Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah: The Eighth Day and the Joy of the Torah

The Eighth Day in the Torah

The eighth day appears twice in Leviticus 23, first in the list of offerings and then in the harvest paragraph:

On the eighth day shall be an holy convocation unto you; and ye shall offer an offering made by fire unto Hashem: it is a solemn assembly; and ye shall do no servile work therein. — Leviticus 23:36

Also in the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when ye have gathered in the fruit of the land, ye shall keep a feast unto Hashem seven days: on the first day shall be a sabbath, and on the eighth day shall be a sabbath.

Numbers 29:35–38 gives its offerings: “On the eighth day ye shall have a solemn assembly: ye shall do no servile work therein,” with one bull, one ram, seven lambs and a goat. The section ends with Numbers 30:1, “And Moshe told the children of Israel according to all that Hashem commanded Moshe,” the last verse of the Torah’s calendar of offerings, read as the maftir on both days.

What does atzeret mean?

The word atzeret (עצרת) comes from the root ע־צ־ר, “to hold back, restrain, detain.” It is used for a gathering of people held together for worship: “Sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly” (Joel 1:14). The seventh day of Pesach is also called an atzeret (Deuteronomy 16:8), and in the Mishnah and Talmud the usual name for Shavuot is simply Atzeret, as the closing assembly of the Pesach season.¹

The sages drew both meanings out. Rashi explains the word as “holding back” with a parable:

Like a king who invited his sons to a feast for a number of days. When the time came for them to leave, he said: My children, please, stay with me one more day; it is hard for me to part from you.

A midrash reasons the same way from the parallel with Shavuot. Shavuot is the “atzeret” of Pesach, fifty days later; the atzeret of Sukkot should also have come fifty days later, but that would fall in the winter rains, when travel to Jerusalem is hard. So Hashem placed it immediately after the feast.²

A Festival in Its Own Right

Is the eighth day the last day of Sukkot or a separate festival? The Torah’s wording allows both, and the Talmud rules that it is a regel bifnei atzmo, “a festival in its own right,” distinct from Sukkot in six ways, remembered by the Hebrew mnemonic PZR KShB (פז״ר קש״ב):³

• P, payis, “lot”: the priestly shifts were assigned by a fresh lottery for this day.
• Z, zman, “season”: the blessing Shehecheyanu is said again, as for a new festival.
• R, regel, “festival”: it has its own name and character, and the commandments of Sukkot do not apply.
• K, korban, “offering”: its offerings are different, as we shall see.
• Sh, shir, “song”: the Levites sang a psalm of its own.
• B, berachah, “blessing”: its own blessing, which the commentators explain as its own name in the prayers, or as the people’s blessing of the king at Shlomo’s dedication (1 Kings 8:66).

This is why the festival prayers name the day as “the eighth day, the festival of Atzeret,” not as a day of Sukkot. It also creates a halachic question outside Israel. Because 22 Tishrei there might, in ancient doubt about the calendar, have been the seventh day of Sukkot, the Talmud rules that one sits in the sukkah on that day without saying the blessing for it.⁴ Customs vary: many Ashkenazim eat in the sukkah on Shemini Atzeret outside Israel, while some Chasidic communities do not. On Simchat Torah, 23 Tishrei, no one eats in the sukkah.

One bull instead of seventy

The offerings make the separateness visible. During Sukkot the bulls run from thirteen down to seven, seventy in all, which the Talmud understands as offered for the seventy nations of the world. On the eighth day there is a single bull. The Talmud continues:

To whom does the single bull correspond? To the singular nation. This is like a king of flesh and blood who said to his servants: Prepare a great feast for me. On the last day he said to his beloved friend: Prepare a small meal for me, so that I may enjoy your company.

The point is not that Hashem cares only for Israel. He has just spent seven days receiving offerings for the whole world. It is that after the great public feast He asks His covenant people to stay for something smaller and closer. Shemini Atzeret is the quiet meal after the banquet, which is why it has no special ritual object: what is left is simply the relationship.⁵

Shlomo’s Eighth Day

The haftarah of Shemini Atzeret is 1 Kings 8:54–66, the end of Shlomo’s dedication of the first Temple. Having finished his long prayer, Shlomo stood and blessed the people:

Blessed be Hashem, that hath given rest unto his people Israel, according to all that he promised: there hath not failed one word of all his good promise, which he promised by the hand of Moshe his servant.

He prays that “all the people of the earth may know that Hashem is God, and that there is none else” (8:60), and charges Israel to let its heart be “perfect with Hashem our God, to walk in his statutes, and to keep his commandments” (8:61). The chapter ends on the eighth day:

On the eighth day he sent the people away: and they blessed the king, and went unto their tents joyful and glad of heart for all the goodness that Hashem had done for David his servant, and for Israel his people.

