TISHREI HOLIDAYS
Tishrei could also be renamed as the month of Holidays. Non Orthodox and engaged Jews celebrate four holidays this month. Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot and Simchat Torah. Simchat Torah is attached to Sukkot as the last day, but it really is a separate holiday that well post dates the origins of Sukkot. Its characteristic celebration of reading the last parsha of Deuteronomy and then the first parsha of Genesis and dancing with the Torah scrolls has really nothing to do with Sukkot as a harvest festival and a prayer for rain.
I’m going to discuss the holidays as a whole system and focus most of my comments on Sukkot. Sukkot is the holiday that has a direct connection to the more than human world; for the others, the connection is less obvious. As a reminder, there are tons of good books about the Holidays, and I’m going to focus my comments on things that you are less likely to find in them.
I’ve long been convinced that the holidays as we currently have them are the result of melding two different systems. On the one hand we have the system of the three pilgrimage holidays that are connected to the agricultural calendar of Israel. These three holidays are Pesach, Shavuot and Sukkot. They are discussed together in the 5 Books of Moses in Exodus and Leviticus. These references are Exodus 23:15-17 Exodus 34:18,22-23. Leviticus Chapter 23 covers the three holidays with the prescribed offerings. This chapter also includes what will become Rosh Hashanah (but not so named in verses 24-25) and Yom Kippur, named as such (verse 26).
I’ve long been convinced that the holidays are two different systems because no one in their right mind would possibly schedule three really important holidays bang bang bang. Our ancestors were practical people; they had to be to survive. Our current calendar is a recipe for overwhelm and confusion.
I would speculate that we originally had the three holidays connected to the agricultural cycle. As we got further away from our connection with the land and the indigenous spirits and Goddess, we created different kinds of holidays—and that is Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, and then later on Simchat Torah.
Pesach and Sukkot represent the book ends of the dry season where on the one hand, we pray for the rain to stop (I will discuss this further when we get to Pesach) and then pray for the life giving rains at Sukkot in a great pleading (Hoshana Rabbah) and a great party called Simchat Beit Hashoeivah
Now, I can’t prove any of this, of course, and it probably sounds a bit heretical. But a Judaism that wants to go back to our indigenous, pre-Rabbinic roots would emphasize Sukkot far more than Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. And what you are going to get in these monthly commentaries is one version of an attempt to recover our indigenous roots.
Sukkot, and here I am following the brilliant view of R. Zelig Golden, is the culmination of the system of the holidays. We’ve been taught that Yom Kippur is the culmination of the repentance of the month of Elul with an intensification in the ten days of awe, the yamim noraim of Rosh Hashana to Yom Kippur. We pray with the greatest fervor before the gates close at the end of Yom Kippur, the holiday in which the high priest in days of yore would enter the holy of holies. In the words of the famous prayer Unataneh Tokef (the basis for Leonard Cohen’s Who by Fire), “Berosh Hashana Yikatevun Uveyom Tzom Kipur Yechatemun” meaning that on Rosh Hashanah our individual fates will be written, and then on Yom Kippur they will be sealed. I always imagined some man with a long white beard and a quill pen leaning over a great, old, leather bound book writing names under each year with two columns—live or die.
But R. Golden teaches that the whole purpose of this repentance process is to plead for the life giving rains during Hoshana Rabbah, the great pleading on the last day of Sukkot. The rains in season were a matter of life and death to our ancestors. Our ancestors believed wholeheartedly that the rains would come if they were in alignment, and they would not come if they were not. In the words of Deuteronomy that we recite daily “So it will be, if you will listen to my commandments that I command you this day to love YHVH your God and to serve him with all your heart and soul, , then I will give your land’s showers at their time, early rain and late rain, and you’ll gather your grain and your wine and your oil. And I’ll give vegetation in your field for your animals, and you’ll eat and be full (Deuteronomy 11:13-15)
We need to be aligned with our fellow humans and the divine so that it will rain and we will live. Water is life. Yom Kippur is not the end but the end of Sukkot, specifically, Hoshana Rabbah is the telos, the aim of the cycle. As the Chabad website says, referencing the teaching from the Zohar, the most important book of Jewish mysticism, Hoshana Rabbah “is the day when the verdict that was issued on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur is finalized.” https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/757453/jewish/Hoshana-Rabbah.htm
One problem with the metaphor of the book of life and the ledger where you were written down to live or to die is that the choice is binary, black and white. But alignment is much more or a continuum. All of us are more or less aligned, more or less out of alignment.
We are routinely taught that there are two kinds of alignments. One is human to human and one is between a person and the divine. The whole basis of all the repentance that we are supposed to do is to balance these ledgers. When we have missed the mark with our fellow humans, we need to ask them for forgiveness, not the divine. When we have missed the mark with the divine, we pray to God for forgiveness.
But, to my mind, there is something missing, namely the status of our ledger with the more than human world. Every Elul I change my morning practice where I give thanks to my human community by praying Mah Tovu and add the asking of forgiveness from the more than human community for our sins against all these beings. It’s part of my repentance of my sins. It’s a funny kind of repentance, in this case, because the extent of our sins against the more than human world means that my repentance really doesn’t add up to much. But I am acting in the scope of what I can do.
