Re-imagining Ancient Phenomena and other Awesome Endeavors

by: Mae Singerman

Wed Sep 08, 2010 at 15:07:25 PM EDT

This year, there was a contest to reimagine a sukkah, using some of the rules that us laymen Jews don't necessarily know about to inspire creativity. I'm psyched to see the meeting of cool design and Jewish law!

"Biblical in origin, the sukkah is an ephemeral, elemental shelter, erected for one week each fall, in which it is customary to share meals, entertain, sleep, and rejoice."

There are hundreds (thousands?) of rules for building a sukkah. Lots of the rules are really strange and mostly irrelevant these days, since these days sukkahs are pretty standard anywhere you go. Looking something like this:

Rules include: a sukkah can be built on top of a camel or a wagon and cannot be made of food. You have to be able to see the stars through the roof and you can't use any living plants for the walls...

During Sukkot, they'll be in Union Square in NYC.

Sukkot and a Sustainable Harvest

by: racrj

Fri Oct 02, 2009 at 13:39:07 PM EDT

Rachel Cohen is a Legislative Assistant at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism. This piece originally appeared in Ten Minutes of Torah.

It is only a few days after Yom Kippur, and already another season is about to end. Not for us as Jews or North Americans, but for the earth. Today begins one of the most joyous weeks of the Jewish year as we celebrate the harvest, and mark the end of the agricultural season, with the festival of Sukkot. And just as Sukkot ends, on Shemini Atzeret, we pray for an abundant rainy season following the dry summer months and enjoy the gifts of the earth - fruit, grains, and water - with which we are blessed once again.

We call ourselves the "People of the Book," yet our calendar and our celebrations remind us that we have always been a people of the land. Greeting cards and gifts aside, the most important holidays in traditional Judaism have always been the three harvest festivals: Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot. These holidays each mark not only an historical event (the Exodus, the giving of the Ten Commandments, and the wandering of the Israelites through the desert) but also a pivotal point in the agricultural calendar (the beginning of spring, the new planting season, and the last harvest before the winter rains). Every year at these critical moments we stop to take stock of where we are - in relation to our earth above all else - give thanks for what we have, and carefully consider our next steps.

Parsha: Brief Reflections on Sukkot

by: Rabbi Mordechai Liebling

Fri Sep 28, 2007 at 17:58:06 PM EDT

This is the Shabbat that falls during the harvest festival of Sukkot. The Torah reading is from the book of Exodus. It is the episode where Moses asks to see the face of God and is allowed to see God from behind. The Israelites are then admonished not to engage in idol worship and to observe Passover and Sukkot the two seven day pilgrimage festivals that required Israelites to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices in the Temple. Passover being the spring ritual to insure a successful planting and Sukkot the harvest ritual to give thanks for a successful harvest. The coupling of admonitions against idol worship with the Torah rituals of reflects the struggle to replace pre-Biblical religion with new rituals for the planting and harvest. The sacrifices would no longer be made to a variety of deities but to the Israelite single deity, however, at least three things were to remain: the cultivation of a sense of gratitude by the people, a deep connection to the earth, and the belief in the efficacy of ritual acts or celebration to bring about collective well being.

I want to briefly examine these three.

Shavuot and Immigration Reform

by: Mik Moore

Thu May 17, 2007 at 21:56:40 PM EDT

According to one oft-cited midrash on the Book of Ruth, Elimelech and his family leave Canaan not because they're starving as a result of the famine, but rather because they're wealthy and wish to hide their own food stores from the desperate masses. This selfishness prompts God to punish the family through the deaths of Elimelech and his sons.

The irony of the story, according to this midrash, is that Elimelech flees Canaan in order to protect his own wealth, only for his wife and daughter-in-law to find themselves back in Canaan destitute and dependent on the generosity of the wealthy.

The point of this midrash is clear: Our own success should make us more, not less, sympathetic to those immigrants who differ from us only in the language they speak and the decade they arrived in America.