Sukkot Revolutions

October 5, 2006 - 12:15 AM by Sarah

One of the lesser-known Jewish holidays is Sukkot, known in English as the Feast of Tabernacles. An adequate Wikipedia explanation of the holiday is here. This year, Sukkot begins this Friday evening, and Jerusalem is getting ready.

It’s hard to understand why this holiday disappeared from the radar of most American Jewry (and maybe other diaspora communities, too, but I cannot speak for them), though it’s been making a comeback. Sukkot is festive, happy, fun, all the good things a Jewish holiday can be. It involves spending lots of time in fresh air and involves no repenting, atoning, fasting, or eating matzah. After the intensity of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Sukkot is the Great Release, a time to say “enough with the serious stuff! Let’s party the Jewish way! Yay God! Yay Jews!”

My theory is that in the diaspora, where Jews have to take off from work for 2 days of Rosh Hashanah and one day for Yom Kippur, Sukkot, which outside of Israel involves taking off up to 4 more days from work or school, is just too Jewish. It is really difficult to explain to bosses, colleagues, and teachers, that, yes, Judaism simply has A LOT of holidays in the fall, and no, we’re not just trying to skip out on our responsibilities; by the end of the holiday cycle, I think a lot of people long ago gave up and decided it’s not worth it, and the general community (with the exception of the very religious few) quietly put Sukkot on the backburner. It was put so far back, in fact, that often the biggest problem for Sukkot-observing Jews in America is not explaining their absence to non-Jewish bosses and professors, but to Jewish ones.

I grew up in a mostly Irish-Catholic neighborhood, and explaining to the neighbors why we were eating outside, sometimes in the freezing Boston October nights, for a week was often “interesting” to say the least.

So, as I sit here now in a cafe at the corner of Emek Refaim Street and Rachel Imeinu, gazing at the pizza parlor and the Moroccan restaurant across the street that have both built sukkahs, I am once again ever grateful to be living in a Jewish country. Here, Sukkot is a national holiday. Many offices shut down or offer half-days for the entire week, there is no school, and, in Jerusalem at least, every apartment building has sukkahs in their balconies or in their gardens.

Knowing how easy it is to push Sukkot under the rug, I am proud and thankful to live in a society where one of my favorite holidays, one of the most joyous occasions in the Jewish calendar, has been taken out of the hall of shame and given a prominent place in public awareness.

And October nights here are so mild . . .

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