Hakafot, Hebrew for "circuits" or "encirclings", are the ceremonial processional circlings made in Jewish worship on certain occasions, most joyously on Simchat Torah. On that festival, which celebrates the completion and immediate recommencement of the annual cycle of Torah readings, the scrolls of the Torah are taken from the ark and carried in seven circuits around the synagogue, accompanied by singing, dancing and rejoicing in which the whole congregation shares. The Torah, ordinarily treated with grave reverence, is on this day embraced and danced with in an outpouring of love for it, and the circlings give that joy its form.
Circuits of this kind appear elsewhere in Jewish practice as well: the Hoshanot processions of Sukkot circle the reading platform bearing the four species, and in some communities seven circuits are made by a bride around the groom at a wedding, or around the deceased at a burial. In each case the encircling expresses a completeness and a binding, of the community around the Torah, of the couple around one another, and the sevenfold repetition, echoing the seven days of creation, marks the act as whole. The dancing hakafot of Simchat Torah, repeated again in the evening in a widespread later custom, remain among the most exuberant moments of the Jewish year.