Sunday at sundown, September 30, 2012 is the beginning of the celebration of the last of the fall festivals called Sukkot, alternately called festival of booths, or feast of tabernacles.
Notice the ‘Our’ in the title of this article on Sukkot.
- Of course, first and foremost, that “OUR” would refer to the chosen people in their wilderness wanderings which is what 4 out of 5 of the TORAH books are about.
- It was to them, the mixed multitude, but specifically to Israel –the newly-freed slaves from Egypt—to whom the celebration (like all other Leviticus 23 feasts) were directly commanded.
- But remember, it was a mixed multitude, so we gentile believers in that Divine Dweller among the encamped tribes, connect with the non-Israelites who were eventually assimilated among the chosen people.
- We imagine ourselves standing with them on Sinai as the TORAH was given, as the one and only Covenant YHWH made with humankind, represented by Israel and the mixing of gentiles among them.
- Sukkot in particular is specific to these would-be desert-dwellers for 40 years, because among other commemorative reasons, they were to be reminded when they finally live in the promised land, of their living in temporary shelters, totally dependent on Divine Providence for everything, from food to water, to protection from their enemies.
- At no other time in Israel’s history did they literally have the Divine Presence in “tabernacle” with them.
- What other people, what other nation ever had that unique privilege? Certainly none other.
- Imagine, not only did the chosen people live in temporary shelters,
- so did the CREATOR, the same REVELATOR on Sinai, the TRUE GOD, the ONLY GOD, choose to symbolically live in a temporary shelter —His travelling tabernacle in the wilderness, His Sanctuary among His people.
- Did they know He was present among them all those years? Of course, because His Presence manifested in different theophanies—-And so, if any ethnic grouping should be celebrating this last and final festival listed in “My feasts,” the festivals of YHWH, that would be the Jews who consider this one of their ‘high holidays,’ the culminating feast in the fall or autumn festivals.
- visibly appearing as the Shekinah glory cloud by day
- and the pillar of fire by night,
- symbolically inhabiting the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies
- of the portable Sanctuary He showed Moses a heavenly copy of,
- that was at the center of their tribal encampment design at places they rested,
- and travelled in the center with them as they continued their journey through the desert of Sinai.
To review — these divinely mandated celebrations opened with welcoming the new year in Rosh Hashanah 15 days ago, simultaneous with the blowing of the Shofar to officially announce “It is time” for what?
- First, to prepare for the “Holiest” day of the year, Yom Kippur, which would occur 10 days later, so a period of self-examination/repentance/setting relationships right needed to be taken care of first (commandments 5-10);
- and second, on that day of atonement, the day of getting right with the True God, to repent of sins against YHWH (commandments 1-3).
- The 7-day Sabbath was of course already established since Creation week, but since these newly-freed slaves probably never enjoyed a day off in Egypt, they could now set that day aside after working 6 days.
We, the dispersed S6K groups, celebrated for the first time in September 2011, and as we had written in another article, Ciso, the oldest among us who had just embraced YHWH as True God danced and sang with more joy than he had ever done before on the 8th day of this feast. When you witness that much joy in his final day, what better revalidation of one’s faith in YHWH could there be? [Reposted for this occasion: “And He Called” 2 – Ciso’s Season of Rejoicing].
And so we rejoice with those whose God is YHWH, in their Sukkot celebration.
NSB@S6K
P.S.
There is always much to learn from our Jewish links, so we have selected a few excerpts to share:
The Canopy of Faith, Jonathan Sacks – [www.chiefrabbi.org]
- Judaism has a complicated relationship with nature. While other ancient peoples identified gods with the forces of nature, the Hebrew Bible spoke of the one God who stood above nature, bringing it into being and establishing its laws and boundaries. It was a huge revolution of thought. God was not in but above; not immanent but transcendent. Ultimate reality was not to be found in the contending elements of the natural world. Instead it lay in something beyond, in the Creator, Ruler and Judge of all things. One creation alone – humanity – was destined to experience the tension between the natural and supernatural. We were and are, as the Bible puts it, a mixture of dust of the earth and the breath of God (Genesis 2:7).
