holiday

[cellio]

I'm really glad that the Reform movement follows the Israeli calendar for the festivals. This means that tonight and tomorrow we will combine Sh'mini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, while others in the disapora will have this on two days.

Why do I care in this case? Because I just don't get Sh'mini Atzeret. I mean, it's a torah-mandated holiday so we have to keep it, but all attempts to infuse it with meaning have thus far fallen flat for me. (Yeah, yeah -- an extra day of assembly after the festival of Sukkot, because we're that special to God that he asked us to stick around. Kind of works intellectually but not emotionally or spiritually for me.) It's sort of a naked holiday (similar to the last day of Pesach in that respect) -- you have the holiday liturgy but no ritual specific to this holiday, and it's just kind of... eh.

Simchat Torah, on the other hand, is fun. It's when we complete the annual reading of the torah and immediately start again. We take the torah scrolls out and dance around with them and sing and have fun. My congregation is, I'm told, somewhat staid by comparison (I'm not sure I could really use the word "dance"), and one of these days I'll find a congregation that goes all-out just so I can see what's possible, but my congregation does a pretty good job. And tonight will be the debut of our new in-house band; I'm looking forward to hearing them.

Comments

interesting...

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

A(n Orthodox convert) friend of mine was saying on the shabbat right after Simchat Torah that while in general she'd be happy to do away with the second day of Yom Tov (and thus the 3-day sequences of Yom Tov, Yom Tov, Shabbat), she wouldn't want to combine Shmini Atzeret & Simchat Torah 'cause all the "extra" things specific to each day would add together to be too much: Shmini Atzeret has Hallel, the prayer for rain, and Yizkor, Simchat Torah has Hallel*, Hakafot, and all the additional Aliyot so every adult male can have one, and if that day fell on Shabbat then there would be megilat Kohelet as well...

*granted we'd only do Hallel once if both days were combined

Re: interesting...

[cellio]

I wonder how this tends to play out in Israel, where all that can end up piled up on one day. I hadn't considered the addition of Kohelet to the mix; somehow that seems even more out of place with the dancing than Yizkor does. (Maybe that's because we say mourners' kaddish every service, so Yizkor isn't thematically too strange.)