We’re coming down the final stretch of the fall holiday season here at Society Hill synagogue and in Jewish communities around the world.
Sometimes, I offer myself a chutzpadik thought experiment: if I were designing the Jewish calendar, the Jewish year cycle from scratch would I do it this way
Would I have the two most well-attended synagogue holidays of the year be ten days apart? Would I choose to deliver a sermon with the biggest audience, a day when finally the pews are packed, on the day when that very same audience has already been fasting for 18 hours? Would I choose to, on the heels of these two huge holidays, the most dramatic moments of the synagogue year, only five days later, begin another seven day holiday, this time one that involves construction of rickety hut, which is supposedly going to house a week’s worth of celebrations in sometimes ideal and sometimes far less than ideal weather? Would I choose to cap off that seven-day holiday, with two more holidays, one that few people can pronounce let alone know what rituals are associated with it, and the other one that calls upon members of the synagogue of all ages to push themselves out of their comfort zone to get up and dance and celebrate the completion—and beginning—of a three thousand year old text, whose beginning and end we know all too well?
In a word, yes. Yes I would.
I’m of course talking about the flow of the holiday cycle from Rosh Hashanah, the First of Tishrei, the beginning of the year, also known as Yom Teruah, the day of sounding the shofar, waking us up to the call to effect teshuvah, repentance/return, aligning ourselves with the Divine, who, as another name for the holiday, Yom Hazikaron, the day of rememberenance suggests, remembers us with love and compassion, thereby, ten days later after 10 intense days of teshuvah, helping us achieve karapa atonement, at-one-ment on Yom Kippur.
Five days later, five days after catching our breath, we celebrate this experience. Sukkot is Zman Simchateinu. The season of our joy. As Rabbi Reuven Hammer writes, “There is no greater contrast in religious feeling than that between Yom Kippur and Sukkot. Yom Kippur is all deprivation, asceticism, and spirituality; Sukkot is all joy, festivity, dancing, singing, and feasting. On Yom Kippur we are in heaven. On Sukkot, we are very much on earth—to our great pleasure.”
Sukkot is also known as Chag Ha’asif—the festival, the holiday of ingathering. It is the culmination of the harvest season, the Jewish thanksgiving. In some ways, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are mere preparation for Sukkot, which is also known as simply he-chag. The festival, the holiday—no further explanation needed. It was the culminating expression of our gratitude for the bounty, for the blessings in our lives, which sustained us. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur allow us to experience that week of celebratory gratitude with a sense of meaning and holiness, grounded in what matters.
But under this reading, make no mistake that the experience of sukkot is the climax, the experience towards which we have been building. The fragile sukkah either an embodiment of the huts our ancestors would use to sleep in and take cover in from the sun when they were in the midst of reaping all the fruits of their harvest, taking in all their blessings, feeling connected to the earth, or it was the shelter we stayed in while making our way through the wilderness to the promised land. Or both. Either way it helps us lift up that sense of gratitude—gratitude for the blessings in our lives, gratitude for the journey, while recognizing life’s fragility and sacredness.
As Rabbi Hammer writes, we cannot and should not stay very long in the rarified atmosphere of Yom Kippur. We have to return to earth, to begin to build and make life happy and fruitful, not only for ourselves but for others. If that is the outcome of the Days of Awe, they have been worthwhile,” he writes.
If Sukkot is the climax, then what begins tonight with Shemini Atzeret, continuing the next day with Simchat Torah, is the Coda, the epilogue.
The Torah for Sheimini Atzeret from the Book of Vayikra, Leviticus, says “seven days of Sukkot you shall bring offerings by fire to Adoani. On the eighth day, Shemini, you shall observe a sacred occasion and bring an offering by fire to the LORD; עֲצֶ֣רֶת הִ֔וא. It is an atzeret, a day of solemn assembly, or, as the famous rabbi Rashi teaches, “The word is derived from the root עצר “to hold back” and suggests: I —as in God — keep you back with Me one day more. It is similar,” writes Rashi, “to the case of a king who invited his children to a banquet for a certain number of days. When the time arrived for them to take their departure he said, ‘Children, I beg of you, stay one day more with me; it is so hard for me to part with you!’”
Shemini Atzeret, tonight, is the lingering, the tarrying. It’s been such an amazing celebration, such an amazing expression of gratitude and joy and intimiacy with the divine and one another that we atzar, we linger one more day with one another. There’s quiet, there’s solemnity, there’s yizkor, remembering: remembering the sacred times we’ve spent together, with one another and with our loved ones who are no longer with us.
After the dust from that has settled, we can’t help but go out with a bang, and so we reconvene for one last celebration with Simchat Torah—with the holiday that recognizes that the cycle doesn’t end—it starts all over again. The end, as they say, is where we start from. So we celebrate the close of one season—but we recognize it’s the beginning of something else.
And, of course, Judaism doesn’t drop us off a cliff; the holiday season isn’t meant to be disconnected from the rest of the year; it’s meant to inform the rest of the year. We don’t go our separate ways after a wedding celebration. We take the ideals that we’ve lifted up over the course of that celebration and weave them into the rest of our lives; even while we return to the mundane, we’ve planted the seeds of the holy to till and to nurture.
This is in many ways the theme of the holiday we celebrate not once a year but once a week. Shabbat. Shabbat has much of the imagery of a wedding celebration, boi kallah, inviting in the bride, the shekhinah, uniting what otherwise might feel fragmented, broken, and then inviting us to feel that sense of shalem, that sense of wholeness, throughout the rest of the week, even when we can’t always hold the kind of space for it that we do on Shabbat.
And that’s life. To cite Rabbi Hammer one more time Jewish holidays, including Shabbat, are not to be isolated, but are to be integrated into a total life, one that includes celebration and a full relationship with the divine and with other human beings. In this way, we actualize the Torah’s command. Choose life.
So, are there downsides to the way our holiday season flows? Sure. Would I change it? In a word, never.
Shavua Tov—to a week, as challenging as it may be, of goodness,
