Hello everyone and welcome once again to the Temple Institute Parsha class.
My name is Gedalia Meyer, podcasting from Maale Adumim in Israel.
Though it seems like a broken record, we appear to be no closer to the end of this thing than
we were a few months ago, at least in Israel.
Nobody knows what the best strategy is and everybody is shooting in the dark.
Here in Israel we are entering the second or third week of the national lockdown, depending
on how one counts the starting point.
The official end date of this lockdown has been extended to a few days after the holiday
of Sukkot, but nobody knows if this is really going to be the end.
It could extend indefinitely afterwards.
Meanwhile, the case numbers keep going up and nobody can see the light at the end of
the tunnel.
Along with all this doom and gloom, we are in the midst of the so-called Hagim - the
High Holidays.
We’ve done Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and now we are heading into Sukkot.
This week-long holiday, the third of the package, is always a great celebration.
It includes two official Shabbat-like days at the beginning and end, and about 5 or six
days in the middle, depending on if one lives in Israel or not, that have minor restrictions
but include all the hoopla of the rest of Sukkot.
It happens that this year, both of the end days come on Shabbat itself.
The first day is called simply Sukkot, while the last day is called by the combined name
of Shemini Atzeret, which means something on the order of ‘eighth day holdover’,
and Simchat Torah, which means ‘rejoicing over the Torah’.
Outside of Israel the first day is celebrated over two days and the combination day is divided
into two separate days.
It’s all very complicated, like anything Jewish, but somehow it all works out.
Because the first day of Sukkot falls on Shabbat, there is no regular Parsha this week.
There is a special Torah reading for Sukkot that includes all of the details about the
holiday.
These details really boil down to two major things.
The first is the reason for the name of the holiday.
The word Sukkot means ‘booths’.
While that appears to many to be a rather nonchalant name for a celebration that is
supposed to be such a big deal, it is what it is.
The booths, as most people who are familiar with this holiday know, are these structures
that Jews are supposed to live in during the entire week of the holiday.
In the good old days these were types of huts, probably made out of wood or branches, or
pretty much anything that could do the trick.
In more recent times people have been making them out of pre-made metal frame kits, or
anything else that does the trick.
Many people now simply have them as a semi-permanent part of their house, like on a porch or something.
The important point is not the walls but the material the roof is made of.
It has to be made of some natural agricultural product such as wood, bamboo, or branches.
A common practice in Israel is to make it out of palm fronds.
The basic idea behind all these details is that the Sukkah, or booth, should be natural
and simple.
One should be able to see the stars through the roof, but it should contain more shade
than sun.
It is meant to be a throwback to the way things were at the time of the very formation of
the Israelites, when they were wandering around the Sinai desert for 40 years.
Whether a modern-day Sukkah really fits this bill is a matter is an academic question.
What really matters is that it is done correctly and that it is a place that one can truly
enjoy being there and feels like it is a kind of home.
The second major detail about this holiday is a bundle-like thing that contains four
species of foliage.
These four are listed in the Torah in a somewhat clear but slightly vague manner.
Jewish tradition has it that the four species are: a lemon-looking thing called an Etrog,
or Esrog in Ashkenazi Hebrew.
This is a nearly inedible fruit that is grown in special orchards in Israel and a few other
places in the middle east.
Supposedly there is now an etrog grove in California.
The second is called a Lulav.
It is the beginning of a new shoot of palm frond before it begins to grow the familiar
fan-like extensions that hang down.
In other words, it is really a kind of stick that grows on a palm tree.
The third is called a Hadas.
There are three of these in the package so they are called Hadasim, the plural for Hadas.
This is a branch from a myrtle bush, a low-growing shrub whose leaves tend to grow on the branches
in groups of three.
The fourth is called Aravot, a thin branch of one of many species of willow that grow
by water.
While this sounds like a considerable amount of details that are really not all that necessary,
for religious Jews it is like manna from heaven.
Such Jews tend to like all these details, and getting the four species of foliage to
not only be kosher, or adequate according to Jewish law, but really nice looking, is
a favorite practice this time of year.
This has become one more thing in Judaism where a person can really go to town over
something that is uniquely Jewish and has no purpose other than simply doing it right
and as good as possible.
Like the Sukkah, it is meant to be a throwback to Biblical times, when foliage like this
was life itself, and celebrating the harvest meant that they would survive the winter.
In addition to all this, there are a number of sideline things that tend to spice up this
already spiced-up holiday even more.