- Joy is an open roof, an open door, an open heart
- Our very existence depends on a delicate balance of too much and too little. JSacks —But in the Holy Land, where the Bible is set, rain was and still is the scarcest resource and without it there’s drought and famine.
- So on Sukkot we take four kinds of things that need rain to grow:
- a palm branch,
- a citron,
- and leaves from a willow
- and myrtle tree,
- So on Sukkot we take four kinds of things that need rain to grow:
—- and holding them we thank God for rain and pray for it in the Holy Land in the year to come – even if we happen to be living in the soggiest of climates. Sukkot is, if you like, a festival about the fragility of nature as a habitat hospitable to humankind.
The natural world is something science and religion both speak about in their very different ways.
- Science explains; religion celebrates.
- Science speaks, religion sings.
- Science is prose, religion is poetry
- and we need them both.
Science continues to inspire us in the way it reveals the intricacy of nature and the power of the human mind. Rarely was this more so than earlier this year with the almost certain confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson, which someone with a sense of humour called the God particle on the grounds that it exists everywhere but it’s so hard to find.
But science can sometimes make us think we’re in control, which is why we need moments like Sukkot to restore our sense of humility. We’re so small in a universe so vast, and our very existence depends on an extraordinarily delicate balance between too much and too little, whose symbol is rain. Too much and we have floods. Too little and we have drought.
So as well as knowledge we need wisdom, and the better part of wisdom is knowing that we are guardians of a universe we can easily endanger and which we still don’t fully understand. Perhaps it’s not crazy, once a year, to lift our eyes toward heaven, the way we do when we’re praying for rain, and remember how dependent we are on things beyond our control. The more scientific knowledge and power we have, the more humility we need.
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This is from JEWISH WORLD REVIEW,[ www.jewishworldreview.]
This past spring one of Hollywood’s most iconic figures passed away.
Elizabeth Taylor will always be remembered for her legendary beauty. Surely her claim to fame is not as a philosopher. Yet, some years ago, she responded to an event in her life with an insight that deserves to be remembered for its profound truth.
Remarkably enough, it is an idea that perhaps best captures the purpose of the holiday of Sukkot which follows immediately on the heels of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
Thieves had broken into her safety deposit box. They stole a considerable amount of expensive jewelry. Reporters asked her after she learned of her loss: “Did you cry?” Her answer was simple: “I don’t cry for things that won’t cry for me!”
“I don’t cry for things that won’t cry for me!”
In Jewish tradition, there’s a saying that during our lifetimes we have three main friends — and when we die, they leave us in exactly the reverse order in which we treated them. No sooner does our soul leave our body, than
- all of our wealth flees with it as well.
- Families are more faithful. They walk with us after our passing to the cemetery, our final resting place. Then, they too leave us to go on with their lives.
- It is only our name, the good deeds we performed for others, and the influence we may have had upon them, that outlive us and offer us a share of immortality.
Strange then, isn’t it, that we spend most of our lives chasing after money, spending far less of our time than we should with our families, and spending so little of our efforts to accomplish those things by which we will be remembered!
Maybe we can even identify with the profound words of the contemporary author Emile Henry Gauvreay: “I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest to make money they don’t want, to buy things they don’t need, to impress people they dislike.”
Related Article: Sukkot and the Secret of Happiness
Sukkot is the one holiday in the year that according to the Torah is meant to teach us all about happiness. Its subtitle is “the season of our rejoicing.” For farmers of old it was the time, as they completed their harvest, that they were the wealthiest they would be all year. After all the work they had put in to grow their crops, they were rich.
And so what did the Torah tell us to do to make sure we didn’t confuse material wealth with true happiness? We were commanded to leave the luxury of our homes to sit in little frail huts with our families and loved ones.
