Category: Sukkot

I am standing near the mechitza, the Orthodox separation between men and women in synagogue, a woman of 49, watching the men dance with the sifrei Torah, the Torah scrolls.

I sing along very, very quietly.

Hoshi’a et amecha [Save Your people] …

…And I am 7 years old, proudly waving a flag among a crowd of children at our Conservative shul. I watch my father holding a sefer Torah and dancing with joyous abandon.

Each child receives a red apple and a Hershey bar. We all stand outside on the steps facing 16^th Street and shout symbolically towards the Soviet embassy, a few miles south of us:

One two three four! Open up the iron door!

Five six seven eight! Let our people emigrate!

The rabbi speaks movingly about Anatoly Sharansky. I do not know that within 10 years, the refusenik will be a free man named Natan, and that a few years after that, the iron door will really open up.

U-varech et nachalatecha [and bless Your inheritance]…

…I am 13, newly bat mitzvah. For the first time, I am old enough to hold a sefer Torah myself. It’s heavy; I can’t dance as wildly as my father, but I am learning.

Ur’em ve-nas’em ad ha-olam [and tend them and raise them up forever]…

…I am 18, at my college’s egalitarian minyan. We dance for hours. We join the Orthodox minyan on the quad, and form separate circles. Dancing, we carry the sifrei Torah through the nave of the gothic library and into the reading room, where there are Jews who do not remember that it is Simchat Torah. In the morning, all my muscles ache from dancing. My friend and mentor, Elka Klein, makes sure I am honored with kallat Bereishit because I am a promising freshman. I do not know that in only 18 years, Elka will pass away much too young fro

Read the full article on The Times of Israel

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?

Read the full article on The Times of Israel

7 + 1 = The helix of new beginnings

You know the feeling when you’re trying to get somewhere, you’re turning round one corner, another, studiously following your map, sure you’re making progress and suddenly you’re back where you started? Of course you do. We all do.

Shemini Atzeret is the opposite of that.

The seven days of Sukkot that prelude Shemini Atzeret are illustrative of the seven days of the week, the cyclicality that the calendar provides. Shemini Atzeret, as the name suggests (“eighth [day] of convocation”) goes above and beyond this circling of time, the seven days of being. The existence of an eighth day means that we are lifted up above and beyond our cyclical existence.

Read the full article on the Times of Israel

After Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, days spent in deep spiritual introspection, Sukkot feels incongruous. Are we really supposed to follow up our intense prayer and fasting with a harvest festival? Especially for those of us who are not farmers, the holiday can sometimes feel foreign: we will happily eat in our sukkot and wave our arba minim, but the meaning of the holiday can feel inaccessible. Is this really the culmination of our year of holidays and rituals? Is waving a lulav and etrog truly the pinnacle?

A close reading of the language describing the commandments of Sukkot can offer another perspective. In Leviticus 23:39-43, the Torah introduces the commandments of the four species and sitting in the Sukkah.

Read the full article on the Times of Israel