GOD'S PEOPLE!
Written Torah is referred to as "the interpreted text." Oral Torah, the Talmud, midrash and all of rabbinics, is the interpreter text. Judaism implemented a unique and revolutionary system. While maintaining the absolute constancy of "the interpreted text," an immutable Torah embodied in each Torah scroll, the Torah remains fluid by being interpreted to apply anew to every age. On Simchat Torah we celebrate this divinely inspired system that has enabled the Jewish people to live immortally, in every land and age, by the immutable yet ever adjusting Torah. We live diachronously attached to Torah, preserving the constancy of the Jewish view and interpretation of the world. But simultaneously Torah interacts with and interprets all current events. Jews are the people who view reality through the prism of Torah. Whether the pursuit of justice, or dancing with the Torah scrolls, or blessing our children Erev Shabbat, or welcoming LGBT Jews into the community in a new and God conscious way: Jews ask "What does the ever ancient but ever-renewing Torah teach me about the eternal principles inherent in our current reality?" By preserving Torah God touches our lives even as we live in the real world daily. We willfully give our lives as God's instruments in the world. In so-doing, we become God's people.