Why on earth are we celebrating the holiday of Sukkot now? The Torah explicitly tells us that the reason God commands us to move into these booths for a week is to remember the way that God protected us in the wilderness when He took us out of Egypt (Leviticus 23:42-43). This holiday, then, should be celebrated on the heels of Passover when we relive the Exodus, not five days after Yom Kippur!
Additionally, if what God wants us to do on this festival is remember His benevolent protection in the desert, why is moving into booths the mechanism for doing so? In all the numerous verses throughout the Torah that describe our sojourn in the desert, not one single one mentions our “sukkah” abodes. In fact, it is only through this verse that commands us to dwell in sukkot annually to recollect the sukkot of the desert that we discover that God housed us in sukkot at that time. If I were God and instructing my people to recollect the Wilderness era, I might have invented a commandment involving some manna-like substance. Why does God select the sukkah as the symbol of the desert years?
