn to dance the dance of Torah with our arms open, we will never find our footing.

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