If we really want to be happy, the first step is to define what it is that will bring us this desired state.
There’s a famous story of a drunk standing under a street lamp carefully searching for something. A policeman comes along, asks him what he’s looking for, and the man answers, “My keys.” Now they both search. After a while, the policeman wants to know whether the man is sure that he lost his keys here. The drunk answers, “No, not here. I lost them back there — but there it’s much too dark to find them.”
Foolish? Of course. But a beautiful illustration of a common failing of mankind. We keep looking for things in all the wrong places. We rationalize that “the light is better here,” but we never stop to ask ourselves if it’s possible that what we’re looking for isn’t really in the place where we’re searching.
“Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy they are who possess it.” That was the brilliant advice of Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld. We set our hearts upon wealth. Why not examine how happy they are who possess it? Is there really a correlation between having and happiness, between lack of money and misery?
There is no correlation whatsoever between income and happiness.
Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, authors of Your Money or Your Life asked over one thousand people from the United States and Canada to rate themselves on a happiness scale of one (miserable) to five (joyous), with three being “can’t complain.” Dominguez and Robin were surprised to find there is no correlation whatsoever between income and happiness. In fact, once the simplest basic needs were taken care of people earning less reported being happier than those considered upper-middle-class.
“Psychologists have spent decades studying the relation between wealth and happiness,” writes Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert in his best-selling Stumbling on Happiness, and they have generally concluded that “wealth increases human happiness when it lifts people out of abject poverty and into the middle class but that it does little to increase happiness thereafter.”
It’s about time we faced up to the truth: More things don’t mean more happiness. The anonymous line, “Those who say that money can’t buy happiness don’t know where to shop,” may be funny, but it isn’t fact. David Myers, professor of psychology at Michigan’s Hope College, in his book, The Pursuit of Happiness: Who Is Happy—and Why?, quotes a student from an extremely wealthy home: “My parents bought me a Mazda 626. Then one year, my stepfather gave me a sailboat. Later he bought me my own Windsurfer. Our house has two VCRs and three Hitachi televisions. Do these things make me happy? Absolutely not. I would trade all my family’s wealth for a peaceful and loving home.”
So now that we’re crying over our losses in this beaten-down economic climate, let’s reflect on what really deserves our tears. We want above all to be happy. Our culture keeps telling us that the way to be happy is to have more money. Then we can buy more things that will give us more pleasure. When they don’t, we’re told that we really need even more money to buy bigger and better things, so that’s why we have to take on more work and more stress — because then we’ll really be happy. And as we see less and less of our family and accumulate more and more possessions, we end up discovering the truth of the warning in the Talmud’s Ethics of the Fathers that “The more property, the more worries”.
“Wealth is like health: Although its absence can breed misery, having it is no guarantee of happiness,” summarizes Dr. David Myers. “If anything, to judge by soaring rates of depression, the quintupling of the violent crime rate since 1960, the doubling of the divorce rate, and the tripling of the teen suicide rate, we’re richer and less happy.”
“Satisfaction isn’t so much getting what you want as wanting what you have.”
“Satisfaction isn’t so much getting what you want as wanting what you have. There are two ways to be rich: One is to have great wealth, the other is to have few wants,” Myers says. “Find ways to make the most of the money that does pass through your hands and never lose sight of all that is far more important than money.”
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And what is it that is far more important than money?
Sukkot, the holiday of our rejoicing, reminds us that even the frailest hut filled with those we love is a far greater source of happiness than the most luxurious mansion. It tells us not to care more about things than about people. It teaches us to reflect far more on what we have than to be depressed by what we lack.
As we sit in the sukkah and gaze up to the heavens above we will find the reassurance of divine guidance, protection and blessing – which the wisest of all generations have invariably concluded is the best source for finding happiness.
