Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah 5787: The Small Feast

The seventy bulls are finished. One is left, and it is ours. The scroll closes on a grave no one can find, and opens on a world with nothing in it yet.

Shabbat, 22 Tishrei 5787 / 3 October 2026 · Israel schedule · V’Zot HaBerachah and Bereshit · Haftarah Joshua 1:1–18 · Yizkor and Tefillat Geshem · Kohelet

The Reading at a Glance

There is no weekly parasha this Shabbat. A festival displaces it. In Israel the eighth day of assembly and the rejoicing of the Torah are one day, not two, and this year that day falls on Shabbat.

Calendar and leyning verified against the Hebcal Israel calendar with the diaspora setting off. Note that widely circulated holiday guides, including Chabad.org, list 3 October as Shemini Atzeret with Deuteronomy 14:22 to 16:17 and 4 October as Simchat Torah. That is the diaspora schedule. Section C of the Talmudic chapter below explains, from the Talmud itself, why Israel reads differently.

Torah Overview

V’Zot HaBerachah is the only portion in the Torah that is never read on an ordinary Shabbat. It has no week of its own. It waits at the end of the year for a festival to carry it, and it is read in a room that is dancing.

Moses blesses the tribes one by one. He opens not with any of them but with Sinai: the Lord came from Sinai, shone from Seir, appeared from Paran. Then the line that every Jewish child learns before almost any other, Deuteronomy 33:4, Torah tziva lanu Moshe, morasha kehillat Yaakov, the Torah that Moses commanded us is the inheritance of the congregation of Jacob. The Talmud in Pesachim 49b refuses to leave that word alone. Do not read morasha, inheritance, read me’orasa, betrothed. The Torah is not property that arrives by the accident of birth. It is a bride, and the wedding is not finished until you study.

Then the blessings: Reuben shall live and not die, Judah shall be brought to his people, Levi shall teach Your judgments to Jacob, Benjamin rests between His shoulders, Joseph receives the bounty of heaven and the deep that crouches beneath, and Gad, who chose the first portion for himself, where the plot of the lawgiver is hidden. That last phrase is not decorative. The Talmud reads it as the address of Moses’ own grave.

And then Moses climbs. From the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, and God shows him the whole land, Gilead to Dan, Naphtali, Ephraim, Manasseh, all of Judah to the western sea, the Negev, the plain of the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, as far as Zoar. I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over. He dies there by the mouth of God, and is buried in the valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth Peor, and no man knows his burial place to this day. A hundred and twenty years old, his eye undimmed, his vigour unabated. And there has not arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses since, whom the Lord knew face to face.

That is the last word of the Torah. The scroll ends on a man who did not get what he was promised, buried where nobody can visit him.

And the congregation does not stop. The scroll is rolled back to the beginning and a second reader begins: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Formlessness and void, darkness on the face of the deep, light, the separation of waters, the dry land, the lights, the swarming creatures, the human being, and then the seventh day, on which God rested from all the work that He had created to do. The Torah does not permit an ending. The maftir is Numbers 29:35 to 30:1, the single bull of the eighth day, and the haftarah is Joshua 1, where the succession is announced: Moses My servant is dead. Now therefore arise, cross this Jordan.

Kohelet is read as well this year. The book that says everything is vapour is read on the day of commanded joy, which is a characteristically Jewish arrangement.

Talmudic Depth

A. A festival that refuses to be an appendix

The eighth day looks like the tail of Sukkot. The Talmud insists it is not. In Sukkah 47b to 48a the baraita rules that the eighth day is a festival in its own right with respect to six things, remembered by the acronym PaZeR KaSHeV: payis, a fresh lottery for the priestly watches; zeman, its own Shehecheyanu; regel, its own pilgrimage status; korban, an offering counted on a new calculation and not a continuation; shira, its own psalms; and beracha, its own wording in the Amidah and the Grace after Meals.

Six separate legal systems all say the same thing. Whatever this day is, it is not the leftover of the day before.

B. Seventy bulls, and then one

The offerings of Sukkot descend: thirteen bulls on the first day, twelve, eleven, down to seven. Seventy in all. On the eighth day, one. Sukkah 55b asks what the seventy correspond to and answers, in the name of Rabbi Elazar, that they correspond to the seventy nations of the world, brought to atone for them. The single bull of the eighth day corresponds to the singular nation, Israel.

Then the parable. A king of flesh and blood tells his servants to prepare a great feast lasting several days. When it ends, he says to his beloved servant: prepare me a small feast, so that I may derive pleasure from you alone.

And then the line that should keep anyone honest. Rabbi Yochanan said: woe to the nations of the world, who lost something and do not know what they lost. When the Temple stood, the seventy bulls atoned for them. Now that it is destroyed, who atones for them?

Read that carefully. It is not a taunt. It is a lament, and the loss it mourns is the nations’ loss of Israel’s service on their behalf. The seventy bulls were not a concession. They were the job.

C. Why Israel reads V’Zot HaBerachah today and the diaspora reads it tomorrow

The baraita in Megillah 31a assigns the readings for every festival. For the eighth day of assembly it assigns Deuteronomy 14:22 to 16:17, the portion of tithes and gifts to the poor, with the haftarah from I Kings 8. Then it adds: on the next day, the second day of the eighth day of assembly in the diaspora, they read V’Zot HaBerachah until the end of the Torah.

The Talmud is explicit that the V’Zot HaBerachah reading belongs to a second day that exists only outside the land. Israel has no second day. The two collapse into one, and the reading that the baraita puts on the diaspora’s second day is what Israel reads on its only one. This is not a later custom overriding the Talmud. It is the Talmud’s own arithmetic.

This is also why a holiday guide written for a diaspora readership will give you the wrong Torah reading for an Israeli shul this Shabbat, without being wrong about anything.

D. The last eight verses, written in tears

Deuteronomy 34:5 says and Moses the servant of the Lord died there. Bava Batra 15a asks the obvious question: is it possible that Moses wrote and Moses died there after he died? Rabbi Yehuda, and some say Rabbi Nechemiah, answers that Moses wrote the Torah to that point and Joshua wrote from there.

Rabbi Shimon objects: is it possible that the Torah scroll was missing a single letter? Scripture says take this Torah scroll, whole. Rather, up to that point the Holy One dictated and Moses repeated and wrote. From that point forward, the Holy One dictated and Moses wrote b’dema, with tears.

The Torah’s last eight verses are a man taking dictation of his own death and not stopping. That is what the congregation hears immediately before it begins to dance.

And the grave itself. Sotah 13b works out the geography: Moses died on Nebo, in the portion of Reuben, but is buried in the portion of Gad, four mil away, and the proof text is Deuteronomy 33:21 from this very reading, he chose a first part for himself, for there a portion of a ruler was reserved. The blessing Moses gave to Gad contains the coordinates of his own grave, and the Torah still says no one knows where it is.

E. The turn to rain

The Mishnah that opens Taanit 2a asks from when we say He makes the wind blow and the rain fall. Rabbi Eliezer says from the first day of Sukkot; Rabbi Yehoshua says from the last. Rabbi Yehoshua’s argument is blunt: rain during Sukkot is a sign of a curse, because it drives us out of the sukkah. Rabbi Yehuda then fixes the seam precisely. On the eighth day, the leader of Shacharit does not mention rain; the leader of Musaf does.

The change happens in the middle of this morning. That is not liturgical trivia. Rosh Hashanah 16a teaches that at four times the world is judged, and on the festival it is judged concerning water. We finish being judged for the year’s rain, and then we ask for it, in that order.

And Taanit 7a tells us what we are asking for. Rabbi Abbahu: the day of rain is greater than the resurrection of the dead, because resurrection benefits only the righteous while rain benefits the righteous and the wicked alike. Rav Yehuda: the day of rain is as great as the day the Torah was given, from my doctrine shall drop as the rain in Deuteronomy 32:2. Rava: greater, because the lesser thing is always the one compared to the greater.

Torah and rain are the same gesture. On the morning we finish the Torah and start it again, we also ask for the rain. Hold on to the detail that rain falls on the wicked too. Section D of the next chapter turns on it, and so does everything in the section after that.

Kabbalistic Depth

A. Zohar, Emor: the day that belongs to the King alone

The Zohar on Emor, at the verse on the eighth day shall be a holy convocation unto you, says plainly: this day is from the King alone, it is His day of rejoicing in Israel.

