As the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas is being put into effect, the first step is returning the remaining hostages seized by the terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. As tentative hope emerges, the question that many faced last Simchat Torah resurfaces with renewed urgency: How do we feel joy when we have faced such enormous loss the past two years?
The answer lies in two extraordinary stories that unfolded in recent weeks—moments that reveal what it truly means to declare: “I want to get up and dance.”
Michelle Rukovitzin was critically injured defending the Kissufim base in the Negev. After being shot seven times, hit by grenade fragments and left bleeding for 14 hours inside a bomb shelter, she was in a coma for three months. Doctors told her family she might never wake up, let alone walk again.
But Rukovitzin made a miraculous recovery. She indeed woke up, and with her fiancé, Rinat Kasimov, by her side, went through 12 months of grueling rehabilitation. The entire time, she made herself a promise: “I will walk to the chuppah on my own two feet.”
The day before Yom Kippur this year, she kept her promise. Michelle walked down the aisle on her own two feet, with Rinat waiting under the chuppah and surrounded by the Israel Defense Forces commandos who retrieved her unconscious body.
Her triumphant story mirrors the story of Rabbi Liraz Zeira, a Chabad campus rabbi and a major in the IDF reserves. The week before Yom Kippur, as he was helping soldiers on a base near Syria prepare for the holiday, Zeira was critically injured when he unintentionally triggered an unexploded land mine while getting out of a tank. When he regained consciousness in intensive care several days later and realized that his feet had been amputated, his first words were simple and profound: “I want to get up and dance.”
While the rabbi’s full rehabilitation will take many months of physical therapy and prosthetic care, his story teaches the same lesson Michelle did: When we dance, we aren’t forgetting our pain or suppressing our trauma, but declaring that we must leap, plunge and charge ahead.
The difference between happiness and joy
The Oct. 7 attacks coincided with Simchat Torah, the day that celebrates the joy found within Jewish life, law and heritage. Our joy this year, like last year, is complicated. The ceasefire promises to bring hostages home, but the families of soldiers and innocent Israelis who have lost their lives have a gaping hole in their hearts. For them and others still grappling with pain, the question remains: How can we experience joy while we still feel immense pain?
The answer lies in the difference between happiness and joy. Happiness depends on circumstances—on things going well, on receiving good news, on life unfolding as we plan and hope. Joy, however, is something deeper. Joy is the choice to affirm life even when circumstances would justify despair.
As Tevye from “Fiddler on the Roof” famously sang: “God would like us to be joyful, even when our hearts lie panting on the floor.”
Although these words come from a fictional musical, they echo a profound reality in Jewish thought. In 1964, when Chana Schneerson, the mother of the Lubavitcher Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson—passed away, many esteemed rabbis and Jewish leaders came to pay their respects to the Rebbe. One of them asked, “If it is a commandment to serve God with joy, how can one possibly fulfill this in a state of mourning?”
The Rebbe answered that while it is painful to mourn, there is a joy that runs even deeper than our circumstances, and that is the joy of fulfilling God’s will. When we serve our Creator, we tap into a joy that exists beyond our personal pain. This joy doesn’t erase our grief, but coexists with it, allowing us to move forward even in our darkest moments.
This sense of coexistence between joy and suffering has existed throughout Jewish history. From our people’s earliest victories over our oppressors through Michelle’s triumphant walk down the aisle, we acknowledge that the very act of rising—of moving forward, of declaring joy in the face of devastation is an example of profound defiance, faith and healing.
Michelle’s walk to the chuppah didn’t begin at the end of the red carpet or even on Oct. 7, but stretches back through 3,500 years of Jewish triumph. Every step she took was a victory over our enemies—over the Egyptians, who sought to erase us 3,300 years ago; over the Romans, who attempted the same 2,000 years ago; over the Spaniards, who sought to eradicate us 500 years ago; and over the Nazis, who tried to exterminate us 80 years ago and failed miserably.
Her steps weren’t without pain. But she understood that we dance through darkness not because the pain isn’t real, but because the light within us shines brighter than any darkness.
Our people’s secret to resilience also comes through our unparalleled unity. Michelle’s recovery was sustained by her husband Rinat’s unwavering presence. Rabbi Zeira’s spirit is lifted by thousands of Jews worldwide who pray for him, visit his bedside and send his family messages of hope.
What we learn from every wedding, bar mitzvah and celebratory occasion is that as Jews, we never dance alone. We are held up by the love of those closest to us and carried forward by the prayers and support of our entire people. That refusal to let anyone face their darkness in isolation is what has sustained us in the past and will continue in the future.
This Simchat Torah, as we celebrate and mourn simultaneously, let us remember: Joy is not the absence of pain, but the refusal to let pain have the final word. Whether we’re taking our first steps after trauma, supporting someone through a journey to recovery or simply showing up for our community when it feels impossible, we are all dancing through darkness together.
For this is what it means to be Jewish—to move forward, even when enduring pain. To declare, “I want to get up and dance,” even from a hospital bed. And to keep dancing, even when the music seems to have stopped.
