TGH, Special Chol Ha'Moed Edition! When Intermediate Days make a Splash

A template for optimism

Hi and welcome back to another galloping episode of Torah Goes Hollywood.

This week somehow seems shorter than the last, with holidays piling atop holidays. So we really mean it when we say we'll give you just a smaller taste this week. But a delectable scoop just the same.

Fortunately it's been a veritable Van Leeuwen of flavors when it comes to this holiday weekend in past years. Shmini Atzeret and the Charlie Kafuman connection here. Kohelet and the connection to “Arrival” here.

And since we're going right into the start of Genesis at the close of the holiday, Brei'sheet and the Darren Aronofsky movie "mother!" here. And Brei'sheet and Terrence Malick here. 

So sample the vegan Strawberry Shortcake and Oat Milk Brown Sugar Chunk to your heart's content. This is the good stuff.

And wouldn't you know it, we've got a mouth-watering treat for you. Emphasis on the watering.

Let's get to Sho'eivahing.

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The Chol Ha'Moed period that comes to an end on this day has been a time of great joy. And not just for Yankee fans.

Even the last student in the back of Mrs. Harris' fifth-grade class is probably familiar with the Mishnah from Sukkah that says "he who has not witnessed the Simchat Beit Ha'sho'eivah has not witnessed joy in his life."

The Priests, back in the days of the Temple, would go and draw the water from the Shiloah pool, then come back to the Temple, where said water was poured on the altar along with a separate ritual decanting of wine (Simchat Beit Ha'sho’eivah, lit, The Celebration of The House of Pouring). 

Then tens of thousands of spectators would dance in the outer courtyard. With music, dancing and fire-juggling to match. (Seriously, this was Carnaval before Carnaval. Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel did the fire-juggling honors.)

This association of a deluge with happiness is actually at odds with a pop-cultural conception of water. Pretty much every movie you can think of that centers on large amounts of water pouring has the stuff as a villain. A few examples:

“Open Water," the fact-based horror c. 2003 about a scuba-diving couple stranded in the middle of the sea.

"Waterworld" and Kevin Costner drifting around a post-apocalyptic world in which all the polar ice caps are melting (the movie's budget was famously apocalyptic too).

Noah," Aronofsky's environmental fable set in the Biblical flood. (The Simchat Beit Ha'shoeivah is also at odds with some Biblical conceptions of water, as we’ll read next weekend.)

"The Impossible," J.A Bayona's 2012 drama set during and after the Indian Ocean tsunami eight years earlier, which has one of the most scary natural-disaster scenes you'll ever see on a screen. You can catch a glimpse here.

I realize all of these are about water as a destructive force in the universe. But that only underscores the contrast. When we see water poured with gusto in rabbinic literature, extreme joy abounds. When we see water poured in filmic literature, death and destruction await.

To perhaps make sense of the disharmony or at least understand how to separate Simchat Beit Ha'Shoeivah from this (water) canon, I thought it might help to go back to why this celebration was so joyous in the first place.

Many symbolic interpretations abide (I heard a nice Chabad one this week about water and wine and how it's the simple stuff we should focus on). But the most straightforward view is that it's about water irrigating the ground. Sukkot is closely associated with a period of agricultural fertility, with the rainy season soon to follow. And so we dance at its abundance.

Now on its face this is a weird thing to be joyous about. Or a weird time to be joyous about it. After all, we're at the beginning of the rainy season; indeed, the prayer for rain will be invoked for the first time tomorrow on Sh'mini Atzeret. So why are we taking this posture? Sure, pouring water with a beseeching vibe might make sense — we hope the months that follow bring enough rain. But pouring it with exuberance doesn't track at all. Who's exuberant about something that may not come to pass? Who does a touchdown celebration when they've downed the ball at their own 10-yard-line? This expression of pure joy at something that hasn't happened yet seems really off.

Something strange is happening here. It’s almost as though we are prospectively joyous. Which is an odd way to be joyous.

There is a slightly different film about water, and I believe it may be instructive in our instance. I refer to Ron Howard's 1984 classic "Splash" starring Tom Hanks and Darryl Hannan (bet you haven't thought about that one in a while!). I'd forgotten how bonkers the movie truly is — literally it has mermaids washing up naked on New York shores and grown men running off to magic underwater kingdoms and no one batting an eye at any of it. All that and more happens in this unlikely/impossible romance.

