Simchat Torah

Simchat Torah is a holiday that rejoices in the Torah, commemorating the end and beginning of the reading of the Five Books. In the States, I love this holiday, singing and dancing at Temple Shalom, watching as the cantor de jeur attempts to run the entire length on one breath. However, realizing how much a spectator I would need to be as a woman in Jerusalem, I decided to spend the holiday weekend in Tel Aviv.
Saturday night, after the Chag was over (by Israeli custom), a group of Beslov Chasids came to the boardwalk by the beach where I happened to be sitting, enjoying the water, and were dancing and celebrating with the Torah, encouraging passersby (males) to join in; in theory, I thought this was all nice and well enough. As I watched this happen, however, a sadness enveloped me. I remembered how it was to actually hold the Torah, and be able to dance with it, a privelage--a right--that had been struggled for by Jews in so many lands, and by women over so many centuries, that I in a way yearned for it. It was an absence that I imagine is felt in so many different sorts of relationships--the yearning of an absent lover, a parent kept from their child, and a child kept from their parent. The Torah, which simultaneously is what has maintained me and is reliant on me to be maintained, had often felt merely as an extension of me, and here I was, forcibly kept from it by a non-obligation turned prohibition, and my heart broke.

And then I got angrier than I have maybe been in a very long time. Sitting merely 30 feet away, I watched as one of the Breslovers jumped down to the beach, urinated on the beach (surrounded by a big city with endless bathrooms), and then returned to his fellows, holding the Torah to dance.
1. This man was not a child, nor an animal, nor stranded in the middle of the woods. In what world is it acceptable--reasonably--for an individual to simply pee, on a beach, where less than ten hours later people would be?
2. In what way is it at all appropriate for a man to go from holding his penis while he urinates to holding the Torah, and yet my holding the Torah would not be appropriate?

I stood for about twenty minutes, developing a bit of a speech (in Hebrew) to scold this man; in the end, I was not brave enough to deliver. It took a phone call to Musha and to Hayley, venting and elaborating on the ways in which this was unacceptable, before I was able to relax enough to fall asleep.