Then the same parable the Talmud tells, with the household made explicit. A king invites guests. While they are there, the whole household is occupied with serving them. When they leave, the king says to his household: until now, you and I were both attending to the guests. Now you and I will rejoice together for one day. So God said: until now you have been bringing offerings for the other peoples. Now bring one for yourselves.

The Zohar adds a line the Talmud does not. The guests of faith are with the King continually. The ushpizin do not leave when the sukkah comes down. Only the seventy depart.

B. Zohar, Pinchas: atzeret is a word about kingship

In Zohar Pinchas, on the offerings of the eighth day, the Zohar asks what atzeret actually means and answers with a verse about Saul: this one shall rule, yaatzor, over My people (I Samuel 9:17). Atzar is not restraint in the sense of holding back. It is sovereignty. The word for the day is a word for a king taking charge of his own.

The Zohar then splits the two feasts between two levels. From the side of the supernal Divine Presence, a great banquet, the seventy. From the side of Malkhut, kingship, the small banquet, the one. And then: Israel is accustomed to be joyful with Him, and so it is called Simchat Torah. And we crown the Torah scroll with its crown, a hint that the Torah scroll is Tiferet.

That is a thirteenth century text naming the day Simchat Torah and describing the crown placed on the scroll. The hakafot are not a folk custom that grew over the Talmud. The Zohar already has them, and it tells you what the crown means: the scroll is Tiferet, beauty, the central column, and it is being placed into the hands of Malkhut, the kingdom, which is to say into the hands of the people standing in the room.

C. Sha’arei Orah: the fourth leg of the throne

Rabbi Yosef Gikatilla, in Sha’arei Orah, asks why the Torah commands three pilgrimage festivals if there are manifestly four. Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot correspond to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to Chesed, Gevurah and Tiferet. Shemini Atzeret is the fourth regel, and it corresponds to David, to Malkhut, the fourth leg that holds up the other three.

He grounds it in the same PaZeR KaSHeV sugya from Sukkah. The legal independence of the eighth day and its sefirotic identity are one fact stated twice. Malkhut is the sefirah that has nothing of its own and receives everything, which is exactly the day whose offering is one bull and whose content is that the King wants to be alone with you.

A note on sourcing. The Arizal’s kavanot for Shemini Atzeret, in Pri Etz Chaim and Sha’ar HaKavanot, develop this Malkhut theme at length. That material is not available in a form this writer could verify passage by passage for this post, so it is credited here at the level of theme only, with no page given. Nothing above rests on it.

D. Peri Tzadik: a drop of life, and who gets it

Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen of Lublin, in Peri Tzadik, Sukkot 34, takes the prayer for rain said this morning and reads it as a description of what is happening to the people saying it. Rain is the infusion of life into creatures. On this day, after Yom Kippur and after Sukkot, a new life is brought into the heart, by way of the renewal of the acceptance of the words of Torah into the heart. The rainfall of this day is the infusion of a drop of life into the heart.

Geshem and Simchat Torah are not two observances that happen to share a morning. They are one act described twice.

Then he presses on Taanit 7a and gets somewhere uncomfortable and important. Why is the day of rain greater than the resurrection of the dead? Because the resurrected dead are free of the commandments and have no choice left to make. But rain falls on the wicked, who are called dead while they are alive, and who are still fixed in their choice to do evil. And God sprinkles on such a person a drop of the life of renewed holiness anyway. That, says the Peri Tzadik, is the greater novelty.

Hold that steady. It is mercy extended to someone who has not stopped being wicked. It is not a statement that he is not wicked. Those are different claims, and the difference is the whole moral architecture of the section below.

E. Rebbe Nachman and the feet of the scroll

In Likutei Moharan 74:3 Rebbe Nachman pairs Hoshana Rabbah and Simchat Torah as speech without wisdom and speech with wisdom. Hoshana Rabbah is the willow, which has no taste and no smell and resembles the lips: he cites the Zohar that there are people who study Torah without knowledge and stammer the words, and every word still ascends, and the Holy One takes it and plants it, and from those stammered words grow the great trees called willows of the brook. Simchat Torah is the next stage, speech carrying wisdom, the tree of life with healing in its wings.

