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Short Summary
Main recommendation: Keep dancing and choosing life, and honor the Oct. 7 victims by taking on the name of one person who was killed each year, learning what they stood for, and living out some of their goodness. The speaker presents this on the third anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack, which fell on Simchat Torah. He connects it to a long history of Jews dancing with the Torah even under Nazi persecution.
Key Points
- The speaker draws on Pearl Banish's Holocaust memoir To Vanquish the Dragon to describe Srulik the barber in Kraków in 1939. Forced to trample Torahs, he instead danced with them and was shot with a Torah in his arms.
- In the Warsaw ghetto in 1942, about 15 men gathered on Simchat Torah to dance with Torahs even as deportations to Treblinka were underway.
- At Shestakova labor camp, a shoemaker hid a small Sefer Torah under a bunk, and prisoners danced around it humming tunes under their breath, each man kissing it in turn.
- Many communities mark a special "sixth hakafa" for the six million, mixing mourning with a continued commitment to joy.
- The speaker quotes his wife's grandmother, an Auschwitz survivor: she carried no hatred for the Nazis, only joy in seeing her children and grandchildren live the lives the Nazis wanted ended.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions: Each year, choose one person who gave their life, read about who they were and what they stood for, and try to reflect that goodness in your own life. The speaker says he does this himself and suggests each listener can do the same to keep that person's "light" and memory alive.
- Communities that observe the sixth hakafa lay all the Torah scrolls on the bima, cover them with a tallit, and sing a tune that holds both the pain of loss and the joy of continuing.
- The Belz story: in 1939, as Germans neared the town, Belz Jews smuggled out their Torah and danced around seven times, escaping before the seventh. In 1993, after communism ended, the nephew of the earlier Belz Rebbe (today's Rebbe of Belz) led hundreds back and danced that seventh hakafa.
- The speaker frames dancing not as a denial of grief but as a way to hold both sorrow and hope at once.
Bottom Line
Remembrance here is active, not passive: the speaker asks listeners to carry forward specific victims' lives through a yearly personal practice rather than only mourning them.
