Sound the Trumpet for Your Simcha

Six hundred and fifty people showed up.

They gathered at a hotel in New Jersey on Monday and again in Toronto on Tuesday — an aliyah expo, organized by Nefesh B’Nefesh alongside Israel’s Ministry of Aliyah and Integration and the Jewish Agency. Families came with checklists and questions and children who probably knew more about the whole plan than anyone admitted. Representatives from government ministries were there. Lawyers explained the bureaucratic maze. The rooms filled fast.

By the end of summer, more than 2,300 people will be boarding planes to move to Israel. Forty-seven group flights. Four hundred and seventy-eight families — one of the largest North American aliyah summers in recent memory, and it hasn’t started yet.

The parsha this week is Beha’alotcha. This is the right week for that story.

The parsha opens with Aaron and the menorah. God instructs Moses: tell Aaron that when he raises up the lamps — beha’alotcha et hanerot — they should give light toward the front of the lampstand. Seven lamps. Aaron does exactly as commanded, and the text moves quickly to the consecration of the Levites, a clarification of the Passover rules, and then something I want to look at carefully: two silver trumpets.

God tells Moses to have them made from hammered silver, to be used for calling the assembly and for setting the camp in motion. The Hebrew word for them is chatzotzrot — a distinct instrument from the shofar, the ram’s horn. The shofar is found; the chatzotzrot are made. Crafted to a purpose. They’ll sound different signals for different needs — long blasts to gather the whole community, shorter calls to move the tribes, alarm calls when enemies approach. A people on the move needs a way to communicate. All of that is practical and makes sense.

Then comes verse 10.

וּבְי֣וֹם שִׂמְחַתְכֶ֗ם וּבְמ֣וֹעֲדֵיכֶ֘ם וּבְרָאשֵׁ֣י חָדְשֵׁיכֶ֚ם וּתְקַעְתֶּ֣ם בַּחֲצֹצְרֹ֗ת עַ֚ל עֹלֹ֣תֵיכֶ֔ם וְעַ֖ל זִבְחֵ֣י שַׁלְמֵיכֶ֑ם וְהָי֤וּ לָכֶם֙ לְזִכָּרֹ֔ון לִפְנֵ֖י אֱלֹהֵיכֶ֑ם אֲנִ֖י יְהוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֵיכֶֽם׃ And on your joyful occasions—your fixed festivals and new moon days—you shall sound the trumpets over your burnt offerings and your sacrifices of well-being. They shall be a reminder of you before your God: I the ETERNAL am your God.

— Bamidbar 10:10

The opening phrase in Hebrew is יוֹם שִׂמְחַתְכֶם — the day of your simcha. Your joy. The same instrument commanded to signal battle and set the camp in motion is also commanded to sound on the joyful occasions. This is explicit instruction. Mark the good days. Make noise.

We have built the rituals for the hard days with extraordinary care. The kaddish, the shiva, the fast. The liturgy for grief and mourning goes back a thousand years and holds — you can be in any shul, any city, any century, and the words are there. We know how to be present in difficulty.

But the silver trumpets for simcha?

The Torah is not leaving the good days to chance. It requires them to be marked. Sound the trumpet on your joyful occasions. Your fixed festivals. Your new moon days. Do not let the good days pass unmarked.

Beha’alotcha is also a parsha about movement. Not long after the silver trumpet instructions, the cloud that had been resting over the Tabernacle lifts, and the Israelites finally set out from Sinai — after more than a year at the mountain. The Torah is specific about how it worked: they camped when the cloud settled, they moved when it lifted. Sometimes the cloud rested for a day. Sometimes for months. The people didn’t choose the timing. They watched, they waited, and when it was time, they went.

I think about the families in that New Jersey hotel ballroom. And the ones, like us, who are going through the process without the expos.

For some, October 7 moved the cloud. For others it came more slowly — a feeling building over years, a conversation that finally landed, a sense that the time was now. For some it was something quieter still: a child who started asking why they lived here and not there, and the question that didn’t go away.

You can’t always name the moment the idea stops being theoretical. Something shifts and you go.

What strikes me is that showing up to the expo is itself a kind of trumpet sound. Before the plane ticket, before the packing, before any of the practical work of moving a life — you drive to a hotel, you sit in a room where the decision becomes real, and the room fills with 650 people doing the same thing at the same moment. Marking the joyful occasion before it has fully arrived. Sounding the trumpet while the simcha is still on its way.

The Torah’s instruction at Bamidbar 10:10 is not to sound the trumpet after the sacrifice is complete. It is to sound the trumpet at the moment itself — in it, while it is happening. The instrument doesn’t have to be silver. It has to sound.

Those families sounded it this week. I found my simcha there.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham