Save the Last Dance for Me

When I made plans as to when I wanted to start working in Taiwan, I planned around the cycle of Jewish holidays in the fall. For those not in the know, Judaism has a couple of other holidays beyond Rosh Hashanah. The first is Sukkot, the Feast of Booths, when we dine in a temporary structure that has slits open to the stars. And the second is Simchat Torah, the holiday of rejoicing in the Torah, when we dance around the Torah scrolls to celebrate the end of the year's Torah reading and the beginning of the new year's reading.

Simchat Torah has always been my favorite Jewish holiday, for as long as I've been involved in Jewish life. I have always loved the ruach (spirit) that comes with dancing around the Torah in circular dances known as hakafot. So it did not surprise when, tonight, I found myself more than a touch nostalgic about my final Simchat Torah in New York before leaving for the Far East.

During my time at Columbia, the Hillel (Jewish student center) there had a tradition regarding the last hakafa of the evening. For the last hakafa, we would all leave the building where the dancing took place and go out to Low Plaza, in front of the campus's main administration building, and do the last dance there. I always saw it as a symbolic takeover of the campus by us Jewish students. Why a takeover? Well, at one time, Columbia actively sought to limit the number of Jews on campus through quotas, much in the way that some American colleges now place quotas on Asian students. I saw this as kind of a sign that we had pretty well managed to reverse things--that we were now front and center in a university that used to discriminate against us.

Before tonight, I had been of two minds about going back to Columbia for Simchat Torah this year. I had been reluctant to go back mainly because it has been four years since graduation, and there is hardly anyone left at Columbia Hillel that I knew then. I was starting to feel more than a little too old for it. This evening, I started out at Ramath Orah, the Orthodox congregation on 110th Street, six blocks from the Columbia campus. But after a few hakafot there, something drew me back to the campus. And I stayed there for the rest of the night.

It was thrilling to take over Low Plaza again, as of old. Thrilling to know that, despite changeovers in the rabbinic staff, and an apparent swelling of the Jewish student body to the point that halakfot have had to move across Broadway into the large auditorium in Columbia's student center, a new generation of Jewish Columbians is still being introduced to this tradition. There is just something about singing Acheinu (a traditional song asking G_d to relieve the plight of all the people of Israel at the top of our lungs, so loud that, as I was leaving for the evening, I could still hear it across Broadway and a block down.

So in the end, I was very glad that I had saved the last dance for Low Plaza. I will truly miss the Jewish community here in New York. But at least I have said goodbye on such a good note.