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Ha’azinu(Deuteronomy 32)
GOOD MORNING! Judaism has something for everyone. If you like to drink, we have Purim. If you like asceticism or self-denial we have Yom Kippur. If you like to play with fire, we have Lag B’omer (celebrated with bonfires!) If you like to dance, we have Simchat Torah, and … if you like the great outdoors, we have Sukkot!
Sukkot starts Sunday evening, September 30th. Sukkot means “booths.” During the 40 years of wandering in the desert we lived in Sukkot. We are commanded in the Torah regarding this holiday, “You shall dwell in booths for seven days … so that your generations will know that I caused the Children of Israel to dwell in booths when I took them out of Egypt, I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus 23:42-43). We are commanded to make our Sukkah our main dwelling place — to eat, sleep, learn Torah and spend our time there. If one would suffer from being in a Sukkah — i.e., from rain or snow — or heat and humidity — he is freed from the obligation to dwell there. We make, however, every effort to at least eat in the Sukkah — especially the first night.
The love and enthusiasm you put into building a Sukkah and decorating it makes a big impact on your children. A friend told me that his father was a klutz (not handy) with tools and their Sukkah would oftentimes fall down. But, what he remembers is his father’s love for the mitzvah of building the Sukkah and happiness in building it each time. We cannot decree that our children have our love for our heritage. However, by showing them our delight and energy in the mitzvot, they build their own love for Torah and the holiday. A teacher once said, “Parents only owe their children 3 things: example, example, example.”
We are also commanded to wave the arbah minim, the Four Species, during the week-long holiday. There are many deep and mystical meanings to be found regarding waving the Four Species. Waving them in all four directions of the compass as well as up and down is symbolic that the Almighty controls the whole world, the winds and all forces — everything everywhere. A second lesson from holding the Four Species together — all Jews are bound together as one people, be they saints or sinners, knowledgeable or ignorant (see Dvar Torah!).
The Torah tells us, “…On the fifteenth of the seventh month (counting from the Hebrew month of Nissan when the Jews left Egypt) shall be the holiday of Sukkot, seven days (of celebration) for the Almighty. The first day shall be a holy convocation; all manners of work (creative acts as defined by the Torah) you shall not do; it is an eternal decree in all of your dwelling places for all generations” (Leviticus 23:34-35).
Sukkot is called zman simchateinu, the time of our joy. Joy is distinct from happiness. Happiness is taking pleasure in what you have. Joy is the pleasure of anticipating a future good. If we trust in God and know that everything the Almighty does for us and will do for us is for our good, then we will know great joy in our lives!
Deuteronomy 16:13-15 tells us “The festival of Sukkot shall be to you for seven days when you gather from your threshing floors and your wine cellar. You shall rejoice in your festival … for the Almighty will bless you in all of your produce and in all of the work of your hand and you shall be completely joyous.” It is fitting that Sukkot is a harvest festival. People who work the earth are amongst the most religious of people trusting in the Almighty (followed perhaps by fundraisers … ). They take a perfectly good seed that could be eaten and they stick it in the ground not knowing whether there will be rain or drought or floods or pestilence. They put forth hard work not knowing the outcome. They trust in the Almighty for their food and their very existence.
The mitzvah of dwelling in the Sukkah teaches us trust in God. We tend to think that our possessions, our money, our homes, our intelligence will protect us. During Sukkot we are exposed to the elements in a temporary hut. Living in a Sukkah puts life into perspective. Our possessions are transient — and our corporeal beings are even more transient than our possessions. Life is vulnerable. Our history has borne out how transient are our homes and communities. No matter how
well-established, wealthy and “secure” we have become in a host country, in the end it too has been a temporary dwelling. Our trust must be in God.
As King David wrote in Psalms 20:8 “There are those who trust in chariots and those who trust in horses, but we trust in the name of the Almighty.” Only the Almighty is the Creator of the world, the Master of history, our personal and caring God Who can be relied upon to help us.