In Likutei Moharan II 5:14 he traces the whole arc from Rosh Hashanah through the five senses of the head and lands on the same verse the Zohar used: Shemini Atzeret corresponds to Malkhut, as in this one shall rule over My people.

And the custom itself. Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak of Lubavitch, quoted in Likkutei Sichot vol. 4 p. 1169, asks why we dance with the scroll closed. Because the scroll wants to circle the bimah and cannot walk. A Jew becomes its feet, carrying the Torah the way feet carry the head. The foot does not deliberate. It goes.

Which is why the one who cannot read a word of it dances with exactly the same scroll as the one who has finished Shas. Closed, it is equal in every pair of hands in the room. That is not a sentimental gloss. It is the reason the scroll is shut.

Further study: Yeshivat Har Etzion publishes shiurim on the festival cycle and on the closing chapters of Deuteronomy.

The World This Week

Seven parallels. Every one of them is structural: a shape in the news that rhymes with a shape in the reading. None of them is a moral equation. The Torah’s figures are not stand-ins for living politicians, and no living politician is being measured against Moses and found comparable. Where the sources force a moral correction, it is written into the paragraph rather than left for the reader to supply. Where a number or a claim is disputed, it is attributed to whoever made it and left unreconciled.

1. An assembly of nations, and a hall that empties

The eighty-first session of the UN General Assembly met in New York this month, and the Israeli prime minister addressed a chamber that a large number of delegations walked out of. Coverage of the speech and the walkouts differs sharply by outlet; that it happened is not in dispute.

Sukkah 55b has the only version of this scene that matters today. Seventy bulls, one per nation, brought by Israel for them. The structural parallel is the annual gathering of the nations and one people standing at an odd angle inside it. The parallel stops there, and here is the correction: the Talmud’s posture is not triumph at being disliked. Rabbi Yochanan mourns for the nations. Isolation in a hall of nations is not evidence of righteousness, and a theology that reads every walkout as proof of election has inverted the text it claims. The seventy offerings were an obligation Israel owed outward, and the loss Rabbi Yochanan grieves is that nobody is discharging it.

2. Singled out, and chosen, are not the same word

Within a fortnight: the Football Association of Ireland confirmed, after a squad vote its chief executive David Courell described as a significant majority in favour, that its fixture against Israel would go ahead. An Israeli tourism company said Mauritius barred an Air Seychelles flight from Tel Aviv over what it called political and diplomatic calculations. The United Kingdom announced sanctions touching Israeli settlements, about which President Trump, asked directly on 22 September, said he did not know.

Shemini Atzeret is a day built on being kept back when everyone else goes home. The structural rhyme is obvious and it is also a trap. The Zohar on Emor describes a king who keeps his household behind because he wants their company. That is intimacy offered. Being excluded from a flight route or a sanctions carve-out is something done to you by someone else. A tradition that collapses the two teaches its children that every hostile act is a compliment, which is both false and corrosive. The day’s gift is that God wanted the company. Nothing in the week’s news confers that, and nothing in the week’s news removes it.

3. The leader who does not cross over

Israeli politics has spent September in open succession season: coalition manoeuvring, candidate announcements and withdrawals, and a prime minister who took the UN podium while facing both an electoral timetable and ongoing legal proceedings at home.

This week’s reading ends with a leader shown the whole land from a mountain and told he will not enter it. The structural parallel is the single narrow one of an era closing before the work is finished, and it must be said flatly that it goes no further. Moses is not a template for any living politician of any party, and nobody currently holding office in any country is being likened to him in righteousness, humility or anything else. What the text actually models is narrower and harder: the man who was refused the land spent his last recorded breath blessing the tribes who would get it, by name, one at a time, including the ones who had fought him. Succession handled without bitterness is the rare thing here, not the disappointment. More on how Israel has handled leadership transitions is at The Leadership of Israel.

4. Tefillat Geshem, said over a lake below its red line

The rainy season opens this morning. It opens over a water system under strain: the Kinneret Authority reported in February 2026 that the lake stood about 4.43 metres below its maximum and some 23 centimetres below the bottom red line, after a January that raised it roughly 15 centimetres. Meteo-Tech Meteorological Services put the season’s rainfall wildly uneven, Beer Sheva at about 110 per cent of its annual average and Safed at about 52 per cent. Those figures are the Kinneret Authority’s and Meteo-Tech’s as reported at the time, not a current reading.

