(Jewish Group) How Did Simchat Torah Get So Popular?

Simchat Torah is an anomaly on the Jewish calendar. The festival, which celebrates the completion of the yearly cycle of public Torah reading, doesn’t appear in the Bible or even the Talmud. The holiday that does appear in biblical texts on this date is Shemini Atzeret, a one-day festival that immediately follows Sukkot and completes the holiday season. Yet over the last millennium, Simchat Torah has become one of the most beloved holidays of the Jewish year—and in some ways overshadows the other holiday with which it shares a date.

The Talmud deems it unfathomable that the Jews had a period without public Torah reading. It asserts that Moses established public reading of the Torah on Shabbat mornings and on the festivals, with Ezra subsequently adding readings on Mondays, Thursdays, and Shabbat afternoons. Based on passages in Philo and in the Talmud, Professor Yitzhak Gilat has suggested that these ancient readings followed no set order; rather, they were chosen based on timely topics and on the local sage’s inclinations.

By late antiquity, an order was established for the weekly public readings, yet the two major centers of Judaism differed on how to apportion them. Communities in Israel divided the Torah into more than 150 sections. As such, the idea of an annual holiday to celebrate the Torah’s completion wouldn’t have occurred to the worshippers, since it took three to three-and-a-half years to complete the reading. Instead, each community, reading at a different pace, would hold its own celebration upon completing its reading cycle.

Seeking to complete the Torah each year, Babylonian communities uniformly divided the Torah into 54 portions (called parashot in Hebrew), the maximum number of non-festival Shabbatot that can occur in a Jewish leap year. (Non-leap years include the reading of “double parashot,” with two portions read in one week.) By completing the cycle after Sukkot, as opposed to before Rosh Hashanah, these communities were able to time the major speeches of admonition in Deuteronomy to be read before the High Holidays. Additionally, Moses’ concluding blessing to the nation provided a fitting conclusion to the Tishrei holiday season. While the custom from the Land of Israel survived until the early Middle Ages, the Babylonian practice, as with many matters, ultimately won the day.

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