Chronicles tells the same story with a different count: Shlomo kept “the dedication of the altar seven days, and the feast seven days,” held a solemn assembly (atzeret) on the eighth day, and “on the three and twentieth day of the seventh month he sent the people away” (2 Chronicles 7:9–10). The dedication ran from 8 to 14 Tishrei, Sukkot from 15 to 21, and the eighth day of the feast was 22 Tishrei. Kings says the people were dismissed on the eighth day, the 22nd; Chronicles says the 23rd. The commentators offer the natural harmonization: on the eighth day Shlomo gave them leave, and on the next morning, the 23rd, they set out for home.⁶ Some readers see in this a picture of the guests in the parable, asked to stay one day more. The two accounts agree that the dedication of the Temple and the eighth day of the feast belong together, and that the people went home blessing the king.

The Talmud lists this haftarah for the eighth day, and for the following day the reading of V’Zot HaBerachah with another passage from the same chapter.⁷ The Temple, the end of the festival season and the blessing of the people are woven into the eighth day from the beginning.

The Prayer for Rain

The Mishnah teaches that “on the Festival the world is judged for water,” and Sukkot sits on the threshold of the rainy season. Yet during the feast itself rain is unwelcome, since it drives people out of their booths; the Mishnah compares it to a master throwing back the cup his servant pours. So when should Israel begin to mention rain in its prayers? Rabbi Eliezer said from the first day of the feast, Rabbi Yehoshua from the last, “since rain on the festival is only a sign of curse.” The halacha follows Rabbi Yehoshua.⁸

So on Shemini Atzeret, in the Musaf service, the congregation recites Tefillat Geshem (תפילת גשם), the Prayer for Rain. In Ashkenazi synagogues the leader wears a white kittel, as on the High Holy Days, and chants a liturgical poem by the early medieval poet Elazar HaKalir that recalls how the patriarchs, Moshe, Aharon and the twelve tribes were saved through water. It ends with the request that the rain come “for blessing and not for curse, for life and not for death, for plenty and not for famine.” Sephardi and Mizrachi communities have their own form of the prayer. From that moment until the first day of Pesach, the second blessing of every Amidah includes the words:

Mashiv haruach umorid hagashem (משיב הרוח ומוריד הגשם): who causes the wind to blow and the rain to fall.

The placement is significant. That blessing praises Hashem as the One who “revives the dead.” The Talmud explains that rain was put there because it is equal in power to the resurrection of the dead; elsewhere it says the day of rain is greater than the day of resurrection.⁹ Isaiah uses the same picture: “Thy dead men shall live… for thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead” (Isaiah 26:19). Every winter Israel prays for rain in the language of the resurrection.

The actual request for rain, v’ten tal umatar, begins later, so that pilgrims would not be caught on the road. In the Land it starts on 7 Marcheshvan, fifteen days after the festival, which the Mishnah says was to allow “the last of Israel” to reach home at the Euphrates. Outside Israel it starts in early December, following a Talmudic reckoning from the autumn equinox.¹⁰ In Ashkenazi communities Yizkor, the memorial prayer for the departed, is also said on Shemini Atzeret, as on the last day of each pilgrim festival.

The Readings

On Shemini Atzeret (22 Tishrei outside Israel) the Torah reading is Deuteronomy 14:22–16:17, which includes the festivals and the command “thou shalt surely rejoice” (16:15). The maftir is Numbers 29:35–30:1, and the haftarah is 1 Kings 8:54–66.

On Simchat Torah the Torah is read three times. First comes V’Zot HaBerachah (Deuteronomy 33–34), Moshe’s final blessing of the tribes and his death, often read repeatedly so that every person present can receive an aliyah. The last section is read for the Chatan Torah, “the bridegroom of the Torah.” Then a second scroll is opened at Genesis 1:1–2:3 for the Chatan Bereishit, “the bridegroom of Genesis.” A third scroll is used for the maftir, Numbers 29:35–30:1. The haftarah is Joshua 1, the transition from Moshe to Yehoshua: “This book of the Torah shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night” (Joshua 1:8). Ashkenazim read verses 1–18, Sephardim 1–9.

In Israel all of this happens on the one day, 22 Tishrei, combining the Prayer for Rain, Yizkor and Simchat Torah. See our page of readings for Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, and our calendar for this year’s dates.

