Hey guys, I’m now in Jerusalem during the holiday of Sukkot.
Before I tell you a little bit about this holiday, I just want to say what a great joy it is to be
here in Israel, in Jerusalem, on a Jewish holiday after living outside Israel for so many years.
You can really feel the holiday spirit in the air. When living in the diaspora, you need to
actively do something in order to celebrate the Jewish holidays, and now in the blessed
time we live in, we just need to go outside and you can already feel that it’s a holiday.
Sukkot, also known as the Feast of Tabernacles or the Feast of Shelters
or Booths or the Feast of Ingathering, is a biblical holiday. Now you might say:
well, aren't all Jewish holidays biblical? Well no, some were added later. The most
well-known one is Hanukkah, which is not mentioned in the Jewish bible.
Sukkot is one of the Three Pilgrimage Festivals on which the Israelites went up to the Temple in
Jerusalem. The other two are Pessach (Passover) and Shavuot (Pentacost). Like all Jewish
festivals, Sukkot has two sides or two meanings: the religious aspect and the agricultural aspect.
The religious aspect remembers the exodus, the 40 years in the desert before entering the Land
of Israel, a time when the Israelites dwelled in temporary huts. The agricultural aspect is
the gathering of fruits and cereals that had been left in the fields before the rainy season.
Sukkot is celebrated on the 15th of the month of Tishri,
which is in September or the beginning of October. If you want to learn more
about the Jewish calendar, I will be leaving a link up here and down below.
So during Sukkot many observant Jews build a “sukkah”, a booth,
and eat and sleep there for 7 days.
I’m going to walk through the Old City of
Jerusalem and maybe also Nachlaot, which was one of the first Jewish neighborhoods
to be built outside the Old City, and we will keep an eye out for Sukkot.
The word “mitzvah” means religious duty, and the best-known mitzvah of Sukkot is
waving the four species “etrog”, which is made up of the fruit from
a citron tree, “lulav”, which is a branch from a date palm, “hadass”, which
are leaves from a myrtle tree, and “aravah”, branches from a willow tree.
Another custom of Sukkot is to invite guests into your “sukkah”. But we don’t use the Hebrew
word for it, which is “orchim”, instead we use the Aramic word for it: “Ushpizin”.
One of the interesting things about Sukkot is that unlike basically all other Jewish holidays,
there is no specific food related to this holiday. And that’s all I have to say about that.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this video. please do subscribe! It’s a small click for you and a great
help for me. Feel free to write any comments you have below. See you in the next video, yalla bye.