Simchat Torah etzli/bei mir/at my place

When we first celebrated Simchat Torah in our current local synagogue, I commented to my husband that I felt as if we'd done the hakafot (the explanation is in here somewhere) in an old age home. So, for years, we used to go with our son to Ansche Chesed on Simchat Torah, hopping from minyan to minyan. (It's a pleasure to be able to do all one's shul-hopping within one building. :) ) We stopped going to AC the year that my husband was chosen to be Chattan Torah at our local shul. (Chattan Torah, "Bridegroom of the Torah," is the man chosen for the reading of the last few verses of the Torah [in English, the end of Deuteronomy].) At first, I resented the feeling that my husband and I, being among the few congregants interested in and/or young enough to indulge in singing and dancing, were the unpaid entertainment. But after a few years, I simply accepted the idea that leading the dancing was our role, and thought that we were doing a good deed for the congregation.

Unfortunately, time has taken its inevitable toll. Last year, I noticed that the number of congregants standing around and talking during the hakkafot vastly outnumbered even the singers, much less the dancers. So this year, I decided to go back to Ansche Chesed, even though that would mean leaving my poor husband (who's the chair of the Ritual Committee) to lead the dancing at such festivities as are left at our local shul. I concluded that I was right to assume that I'd enjoy myself a lot more at AC when the locals begged me to stick around for Erev Simchat Torah (the Evening of Simchat Torah), for fear that they wouldn't get a minyan without me. (If memory serves me correctly, it was partly because we almost didn't get a minyan for Simchat Torah several years ago that the synagogue decided to start counting women for a minyan.) To make a long story painfully short, we got less than 20 people, and my husband and I were the only people dancing. Even my best buddy couldn't join us--her knees have given out. As I said to her, "It's official--I'm too young for this shul." (Have I mentioned lately that I'm 57?) So I went to AC, and danced with Minyan M'at until almost 4 PM. (!) (They weren't even the wildest dancers--the 20- and 30-somethings of Kehilat Hadar were too wild even for me.)

It was an interestingly mixed year for me. On the one hand, I haven't had this much fun on Simchat Torah in probably more that a decade. On the other hand, it was a bit rough on my ego, knowing that, since a number of the congregants of our local synagogue had specifically requested that the hakafot be kept short and sweet, they were probably just as glad that I wasn't there.