There are Sukkah-hopping groups in neighborhoods that are thickly Jewish, who go from one Sukkah
to another to eat, drink, shmooze, and sing.
There are prayers for rain, which also starts to fall in Israel shortly after Sukkot.
There is even a ceremony of banging a bundle of willow branches on the ground that comes
on the second-to-last day of the holiday, which doesn't have any real basis or explanation
other than that it was done in ancient times.
In the times of the Temple in Jerusalem, there were water-drawing ceremonies and parades
with dancing and acrobatics.
It was kind of like the Biblical equivalent of the Mardi Gras.
What does it all mean?
To get to the bottom of all this we have to look into the actual verses in the Torah that
describes it all in relative detail.
After all the details about the four species and the various offerings that are brought
for the celebration, there is a kind of summing-up of the whole holiday.
‘In Sukkot you shall dwell for seven days, every citizen of Israel shall dwell in Sukkot.
In order that your generations know that in Sukkot I had the Israelites dwell when I took
them out of Egypt, I am Hashem your God.’
That really tells it all.
This entire holiday and the accompanying ceremonies, with all the hoopla, exists to remind us a
particular detail of the Exodus.
That detail was the simple fact that they dwelled in these booth-like things during
the wanderings through the desert.
Future generations, for some reason, would have to know this little detail, and it is
for that reason that this holiday exists.
Everything else is really the fine print.
It has to be said right off the bat that this was really a harvest festival.
That much is made clear elsewhere in that Torah.
The Sukkot thing seems to have been a way to tie things back to the Exodus and the origins
of the Israelite people.
Harvest festivals were standard fair throughout the world until very recently, and the fact
is that they still exist today, though one would hardly know it unless one lived in a
rural area.
If it weren’t for produce from the land we could not survive.
To celebrate the harvest is to celebrate life itself.
The Torah managed to tie this universal celebration to the unique story of the Israelites.
But we must ask the question as to why it was so important that future generations know
that their ancestors dwelt in these booths.
Who really cares how they dwelt?
For that matter, what else would we think they were living in other than some kind of
portable and easy-to-put-together structure.
They couldn’t have been carrying large homes around with them as they wandered.
The only alternative would have been a nomadic tent, which, it happens, is what the Torah
states many times.
So were these Sukkot really just tents?
It does seem possible, and even likely.
Perhaps the way the custom evolved in Judaism was that the booth system, with the roof made
of foliage, was the best way to recall that simple mode of life when there wasn’t much
difference between one’s home and the earth outside.
But why is this so important to remember?
The easy answer to this question is that it is one more of the many ways of recalling
the Exodus.
This, as everyone knows, is a major component of Judaism.
It is the whole point of Passover and it seems to get mentioned at every possible situation
in Jewish prayer.
Even though it took place over 3000 years ago, for observant Jews it is like it happened
yesterday.
Reliving the experience by dwelling outside of the comfortable home is perhaps the best
way to get a taste of what it was like.
Whether this still works today is a matter for each individual celebrant to determine
and to make happen.
But there is another idea that may answer this question on a deeper level.
This is the idea that on some fundamental level, this is the true way that we were supposed
to live.
The manner in which the Isralites lived during the Exodus period was seen, perhaps, as an
ideal that can never quite be reached again and we can only imagine to some degree.
All of our extras that we so badly seek and believe that we need in life, are really nothing
other than glorified illusions that serve no function other than to distract us from
what is truly important.
This, perhaps, is what is meant by the phrase, ‘In order that your generations know that
in Sukkot I had the Israelites dwell when I took them out of Egypt’.
Those future generations have to know this because this is what is absolutely essential
to know.
This is real living, and not whatever souped-up version that you concoct in the future.
This is life.
This point cannot be more relevant than at this very moment in history.
As we battle this pandemic, not knowing where and when the end lies, not knowing if we are
the right path or the wrong one, not knowing what our societies and our lives will be like
when this is all finally over, we are forced to face the unsettling possibility that maybe
we have been off course for quite some time.
Maybe we went astray in our collective and individual lives, valuing things that were
of no real value and ignoring things that we should have paid close attention to.
A Sukkah, with its intended very basic and down-to-earth structure and appearance, cuts
through all the nonsense and tells us what really matters.
It is walls and a roof and a connection to God, to the earth, and with our past.
With such a structure we can gain a taste of what is essential and what is not.
In a sense, it is a taste of heaven.
Hag Sameah - enjoy the holiday, and Shabbat Shalom!