Embracing Torah to Face the War
As we prepare to conclude reading Sefer Breishit, we are re-publishing this column by Rachel Sharansky Danziger, who reflected on cycling through the Book last year in the early months of the war. A year later, the war is still being waged and her insights are no less powerful. Listen to Rachel’s recent appearance on the Tradition Podcast.
On the night Before (before the war started, before the world as we knew it disappeared, before 1,200 people were murdered, before before before), I danced with a Torah scroll in Jerusalem’s streets.
This particular Torah scroll was small and light. Physically, I could barely feel its weight against my chest. My babies had weighed more, and felt more solid in my arms, back when I nursed them. But it didn’t matter. My flesh came to life where the Torah touched me. My whole body, in fact, came to life at its touch. My feet filled with swiftness, my body with motion, my mouth with rina. I danced and hugged the scroll as if it was, for just a moment, my child and my parent in one, a whole world held between my arms.
A few meters away, in the men’s circle, a larger Torah was passing hands. I glimpsed my father shouldering it, my husband cradling it, my eldest son leaning it against his neck. I could almost sense the weight of that other, larger scroll as it passed from hand to hand, from shoulder to shoulder. I could feel it settling against my neck, against my cheek. Why wouldn’t I? Every Torah scroll in the world was present inside the one I held against me because all of them are but an entryway into the same eternal journey, a journey Jews have been taking over and over again for millennia, through the same words, the same sentences, the same scenes. If “Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity,” as Yehuda Amichai poetically put it, this little, light artifact within my embrace was a point of departure to the same sea. I danced in the street of the first and held onto the latter, and for a moment, I transcended the boundaries of the self. I felt the ghostly presence of countless other arms hugging the Torah beside me, inside me, bringing their own joy and awe into my own.
I knew that come morning I would carry this shared joy into shul with me, into the moment when we will start, once more, in the beginning. “In the beginning, God made the heavens and the earth,” we’ll read, and I will hold the memory of all those other dancing Jews throughout the generations, all those other year-long journeys that they – we – took into Torah’s words. And I will plunge the hands that hugged the Torah into the same familiar stories, and see what new truths, new meaning, I’ll find within this time around.
By the time we actually read those words in the morning, we had been plunged into a very different kind of journey: a harrowing voyage down the path of violence and of trauma and of mourning. We couldn’t imagine its scale at the time, but we could see its maw opening before us. Our children huddled by our side in our Jerusalem shul’s bomb shelter. The reader had to yell to outcry the sirens. Members of our community were already on their way to their army bases. Rumors about hostages and an invasion began to spread. As we read about the world’s creation, we already knew that our own world was being unmade underneath our feet.
The words of the Torah became a lifeline in that moment. They were familiar, like my children’s hands in mine, like my friends crowded tight around me. They were a point of continuity in a shifting world. We danced as best we could in the tiny space and chose joy in defiance. You won’t take away our love of Torah—our Simhat Torah—I thought. The sirens rent the air, but we out-sang them. We held on to each other, to the Torah, to our joy.
The days following Simhat Torah were marked by heartbreak. The magnitude of the October 7th horrors was revealed in bits and pieces, each unbelievable yet true. We went from incredulously whispering that there were over a hundred victims on Saturday night to exclaiming that maybe there are over three hundred on Sunday, six hundred that night. The rise in the death tally simply wouldn’t stop.
The horrors didn’t remain impersonal, “out there,” a matter of statistics. They invaded every familiar space. We learned that even as our rabbi led us in defiant dancing on Simhat Torah morning, his nephew was fighting to defend his community down on the Gaza border, and saved many lives before being shot to death. We heard that another community member’s cousin was murdered, though she only learned it definitively a week later, once his body was identified. The same friend’s other cousin was kidnapped into Gaza (he has since been returned).
Nor did the losses stop with October 7th. An older couple’s grandson was killed in the north a few days later. A neighbor’s soldier-son died fighting in Gaza. Many of our shul members donned uniforms and disappeared into reserve duty for months on end, leaving their families, and us, praying for their safe return.
