By Rabbi Patrick Beaulier
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So, speaking of Sukkot…
I can’t think of a more made-up sounding holiday. Let’s go through a Jewish New Year, a date of Atonement, and then let’s end it by building huts?
The truth is that the early “Radical Reform” rabbis begged the same question. As they transitioned Judaism in America from a peoplehood-based philosophy to a faith-based religious community, the question of hut building and shaking the lulav made little sense. How does a temporary shelter that celebrates an ancient people’s agricultural festival bring people into higher states of spirituality and universal ethical values?
Rabbi Howard Berman offers an idea that is very meaningful to me:
Reform’s characteristic recasting of the significance of many traditional celebrations, shifting the emphasis from ritual symbolism to a focus on explicit ethical messages, found particular expression in its interpretation of the Festival of Sukkot.
While reaffirming the historical link to the wanderings of our ancestors in the wilderness following the Exodus, the early Reformers added two additional layers of significance to the festival.
…The Emancipation from the confines of the Ghetto in the 18th century, and the experience of the frontiers of America, both combined to reconnect Jewish consciousness to the land – an encounter that would eventually critically shape the emerging resettlement of the Land of Israel as well. The reclaiming of the fall seasonal harvest theme was particularly significant for the American Reform Movement, which identified with the shared ideals and Biblical roots of the pioneering spirit embodied in the Thanksgiving Story.
The second major interpretation that Reform brought to Sukkot was the ethical extension of the harvest symbolism. Rooted in the Torah’s “Holiness Code” of Leviticus 19, with its call for the equitable sharing of the bounty of the harvest, the original liturgy that the early Reformers composed for the Festival emphasized the concept that Sukkot‘s ultimate message was one of economic justice.
This is lovely, but of course is begs the question: what right do we have to redesign, recast, reshape and reinterpret Jewish practices? Isn’t the point of Sukkot to honor our past as a peoplehood? Shouldn’t that be enough?
My take is very simple: the only constant in life is change. And the truth about Jewish holidays is that they have been reforms/reconstructions of other practices since their very beginning.
Jewish scholarship casts Sukkot in many different ways, either as a utilitarian practice that became a religious practice, perhaps a way of countering the Babylonian festival of installing Marduk as the king (replacing Marduk with YHWH) or something else entirely that I find compelling - that Sukkot recasts an Ugaritic practice:
The connection to the practice on Sukkot of gathering branches and building booths, familiar from Leviticus 23, is unmistakable. In his introduction to this text, the Ugaritic scholar, Dennis Pardee, writes:
The reference to the “day of the new moon”… marks this as a text outlining a two-month festival, or at least, the festival of the last month of the year with a transitional festival to the new year. The new-year festival, similarly to that of the Hebrew Bible, appears to be a harvest festival, as may be surmised from the mention of “dwellings” for the gods made of “cut branches.
But at the end of the day, very few of us live in this world of Biblical scholarship. No matter what Sukkot was and became, we’re still left wondering why we need to build a sukkah and pay for an outrageously overpriced lemon-and-twig ensemble.
That’s where change comes back into play.
A sukkah is a change:
changing branches into a home,
and having that home change
once we take it down.
Change is
Creation,
the cycle of nature
and Life,
the change in our lives from one year to the next
We changed whatever Sukkot was into what Sukkot is.
And we are creatures of nature who live in the cycle of change.
And what is changed is only temporary - it changes again.
And again,
and again,
and again,
unit the next year.
My blessing for you on Sukkot is that you change, just as nature does. That you live fully in the cycle of time: of this world, of your kavanot (intentions), of your capability to shape your life, and to be fully present as the world changes around you.
Here in bella Italia we are observing Sukkot with the local parish priest and congregants. We share the holiday which in Italy is called "La festa delle capanne." For both Christians and Jews it is a pilgrimage holiday. Thank you for a very cogent take on our Suklot festival. Kol HaKavod, well done.