Rosh Hashanah 16a: on the festival the world is judged concerning water. Taanit 2a: the leader of Musaf this morning is the first to say that God makes the rain fall. The structural parallel is exact, because it is not a parallel at all, it is the same calendar. The correction matters more than usual here: a dry year is not a verdict on anybody’s conduct, and Taanit 7a forecloses that reading by making rain the thing that falls on righteous and wicked without distinction. Anyone using drought to assign blame is arguing against the tractate that governs the prayer.

5. A strait, and a word that means to hold

Iran and the Strait of Hormuz dominated the week. President Trump said he had rejected an Iranian proposal, characterising it as an offer to reopen the strait immediately because they are losing so badly, and posted that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. President Pezeshkian said Qatar and Pakistan were mediating, that Tehran no longer has faith in Washington after the attacks and sanctions, and that the Supreme Leader is in good health. Each of those is that speaker’s assertion. They are left here as they were made.

The Zohar on Pinchas derives atzeret from yaatzor, to rule, and reads the eighth day as kingship: a sovereign gathering his own to himself. A chokepoint at the mouth of the Gulf is the same verb pointed the other way, holding to deny passage rather than holding to keep close. The correction is the whole point of noticing it. The Zohar’s atzar is a King who wants you in the room. Sovereignty exercised by strangling a sea lane is that word inverted, not that word applied. The rhyme is in the Hebrew, and the moral distance between the two uses is the thing worth taking home.

6. Rolling the scroll back to the first verse

The post-war architecture for Gaza remained contested all week. Qatar’s prime minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, said the Israeli prime minister is the biggest obstacle to progress on the peace plan. A Hamas leader said the roadmap agreed to includes the establishment of a Palestinian state. Prime Minister Netanyahu has held that reconstruction should not begin before Hamas disarms. The House of Commons Library briefing on the Board of Peace and the transitional committee records that the committee, led by Ali Shaath and excluding both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, is based in Egypt and had not entered Gaza. These are four parties’ positions. They are not reconciled here, and they do not average.

The structural parallel is the mechanic of this morning: the scroll reaches no man knows his burial place and is immediately rolled back to in the beginning, without an interval. The correction is that Bereshit is not a guarantee that whatever begins next is good. Genesis 1 is followed within two chapters by a murder. What the liturgy asserts is only that an ending is not permitted to be the last word, which is a claim about obligation, not about outcomes.

7. Yizkor and hakafot in the same morning

Twenty-two Tishrei is the Hebrew date of 7 October 2023. This Shabbat, 3 October 2026, is that date. The civil anniversary falls four days later. Israeli communities have argued publicly every year since about how much celebration the day can carry; reporting from Hostages Square in previous years documented the split rather than resolving it.

No parallel is needed, because the halachic structure is already the argument. This one morning contains Yizkor, said for the dead, and hakafot, danced with the scroll, and the order is not negotiable. The tradition did not build that collision for this decade; it has been there for centuries, which is precisely why it holds. The correction, and it is the one this whole section has been walking toward: commanded joy is not instructed forgetting. The Peri Tzadik’s drop of rain falls on a person who has not stopped grieving and does not ask him to stop. A day that can hold Kohelet, a memorial prayer and a dance at once is not being shallow. It is refusing to make anyone choose.

Summary

The Torah ends with a man who was not allowed in, buried where nobody can lay a stone. It begins again in the same breath, over a world with nothing in it. Between those two verses the congregation dances, holding a scroll it cannot read while it is closed, on the morning it asks for rain.

May the rain come in its season, may the small feast be worth the King’s trouble, and may everyone who has to hold Yizkor and hakafot in the same hour be given the strength to do both without letting go of either. Chag sameach, and may we be written into a year we are glad to begin.

Sources verified against Sefaria and Chabad.org. Calendar verified against the Hebcal Israel calendar. News items are attributed to the parties who asserted them and are not reconciled. Where a source could not be verified passage by passage, it is credited at the level of theme and said so in the text.