Yet through this time of pain and sacrifice, I held on to the memory of dancing with my friends and neighbors, of finding continuity and meaning in this time of loss. And I found the same in the journey we had planned to commence on Simhat Torah: the journey through another cycle of the Torah reading, beginning “In the Beginning.”
After October 7th, I embraced the journey through the Torah, as I had embraced the scroll itself on the night before because I knew it would sustain me. As we stumbled about in the dark and in the fog that was forced upon us, the textual journey of weekly reading would help me find my way in our haunted reality. These two journeys looped around and into one another and changed my understanding of them both.
Bereshit came first, a week into the war, and helped me understand my feeling of all-encompassing loss. Like Adam, I was exiled from the Eden-like existence that I believed we lived in, from the story that used to define my sense of self. Until October 7th, I thought that the State of Israel was the happy ending of the Jewish people’s journey, the shining promise for which we toiled, prayed, and paid. I thought that we were done with paying, that we had made it. But how could such beliefs survive a pogrom in our State?
Adam’s story also gave me focus and encouragement. It reminded me that exile doesn’t have to be a story’s end. Like Adam, we find ourselves where we have to strive and pay for every step “with the sweat of our brow,” with blood and sacrifice.
So be it. He and Eve went on living. So could we.
Noah came next, at a time when all I wanted to do was run around and volunteer and drown the horror gnawing at my thoughts in quiet moments. But I had to stop, because my children were scared and sad and needed comfort. I thought of Noah and used his work as inspiration. I made myself go still, and cook comfort foods, and hold my children on the couch, and listen. I made a little ark out of my arms and patience, my attention. I let it carry us across the flood.
By the time we made it to Lekh Lekha, my children went back to school, but the challenges were far from over. We were waiting for the incursion into Gaza to commence in earnest, and I knew that we would need both strength and patience for the days to come. Adrenaline kept us going in the mad dash after October 7th, but I could feel it dwindling even as the sprint was transforming into a marathon under our feet. I looked into my tired eyes in the mirror and wondered if we were up for the task. Where would we find the strength to keep going, when we already felt down to our dregs?
Abraham’s story reminded me that we are more than our present moment, more than our response to the crisis at hand. We are an ancient people, and we’ve been journeying together from Abraham’s days onwards. I didn’t need to make do with my own dwindling strength and resources, not when I could look to our past and our people’s many periods of strife and heroism and find guidance and inspiration there instead.
Vayera kept me going a week into the invasion after the terrible price of war started to come due. I visited a shiva home that week and hugged the sister of a fallen soldier. It was hard to feel hopeful at that moment. But I asked myself, “Is anything too wondrous for God?” (Gen. 18:14). I must answer in the negative, I told myself. I must believe that God can help us win the war, return the captives, and protect our soldiers. Because if we don’t believe in it, if we resign ourselves in advance to failure, how will we have the strength to make these dreams come true?
The deaths kept coming. In Hayye Sara, we read of Abraham burying his dead even as we were busy burying more and more of ours. Earlier that week, we marked the shloshim, the thirtieth day following the attack, and my mind was filled with rituals of mourning, with the way we both honor the dead and draw a line between them and the living, trying to close a door on the past as we move forward with our lives. In the parasha, Abraham does move on with his life, but even more significantly, so does the Jewish story. Isaac takes the mantle of leadership and guarantees that his father’s achievements will outlive the span of Abraham’s life. As I watched young Americans flock to Washington a few days after Hayye Sara for the largest rally in the history of American Jewry, I felt that I was witnessing just such a moment. I watched the younger generation take charge and felt hope.
Jacob’s story in Toldot gave me heart as more and more voices outside Israel called us colonialists, murderers, monsters, and worse. I looked at myself through their eyes and didn’t recognize the person that they saw. I felt violated, as if they imposed their truths onto me somehow. But I remembered Jacob remaining himself and retaining his voice even underneath the furs that made Isaac mistake him for his brother. The haters didn’t have the power to steal my true self from within me, and I knew that I would hold on to my truth no matter what they chant. It is not incidental that emet, truth, is the divine attribute associated with Jacob.
