Sukkot 101

MyJewishLearning.com

Beginning five days after Yom Kippur, Sukkot is named after the booths or huts (sukkot in Hebrew) in which Jews are supposed to dwell during this week-long celebration. According to rabbinic tradition, these flimsy sukkot represent the huts in which the Israelites dwelt during their 40 years of wandering in the desert after escaping from slavery in Egypt. The festival of Sukkot is one of the three great pilgrimage festivals (chaggim or regalim) of the Jewish year.

History

The origins of Sukkot are found in an ancient autumnal harvest festival. Indeed it is often referred to as hag ha-asif, “The Harvest Festival.” Much of the imagery and ritual of the holiday revolves around rejoicing and thanking God for the completed harvest. The sukkah represent the huts that farmers would live in during the last hectic period of harvest before the coming of the winter rains. As is the case with other festivals whose origins may not have been Jewish, the Bible reinterpreted the festival to imbue it with a specific Jewish meaning. In this manner, Sukkot came to commemorate the wanderings of the Israelites in the desert after the revelation at Mount Sinai, with the huts representing the temporary shelters that the Israelites lived in during those 40 years.

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On Yom Kippur, must we ask forgiveness for communal wrongs?

by Edmon J. Rodman, JTA, JewishJournal.com

On Yom Kippur, as we focus on our personal faults, how do we acknowledge those shortcomings that are more communal?

In synagogue, reciting line by line the Al Chet prayer, seeking atonement for the areas of our lives where in the past year we have fallen short, events in the news, even those that may have touched our lives, seem far away and better off resolved by the talking heads of the cable news.

Beating our chest for each “chet,” we ask God in page after painful page to forgive us for “rashly judging others,” “scorning parents and teachers,” even engaging in “idle chatter” and “forbidden trysts.” Isn’t that enough?

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This Rosh Hashanah, I Challenge You to Focus on the Positives

Nina Badzin for Kveller

Two essential parts of preparing for Rosh Hashanah, our clean slate for the year, is asking forgiveness from anyone we wronged and making a list (mental or written) of the ways we fell short since the last time we heard the shofar. Ideally that hard work of going to friends, family, and anyone else deserving of our forgiveness happens in the weeks leading up to Rosh Hashanah. By the time Yom Kippur rolls around 10 days later, we should be ready to confess our mistakes as a community, having already considered our personal paths to a teshuva, repentance, and how we will do better this year.

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Wholehearted Devotion

Rabbi Jacob Staub for Jewish Reconstructionist Communities

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, is a time for teshuvah—returning to the divinely commanded path, the Torah, that was revealed at Mount Sinai (Exodus 20), from which we have each invariably strayed over the course of the year. According to Jewish traditions, the Torah includes 613 commandments.

Why aren’t Jews overwhelmed by the sheer number of commandments?  Why don’t Jews feel condemned by the need to observe of the commandments, as Paul assumed to be the case in his Epistles?

The approach of Hasidic teachers to this question may be helpful to all people who seek to commune with the divine presence.  They observe that the biblical verse, Cursed be the one who does not observe and do the terms of the Torah (Deuteronomy 27: 26) makes no sense, because nobody is able to observe all 613 commandments.

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