You Will Be Found – A Song for Simchat Torah After October 7
Parashat Vezot Haberacha / Simchat Torah
Rabbi Cantor Eyal Bitton highlights a song that connects with this year’s Congregation Neveh Shalom theme, “Na’aseh V’nishma.”
There are years when Simchat Torah is exactly what it claims to be: a celebration of Torah. A moment of pure joy. A moment when we dance in circles, united by the scroll that has bound us together for thousands of years.
And then there are years like this one.
On Simchat Torah, October 7, 2023, the Palestinian leadership of Gaza and many of its civilian supporters committed the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Families were torn apart. Children were murdered. Babies. Elderly. Whole communities shattered. The festival of Torah became the day of horror.
What do we do with that?
We do what Jews have always done. We mourn. We weep. And then we pick up the scroll. We sing. We dance. Not because we don’t feel the pain—but because we do.
Parashat V’zot HaBerachah is Moses’ final blessing to the people. He blesses each tribe. He reminds them of their strength, their purpose, their uniqueness. But what comes next? He dies. And then what?
We begin again.
That’s the message of Simchat Torah. We finish the Torah—and we immediately return to the beginning. Na’aseh v’nishma. We do. We begin. Even in grief. Even in devastation. Especially then.
That’s why the song “You Will Be Found” matters now. It speaks to anyone who feels overwhelmed by sorrow. It speaks to a people who are being targeted, demonized, and isolated. The lyrics are not theological. They are existential: “Even when the dark comes crashing through… you will be found.”
The message of the song is the message of the Jewish people. We don’t run from darkness. We walk into it with a Torah scroll in our arms. We say: Am Yisrael Chai. We are still here. And we are not alone.
Simchat Torah this year is not about escapist joy. It’s about defiant joy. It’s about affirming life in the shadow of death. And V’zot HaBerachah reminds us that our strength is not in the absence of pain—but in our refusal to let pain define us.
So yes—we will be found. Because we will find each other. In song. In Torah. In peoplehood. And in the unbreakable decision to dance even after the tears.