How Simchat Torah Came to Be

Simchat Torah is not mentioned in the Torah, the Mishnah or the Talmud. Its history is a story of how the Jewish people came to read the Torah, and it is better documented than many legends about it suggest.¹¹

Two reading cycles. In late antiquity there were two ways to read the Torah publicly. The Babylonian Talmud mentions in passing “the people of the West,” that is, the Land of Israel, “who complete the Torah in three years.”¹² This triennial cycle divided the Torah into about 150 shorter readings. The Jews of Babylonia read it in a single year, in the larger portions we know today. In the Babylonian system the end of Deuteronomy naturally fell at the end of the festival season. The Talmud already lists V’Zot HaBerachah as the reading for the day after Shemini Atzeret.¹³

The name and the celebration. The name “Simchat Torah” appears in the post-Talmudic period, once the yearly completion on 23 Tishrei had become a festive occasion. The Geonim of Babylonia introduced Joshua 1 as the haftarah, recorded in the ninth-century prayer book of Rav Amram Gaon. As the Babylonian practice spread, the annual cycle became the norm, though traces of the old one lingered. Around 1170 Benjamin of Tudela found congregations in Egypt still reading the Torah over three years. Writing in the same century, the Rambam records that “the common custom in all Israel” was to complete the Torah in one year, though some completed it in three.¹⁴

Beginning again at once. By the fourteenth century it was customary to begin Genesis right after finishing Deuteronomy. The Tur gives a memorable reason: so that the Accuser could not say that Israel finished the Torah and did not want to start it again.¹⁵ The honors of Chatan Torah and Chatan Bereishit developed in medieval communities, and the Rema records them.¹⁶

Hakafot. The most visible custom, the hakafot (הקפות), seven circuits around the bimah carrying all the Torah scrolls with singing and dancing, became widespread in the sixteenth century. In Poland the Rema records the custom of taking out all the scrolls at night and in the morning and circling the bimah, drawing on an earlier Ashkenazi book of customs. In Safed the kabbalists around Rabbi Yitzchak Luria, the Arizal, gave the circuits their fervent character; his disciple Rabbi Chaim Vital describes the Arizal’s joy in them.¹⁷ Hakafot are held in the evening and again in the morning; many Chasidic and Sephardi communities outside Israel also hold them on the night of Shemini Atzeret. In Israel a custom developed of “second hakafot” on the evening after the festival, often outdoors with music, in solidarity with the diaspora’s second day.

Before the hakafot the congregation recites a collection of verses beginning Atah hor’eta lada’at:

Unto thee it was shewed, that thou mightest know that Hashem he is God; there is none else beside him.

The children. Children carry flags and receive sweets, and many communities have a special aliyah, Kol HaNe’arim, “all the children,” at which every child stands under a large tallit spread above them while the congregation blesses them with Yaakov’s words: “The angel which redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads” (Genesis 48:16).

Simchat Torah in hard times. The festival has repeatedly become a declaration of Jewish identity. In the 1960s thousands of young Soviet Jews, who could hardly study Torah, crowded the street outside the Moscow Choral Synagogue on Simchat Torah to sing and dance. Elie Wiesel described the scene in The Jews of Silence (1966), and it helped awaken the worldwide movement for Soviet Jewry.¹⁸

Simchat Torah 5784: Joy and Mourning

Simchat Torah now carries a wound. On Shabbat, 22 Tishrei 5784 (7 October 2023), Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah in the Land of Israel, Hamas-led terrorists broke through from Gaza into southern Israel and murdered about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, in kibbutzim, towns and at a music festival, and took 251 hostages into Gaza. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Shoah. A day meant for dancing became a day of funerals. The war that followed is called in Israel “Swords of Iron.”

Since then, many communities in Israel and around the world hold the hakafot with both joy and grief: saying the names of the fallen and the captives, praying for the wounded and the bereaved, and still taking the Torah scrolls in their arms. Dancing with the Torah on that date is not denial. It is the faith of the psalmist who could say, “Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing” (Psalm 30:11), before he could see it fulfilled. Israel marks a national day of remembrance for those murdered and fallen; see our article on the Swords of Iron War Memorial Day.

“The Last Day, That Great Day of the Feast”

For followers of Yeshua, the eighth day raises a question about John 7:37: “In the last day, that great day of the feast, Yeshua stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.” Which day was it? Scholars are divided, and both cases are serious.¹⁹

The seventh day, Hoshana Rabbah. The Torah calls Sukkot a feast of “seven days” (Leviticus 23:34), so its “last day” would be the seventh. The water libation was poured only on the seven days, not on the eighth, and on the seventh the willows were circled around the altar seven times with cries of “Hosha na,” “Save, please.” A call to come and drink would have its greatest force on the day the water ceremony reached its climax.²⁰

The eighth day, Shemini Atzeret. The Torah calls the eighth day a holy convocation, a “sabbath” (Leviticus 23:39), so it could well be called “great,” while the seventh was a working day of Chol HaMoed. Nehemiah 8:18, Second Maccabees and Josephus all reckon the festival as eight days. And if it was the eighth day, the absence of the water would itself make the point: the day after the libation stopped, Yeshua offered water that does not run out.