Two questions I will ask at the end are: Where are you out of balance in your relationships—with your fellow humans, the divine and/or the more than human world? What might be the one or more actions you can commit to taking that will bring you into greater alignment?
Sukkot. The most important comment I can make is the focus of the holiday is water because water is life. We can forget that lesson here living in the modern world, but no rains in season meant starvation and death for our ancestors. Not nothing. I think about rain and Sukkot in three aspects. Simchat Beit Hashoeivah, Hoshana Rabbah and the lulav and etrog.
Simchat Beit Hashoeivah literally means rejoicing at the place of water drawing. Every morning, when the Temple stood, there was a ritual unique to Sukkot where the priests poured water on the altar after the wine offering was poured. This is obviously a kind of sympathetic magic, that may the rains pour down on us just as we are pouring water on the altar. Then in the evening, there was a big party with lots of dancing and music at the pool of Siloam from which the water was drawn. There’s a famous quote from the Talmud "He who has not seen the rejoicing at the Place of the Water-Drawing has never seen rejoicing in his life." (Tractate Sukkah 5:1).
Hoshana Rabbah is the great pleading that takes place on the last day of Sukkot proper. What are we pleading for? One interpretation, grounded in the Zohar, the most important book of Kabbalah, is that this is the day when the judgment of Yom Kippur is delivered—that is on Rosh Hashanah it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed and on Hoshana Rabbah it is delivered—who will live and who will die.
However, I think the great pleading is for rain. Our ancestors prayed for rain because they knew that they might get rain at that point in the year, they might also get drought, and they wholeheartedly believed that their moral alignment with the divine influenced the rain or lack thereof.
The traditional ritual of Hoshana Rabbah entails the making of seven circles while beating the willow against the ground and offering pleadings. The making of the circles of course is the same ritual binding that is present in the marriage ceremony. Further, I think it is a fairly obvious connection to make that what we have here is a form of ritual sexual intercourse between the phallic willows and the feminine earth. This is a prayer for fertility. Just as the rains from the heavens fertilize the earth, just as the kabbalists viewed rain as divine semen fertilizing the earth, so we pray for fertility. I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to say that we are reenacting a divine marriage/intercourse between Father Sky and Mother earth.
The lulav and the etrog buttress my interpretation of Sukkot as a long fertility ritual. They represent the four different Israelite ecosystems (following R. David Seidenberg https://jewcology.org/resources/what-is-lulav-and-sukkah/)
Lulav Palm Fronds Desert
Hadas Myrtle Mountains
Aravah Willow Wet Riparian areas
Etrog Citron Lowlands, Agricultural areas
The etrog is an oval fruit that looks like a larger yellow egg in the citrus family. There’s a really obvious female symbolism here simply because of the shape. The lulav contains the three other species. Lulav are the palm fronds which are also very phallically shaped. The myrtle grows in mountain areas where water collects and the willow is a water loving plant. They are all phallic shaped. And though the Lulav most of us have has the palm fronds being the longest, I can testify from experience that is possible to harvest really long willows from a Mediterranean climate. The lulav and the etrog combined represent the merger of male and female, it seems to me.
We are commanded to waive the lulav and etrog in the four cardinal directions, as well as backwards and forwards. To me, this is a way of making sure we are including all of the land, and not just a part. We have a fertility ritual for all of the land of Israel.
How do we adjust this for those of us who live in ecosystems where it rains in all four seasons? I think it is fairly easy to pray for balance. We are praying, despite all of our actions to the contrary, that our ecosystem be in the kind of beneficial balance it was in before industrialized humanity acted upon it with callous disregard. So enough cold in climates where deep freezes are an essential part of the ecosystem (we have millions of trees are dying in areas where winters have become too warm with global warming), enough snow but not any devastating blizzards, no droughts, no pouring rains that create killing floods. Our actions say that we don’t deserve the beneficence of a balanced ecosystem. Sukkot is a prayer that even though we don’t deserve it, we will receive the blessings of fertility and balance.
I want to talk about the sukkah itself for a moment. This is a kind of booth and if you are like me you were taught an historical explanation rather than an agricultural one for the origin of these booths. I was taught that these booths were what we slept in during our journey in the wilderness from Egypt to the Promised Land. Only they weren’t—these booths, scholars agree, are actually patterned after the booths that workers stayed in during the grape harvest that immediately proceeded Sukkot. I raise this because it is important in reclaiming an indigenous Judaism to embrace the agricultural aspects of the holiday and not have them erased or minimized in favor of the historical/theological explanations.
I think the booths suggest that people probably moved around helping their neighbors get the harvest in—otherwise why need booths just for your own harvest which surely was close enough to your house to sleep in your usual place? In our agriculture today, the booths would be for migrant labor, but I’d like to think it was more like the tobacco harvests of Wendell Berry’s childhood where a group of men would spend a few days or a week or so in each place, starting with the farm where the tobacco matured first for whatever natural ecological reason. (the community around harvesting tobacco is a common theme in Berry’s writings).
QUESTIONS
Where are you out of balance in your life with the divine, your fellow humans, the more than human world?
What actions in the coming year can you take to become more in balance?
What do you need to impregnate? What do you need to carry, like a woman carries a fetus, waiting to be born?
How is the balance of your female and male energies? Where do you need to be more receptive, less receptive? Where do you need to thrust more, and where thrust less?