By the time we made it to Vayetzei we had shifted gears from war to ceasefire, and the first group of our hostages walked out of captivity on the very Shabbat when Jacob walked out of his father’s house. In the following days, Hamas played on our nerves by delaying each release and repeatedly failing to meet the terms of our agreement. I held on to the story of Jacob’s life in Laban’s house, and how he had to keep focused on his interests despite his father-in-law’s incessant manipulations. I prayed that, like Jacob, we would know when to play along and when to cut ties.
By the time we read Vayishlah we had resumed the fight in Gaza. How well I understood, for once, Shimon and Levi’s rage, their determination to use force to free a captive sister. How well I understood the pain of having to negotiate with those who did her harm. And how proud I was to note that of all the characters in the biblical story of Dina’s rape and Shekhem’s subsequent destruction, the one role we didn’t fit into was the role of the silent victim. We may not occupy the end-of-history Eden I imagined before October 7th, but neither are we helpless. We are not Dina.
We read Vayeshev on Hanukka after a staggering week in which we lost 24 soldiers. The pain was unbearable, and yet we had to bear it. And it helped to shoulder the burden together as a people, mourning as one. As we read about the brothers throwing Joseph into a pit, I looked around me. I thought – we are the tikkun for that ancient violation. Here we are fighting for one another, pulling each other through this nightmare. We are our people’s answer to our ancestor’s sin.
While this thought still rings true, the week following Vayeshev was brutal. Not only did we lose many soldiers each day, but deep divides over the right way to fight the war kept pitching us against each other once again. Between those who demand to prioritize the return of the hostages at any cost and those who advocated applying even more military pressure, the tensions amongst us were rising, threatening our united front.
In that week, I thought about Joseph, and how he kept hold of his dreams in the pit, the slave quarters, the prison cell, and, in Miketz, the royal court. Joseph dreamed once about sheaves of wheat, and he held onto his ambition to bring this dream into reality throughout the vicissitudes of his life’s journey. We, too, will survive the ups and downs of our present, including our disagreements, if we keep our eyes on the dreams we share, like distant stars by which to navigate our way. The thought of these dreams – a victory, the return of the captives, a renewal of our social contract – kept me from crashing on Saturday night after we read Miketz, when we left Shabbat to discover that our own soldiers’ terrible mistake cost the lives of three hostages. The pain of this left me gutted and empty, but I thought of Joseph holding onto his dream through both disaster and prosperity and held onto mine in the whirlwind of this pain.
As we approached Genesis’ end, Yehudah—like our soldiers millennia later— put his own life on the line to save his brother, asserting his responsibility for him. As we read Vayigash I thought of our soldiers, fighting for us all. I think of the terrible costs we are willing to pay for our captives. I see how our past lives on in our present, shaping our future course.
Dare I hope that, like Jacob and Joseph, all the captives’ families will be reunited with their loved ones? Dare I hope that we won’t lose even one more soldier so that all of Israel’s parents will get to live surrounded by their children and bless them before moving on, as Jacob will do this week in Vayhi, instead of over open graves?
I hope. I pray. I allow the improbably happy ending of Genesis to nurture my optimism. Even though this book ends in exile, it doesn’t end with tragedy; instead, it presents a united family standing together, ready to face the hardships still ahead. We may still be exiles from our past lives, and hundreds of thousands of us are still exiled from their homes. But even though our journey through this war is far from over, we will face it, standing tall.
When we last said “hazak hazak ve-nithazek” in shul, I was sad and frightened. I knew that I would require each drop of strength that I could muster for the path before us, and I didn’t know where it would be found or if it would be enough. Since then, I garnered this strength in the textual journey that commenced on that same morning. When I’ll say “hazak hazak ve-nithazek” in shul this Shabbat it will be with gratitude. The Torah that I danced with before our universe was upended now carries me and enables us all to carry on.
Rachel Sharansky Danziger, a Jerusalem-born writer and educator, teaches at Matan, Ma’ayan – Torah from the Sources, Pardes, and Torah-in-Motion. Currently a Sefaria Word-by-Word Fellow, Rachel is working on a book about family drama in the biblical Book of Judges.