Either way, the meaning is the same. At the end of the festival of water and light, at the threshold of the season of rain, Yeshua pointed to the gift of the Ruach HaKodesh promised by the prophets (Isaiah 44:3; Joel 2:28) and spoke, as always, in the Father’s name: “My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me” (John 7:16). The crowd immediately argued about whether he was the prophet or the Messiah, and whether the Messiah would come from Galilee or from Bethlehem (7:40–42). Messianic hope at the eighth day is as old as the Gospel itself.

The Torah Written on the Heart

Simchat Torah celebrates a book, but the prophets promised more than a book. Jeremiah’s new covenant is not a covenant without Torah but a covenant in which the Torah moves inside:

But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith Hashem, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.

Ezekiel says the same: “I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes” (Ezekiel 36:27). The Brit Hadashah quotes Jeremiah in full (Hebrews 8:8–12), and Paul describes his hearers as a letter “written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart” (2 Corinthians 3:3). The Spirit poured out at Shavuot does not replace the Torah; it writes it where it can be kept.

A homiletical observation often made on Simchat Torah fits this well. The Torah’s last word is Yisrael (ישראל), ending in lamed (ל); its first word is Bereishit (בראשית), beginning with bet (ב). Read across the join, as we do on this day, they spell lev (לב), “heart.” It is wordplay, not proof, but it captures Jeremiah’s promise: the Torah is meant to end up in the heart.

Yeshua’s own words leave no doubt about his relationship to the Torah:

Think not that I am come to destroy the Torah, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the Torah, till all be fulfilled.

He went on to say that whoever does and teaches the commandments “shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven” (5:19). Paul asks, “Do we then make void the Torah through faith?” and answers, “God forbid: yea, we establish the Torah” (Romans 3:31); “the Torah is holy” (7:12). A Messianic Jew dancing with the Torah on Simchat Torah is not returning to something left behind. He is rejoicing in what his Messiah came to fulfill and to teach.

The Word and the Wisdom: John 1 and the Torah Before Creation

The beginning of the Torah, read on Simchat Torah, was read by the sages together with Proverbs 8, where Wisdom says:

Hashem possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his works of old… Then I was by him, as one brought up with him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him.

The midrash identifies this Wisdom with the Torah. The Hebrew amon, “one brought up with him,” is read as uman, “craftsman,” and the Torah says, “I was the craftsman’s instrument of the Holy One”: as an architect builds from a plan, “the Holy One looked into the Torah and created the world.”²¹ The Mishnah calls the Torah “the precious instrument with which the world was created,” and the Talmud lists seven things created before the world, the first being the Torah and the last “the name of the Messiah.”²² Ben Sira has Wisdom say that her Creator “caused my tabernacle to rest, and said, Let thy dwelling be in Jacob,” and then identifies her with “the law which Moshe commanded.”²³

This is the Jewish world in which John opens his Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God” (John 1:1). The Word is Hashem’s speech, wisdom and purpose, the same Word by which “the heavens were made” (Psalm 33:6) and which Israel received as Torah. John’s further statement that the Word “was God” is best read in this Jewish frame: God’s Word is truly His own, His self-expression, and not a second being beside Him. Then comes the decisive verse: “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (1:14). The Torah that was with God from the beginning, the plan by which He made the world, took on a human life in Yeshua. He is the Torah’s living embodiment and its messenger, the man in whom Hashem’s Word was fully lived out, the Son whom the Father sent. He is not Hashem Himself: “this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Yeshua the Messiah, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3).

John then writes, “For the Torah was given by Moshe, but grace and truth came by Yeshua the Messiah” (1:17). This is often misread as a contrast between law and grace. But “grace and truth” is the Hebrew chesed ve’emet (חסד ואמת), the very words of Hashem’s self-revelation to Moshe at Sinai, “abundant in goodness and truth” (Exodus 34:6), written in the Torah itself. John is not setting Moshe against Yeshua. He is saying that the same covenant love revealed to Moshe came to dwell among Israel in the Messiah. As Yeshua put it, “had ye believed Moshe, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me” (John 5:46). The Talmud’s “name of the Messiah” before creation and John’s Word “in the beginning” both say that Messiah was in Hashem’s plan from the start.