During the Festival of Sukkot when we had our Temple in Jerusalem, 70 offerings were brought — one for each nation of the world — so that the Almighty would provide rain for their crops. The Talmud tells us that if the nations of the world understood the value of what the Jewish people provided them, they would have sent their armies to defend our Temple in Jerusalem to keep it from being destroyed!
Sukkot is one of the Shelosh Regalim, Three Festivals (the other two are Pesach and Shavuot), where the Torah commands everyone living in Israel to leave their homes to come to Jerusalem to celebrate at the Temple. For the last 2,000 years since the destruction of the Temple, we’ve been unable to fulfill this mitzvah. May we soon be able to fulfill this mitzvahonce again in its entirety! For more on Sukkot, go to: aish.com/sukkot
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Torah Portion of the Week
Ha’azinu
The Torah portion is a song, a poem taught to the Jewish people by Moshe. It recounts the trials and tribulations of the Jewish people during the 40 years in the desert. Jewish consciousness, until the present generation, was to teach every Jewish child to memorize Ha’azinu. In this manner we internalized the lessons of our history, especially the futility of rebelling against the Almighty.
The portion ends with Moshe being told to ascend Mount Nevo to see the Promised Land before he dies and is “gathered to his people.” By the way, this is one of the allusions to an afterlife in the Torah. Moshe died alone and no one knows where he is buried. Therefore, “gathered to his people” has a higher meaning!
Dvar Torah
What is The Meaning of the Arbah Minim?
One of the special commandments for Sukkot is to take the arbah minim, the Four Species (etrog, lulav, hadassim, and aravot), and to wave them in the four directions of the compass as well as up and down. The meaning of the waving is that God is everywhere. However, why are these four species designated for the mitzvah?
Our rabbis teach that these four species are symbolic of four types of Jews:
the etrog(citron) which has a fragrance and a taste represents those Jews who have both Torah wisdom and good deeds; the lulav (date palm branch) which has a taste (from the dates), but no fragrance represents those Jews who have Torah wisdom, but no good deeds; thehadassim (myrtle branches) have a fragrance, but no taste representing those Jews who have good deeds, but no Torah wisdom; and lastly, the aravot (willow branches) have neither a taste nor a smell representing those Jews who are lacking in Torah wisdom and good deeds.
What do we do on Sukkot? We symbolically bind together and recognize every Jew as an integral and important part of the Jewish people. If even one is missing, the mitzvah is incomplete. Our People is one; we must do all we can to bind together the Jewish people and work to strengthen the Jewish future!
Dvar Torah
based on Growth Through Torah by Rabbi Zelig Pliskin
In the song of Ha’azinu it says:
“Remember the days of yore, understand the years of every generation.” (Deut. 32:7)
What does understanding the “days of yore” have to do with understanding “every generation”?
Rabbi Mordechai Gifter, the former Rosh Hayeshiva of Telse, elucidated: “The Torah gives us guidelines for the viewing and understanding of history from a true perspective. If one wishes to comprehend an event in history, one cannot look at it in the limited scope of the finite here and now; rather, one must understand the event as having a place in the historical continuum.
“A historical occurrence extends itself beyond the isolation of time and space and reaches towards the past and future to acquire true significance. However, one must invariably begin with Creation and the Creator. As the Vilna Gaon explained, to understand ‘the years of every generation’ one must first ‘remember the days of yore’ – the Six Days of Creation. For in those days lies the complete plan of the development of the universe and humankind in it. This, the Gaon taught, is the only way to understand history.
“Secular sources view history in perspectives of their own, predicated on economic, social, and political principles. By contrast, the Torah directs us to view history as the unfolding of the Divine Plan.
“History is the metamorphosis of man through the stages of destruction and redemption, continuing towards his final redemption in the days of Moshiach (messiah). All such events, the redemptions and the destructions, are perceived as fundamental testimony to the presence of the Almighty in this world, and are understood as experiential units in divine supervision, the active force of the Hand of the Almighty.”
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