“From Simchat Torah to Today,” Rabbi Elaine Zecher’s Shabbat Awakenings

October 17, 2025 | 25 Tishrei 5786

Welcome to Shabbat Awakenings, a weekly reflection, as we make our way toward Shabbat. You can also listen to it as a podcast.

This past Monday night, we gathered for Simchat Torah and to mark a historic moment. Our new students participated in consecration. Our teens from the Tent attended, multi-generation families, and many of our members joined together. It had been an emotional day. To watch the return of the hostages to their families made me cry multiple times. We are in a time of wailing and rejoicing. Here are the words I offered that night:

We are here to celebrate. After 737 days of war and captivity, we can welcome the hostages home and at the same time we can mourn for the lives lost and the horrendous toll on people’s lives over the past two years.

This is the season when we learn that it is possible to hold contrasting ideas. To be joyful but also have space in our hearts to be mournful.

For the kids here, I want to compare this to the feeling that sometimes we might have of being jealous of a sibling or a friend who received an award yet because we love them and care them, we can also be happy for them. Those are two emotions that we think don’t go together and yet they do.

Long away, the person who wrote the biblical book Ecclesiastes, found meaning in this very idea. The book speaks about time for planting and time for uprooting the planted; time for tearing down and time to building up; time for seeking and a time for letting go; and also a time for weeping, wailing, and also laughing and dancing.

Rachel Polin-Goldberg told a reporter today that she breathes in the cramp of agony and breathes out feeling blessed each day. She knows loss firsthand. Her son didn’t make it out of Gaza alive, yet, she has learned to rejoice that he lived.

This is a lesson worthy of learning and what this holiday cycle teaches us. With 20 hostages returning home and 28 slain, some of whom will finally find their final resting place while others have not yet been returned, we are filled with emotions. We have the capacity to hold grief and gratitude together, to ensure that mourning and rejoicing can be intertwined.

Hope is what guides us now. It may be fragile still, yet it is ever present. This morning, at Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt where dozens of world leaders gathered, they expressed hope with a sign: “Peace in the Middle East.” I don’t want to underestimate that intention emphasized by Ecclesiastes additional line that there is time for war and time for peace.

We can feel worried, even cynical for some, and at the same time feel elation and exuberance that we have come this far.

The poet Emily Dickenson wrote:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops — at all…

Yet, in this moment with hope warming and perching in our souls, hope does make a request of us. With all our emotions emoting, we allow ourselves, release ourselves to feel the joy, thrill, and delight in our celebration. We have a holiday made for this moment. We experienced it two years ago in our deepest darkness and return to it in a time of great celebration.

One more image for the kids but really, also for the adults. Have you ever heard a teacher or a parent say, “Play nice!” “You have to figure out a way to get along!” “You do know how to share!” That’s an instruction not just for kids. It’s a directive to everyone no matter what their age is. This is the work of peace, of shalom, of figuring out how all the pieces and players have to fit together to play nice, to figure out a way to get along, and to be able to share. In the coming weeks, months, there will be hard work ahead for those who believe in that sign: Peace in the Middle East.

Let’s feel the joy, the hope, and the immense possibility for peace. And celebrate!!

Shabbat Shalom! שבת שלום and Hag Sameah! חג שמח

I look forward to hearing your thoughts and impressions. Share with me what you think. Your email goes directly to me!

Rabbi Elaine Zecher