The Joy of the Torah

Simchat Torah’s joy has deep roots in Scripture. The longest psalm, Psalm 119, is an extended love song for the Torah:

O how love I thy law! it is my meditation all the day.

“I rejoice at thy word, as one that findeth great spoil” (119:162). “Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law” (119:18). “The statutes of Hashem are right, rejoicing the heart” (Psalm 19:8). The dancing of the hakafot recalls David dancing “with all his might” before the ark that held the tablets of the covenant (2 Samuel 6:14).

On Simchat Torah scholar and child dance the same circuits with the scroll closed: the Torah is embraced before it is studied. That order matters. Love for the Torah is meant to lead to doing it, and the Torah is meant to lead to the One who gave it, and for followers of Yeshua, to the Messiah of whom Moshe wrote.

The Eighth Day and the World to Come

The number eight carries meaning throughout the Torah. A son is circumcised on the eighth day (Genesis 17:12). The Mishkan began its service “on the eighth day” (Leviticus 9:1), and a healed person was restored to the community on the eighth day (Leviticus 14:10). Seven is the number of the created week; eight is the first day of a new week, the step beyond the completed cycle.

Jewish tradition used the week as a picture of history. The Talmud records the teaching that “the world exists for six thousand years,” followed by a millennium of desolation or of rest, and the related saying of the school of Eliyahu dividing history into three ages of two thousand years, the last being the days of the Messiah.²⁴ In that frame the seventh day stands for the messianic Sabbath, and the eighth for what lies beyond it, the Olam Haba, the world to come. These are frameworks that express Hashem’s sovereignty over history, not timetables. The same Talmudic passage curses “those who calculate the ends,” and Yeshua said, “of that day and that hour knoweth no man” (Mark 13:32).²⁵ Peter’s reminder that with God a day is as a thousand years (2 Peter 3:8; Psalm 90:4) speaks of His patience, not a calculation.

If the seven days of Sukkot picture the nations gathered to Jerusalem in the messianic age, the eighth day pictures what follows: Hashem and His people together, with nothing between them. The prophets sketch it:

And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of Hashem’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains… and all nations shall flow unto it… for out of Zion shall go forth the Torah, and the word of Hashem from Jerusalem.

Out of Zion goes the Torah, and the nations “beat their swords into plowshares” (2:4). Isaiah 25 adds a banquet: “in this mountain shall Hashem of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things,” and Hashem “will swallow up death in victory” and “wipe away tears from off all faces” (25:6, 8). That is the resurrection hope. The dead sleep in the dust until the day when “many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake” (Daniel 12:2). Not escape from creation, but its renewal.

Revelation 21–22 completes the picture. John sees “a new heaven and a new earth” and the holy city descending, and hears, “Behold, I make all things new” (21:1, 5). There is no Temple in the city, because Hashem and the Lamb are its Temple (21:22). A “pure river of water of life” flows from the throne, and beside it grows the tree of life, whose leaves are “for the healing of the nations” (22:1–2). “And they shall see his face” (22:4). The living water of Sukkot, the rain of Shemini Atzeret, and the Torah going forth from Zion all meet in that river.

Simchat Torah enacts this hope every year. The scroll is rolled to its end, Moshe dies on Mount Nevo and Israel stands at the border of the Land, and in the same breath the reader begins again: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” The end of the story is a new creation. That is the shape of the hope of Israel: the Messiah who came as Mashiach ben Yosef, suffering and raised, will be revealed as Mashiach ben David, Israel will be gathered and restored, the dead will rise, and the world will begin again under the reign of the One God.

Keeping Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah

General guidance for households and congregations:

• Keep the yom tov. Light candles, say Kiddush, and refrain from work on 22 Tishrei (and on 23 Tishrei outside Israel). Shemini Atzeret has no special ritual object; its observance is simply staying close.
• Outside Israel, on Shemini Atzeret, many eat in the sukkah one last time, without its blessing, and say goodbye to it.
• Listen for the change in the Amidah. From Musaf of Shemini Atzeret, add mashiv haruach umorid hagashem, and let it remind you that Hashem gives life to the dead.
• Remember the departed at Yizkor, if that is your community’s custom.
• Dance with the Torah. Join the hakafot, bring the children, and make sure everyone who wants an aliyah has one. If you cannot be in a congregation, read Deuteronomy 33–34 and Genesis 1 aloud at home, one after the other.
• Remember 7 October. Say Psalms for Israel, for the fallen, the captives and the bereaved, and hold the joy and the grief together.
• Begin again. Make a commitment to read the weekly Torah portion through the coming year, beginning with Bereishit.

See our calendar for this year’s dates and our page of readings for Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah for the portions.