The film has another notable feature: a nuanced view of water. On the one hand, water in Ron Howard’s imagining is a weapon, as when deployed by a bad dude to try to expose Hannah's mermaidiness. But water also represents a place of refuge, of peace, even of hope. Hanks' character Allen has led a troubled life when it comes to love, and when Hannah's Madison character offers the prospect of running off to the water to be together (she can't stay out on dry land) water becomes a symbol of something else: better days ahead.

The couple doesn’t actually get there until the very last scene in the film, but just the very thought of being in the water changes Allen’s attitude, changes his life. As Rita Coolidge’s shmaltzy theme “Love Came for Me” has it, “I saw stars/Shining in clear blue skies/We flowed together/Once and forever/Love came for me/One fine night.”

Considering this film in the context of our question, something clicks. The water being poured in the Temple indeed hasn’t flowed in real life yet, just as Allen for most of the movie has yet to run away to the water. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is what it portends. The point of the movie — and I think of Simchat Beit Ha’Shoeivah — is what water allows us to internalize, how it changes our attitude in the here-and-now, no matter what eventually happens.

Put another way, this ritual isn't about being happy there’s water. It's a lesson in how to be optimistic.

After all, with the rainy season about to start this could be a time of great anxiety. Who knows how much water will arrive and whether we’ll get to the spring with the crops needed to survive another year? No one, which is why we plaintively cry out to God to make it so. But the fact that abundance could happen, the ritual is telling us, is how we should be thinking about the time ahead; the fact that a massive gush is possible should be the attitude that permeates us and displaces the anxiety.

The lesson of Simchat Beit Ha'Shoeivah isn’t about water but mindset. Joy after something good is easy. It takes a hardier soul, a more bone-deep kind of optimist, to feel the happiness before it might even take place.

Perhaps that's why he who has not seen Simchat Beit Ha'shoeivah has not seen joy in his life. Not because there was much dancing and singing, but because the true kind of joy lies in being happy in the uncertainty — in being hopeful. If you're just waiting for something good to happen before taking a positive attitude then, well, you don't really know happiness.

This idea squares with another ritual moment this holiday. Every day this week in morning prayers we've been reading the offering of the corresponding day in the Temple. Those verses are not enough to be spread across four aliyot, so we read additional material. But instead of going back to read the previous day's offering, culminating in the current day — that might make more sense, since that already happened — we read the next two days. And then the following day when we get there we do it again.

This strikes me as of a piece with the Shoei’vah ceremony. It would be easy to focus on what already happened, on the rituals already performed. But the lessons of these days it to be able to envision something that hadn’t happened yet — to take what we have now and imagine it could continue and even multiply tomorrow. To take the uncertain present and mentally transform it into a brighter future. Maybe those better days will arrive or maybe they won’t, true enough. But not to imagine them is to fall short in our behavior, to live wrongly, to not know happiness.

The holiday about to descend conjures conflicting feelings for many of us. It should be, on its face, a hopeful time, the atzeret or finale of the most happy holiday of the year — a time literally called chag — and the rejoicing with the Torah on that day or the day following, depending on what country one finds themselves. Happiness is literally in the name.

And yet because of what it evokes from last Simchat Torah and the memories of the horrific trauma that slowly engulfed us as we heard about it througout the days’ celebrations, it can’t but bring back hard and painful times, throw us down into the pit of last year. This holiday should be beautiful. But it feels tainted.

Yet if there’s some way to clamber out of the dark, I think this interpretation of the Shoei’vah celebration offers a blueprint. There is no way to truly know if more fertile and happy days lie ahead. Given the precedent, there is reason to be skeptical. But these holiday moments and their rituals are gently nudging us to be hopeful, etching in their customs a way for us to imagine brighter worlds, to feel satisfied and even exuberant about the possible.

The memories may be tough and the world grim. But the water can flow, people can dance, and Daryl Hannah’s underwater kingdom is out there. We just need to close our eyes and imagine it.

Thank you, as ever, for reading, and have a dancey, happy and hopeful Simchat Torah.