As the senior members of our Jewish Texas law firms like to greet each other on the holiday. “Chhhhhowdy pardner.” We don’t want to unduly alarm anyone, but while many of you weren’t looking we just finished celebrating the first day of the Jewish festival of
Sukkot.
Some of the uninitiated – and certainly many of the uncircumcised – may be asking yourselves, what’s a sukkot? If not, please feel free to do so, because nobody else is going to. This, of course, assumes you are on good speaking terms with yourself, without necessarily crossing the line into schizophrenia. Even those of us here on the fringes of the Hebraic persuasion may be wondering what’s the difference between a Jewish festival and a Jewish holiday? [ibid.]
So now might be as good a time as any to trot out my [spoiler alert] ponderous dissertation explaining the how and why of not only what we celebrated today, but two other related “S” holidays that will soon be upon us next week, I guess making this a “holiday season,” although you hardly ever hear it referred to it in those terms. Bearing in mind, of course, the remote possibility that, some of the interpretation may be slightly out of kilter (a word that sounds Yiddish enough, I feel no compunction at throwing it in here this gratuitously). So let’s begin.
Sukkot is the Jewish festival commemorating our ancestors' wandering around with Moses 40 years in the wilderness (or as the less theatrical among us refer to it, the desert), after fleeing the Pharaoh in Egypt – which is a completely different holiday I don’t even want to get into. As for the 40 years, you’ll have to remember, that was at least several decades before GPS; and FEMA was also said to have been heavily involved in the relocation effort.
Sukkot also serves the incongruent dual purpose of celebrating the harvest, which one has reason to believe probably only happens every 40 or so years in the desert -- or perhaps never.
During Sukkot, Jews are supposed to "dwell" for 7 days in crude temporary shelters called
sukkahs -- because, why create a whole completely new word? These "dwellings" are meant to represent the ones our people had to schlep around and live in, without even indoor plumbing for all 40 years. As we see later, 40 is apparently not a terribly lucky number for our people, not even on a scratch off lottery ticket.
Sukkot runs, or to be more precise, sits, outside in these huts, through next Wednesday evening, October 15th, during which time we are expected to at least take a couple of meals out there with a hibachi, if you consider the full-court “dwelling” custom to be pushing the envelope.
As for the distinction between a Jewish holiday and a festival, let me respond to the question in the traditional manner, with two other questions, “Me, you’re asking?” and “How should I know?”
But to the best of my understanding a festival is frequently a holiday that takes place over a number of days. This was especially necessary for the three so called pilgrimage festivals, Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot, which traditionally required Jews from all over the Mideast – or at least the tri-county Mesopotamian area -- to travel in one fell swoop (actually three separate fells swoops) to the Temple in Jerusalem to reaffirm their commitment to our covenant with the Almighty. (What, you thought it was the Arabs who jumped into this lucrative religio-tourism industry first with their hajj?)
Apparently, the covenant had an expiration clause if not renewed annually there, through the ritual sacrifice of animals, either purchased locally or brought with them – thereby frequently making the return trip possible without having to check your luggage. Presumably in the other two pilgrimages, you could lose the hut and stay at the Hilton, or if really into it, in your own religious vehicle (RV).
This may be an appropriate time to insert my own additional qualification that, while all Jewish festivals are holidays, not all Jewish holidays are all that festive – whether or not they get you an extra day out of school -- which, incidentally, many feel to others as highly discriminatory.
To pick one example, Yom Kippur, the day of “atonement” we just finished, that always precedes Sukkot by 5 days. A “holiday” better described as observed rather than celebrated, where we are asked to fast 24 hours while confessing to, and asking forgiveness for, an entire year of transgressions, some of which even your marital partner may have somehow neglected to point out. Or maybe Sukkot is a festival, because indoors or out, at least you get to eat?
Then just when you think you’re out of the woods—pardon me, the wilderness—here comes Shemini Atzeret, immediately on the heels of Sukkot, Thursday, Oct 16. This is frequently known as the eighth or last day of the festival of Sukkot, quite possibly because, technically, Shemini Atzeret translates eponymously as "The Day after the Last Day of Sukkot." Go figure.
However, the Talmud, which preceded the far more secular Book of Knowledge by at least several years, explains that there are six ways in which Shemini Atzeret is different from Sukkot, which you can learn only by reading the Talmud – because apparently nobody else is talking.
One of the main things we pray for on Shemini Atzeret is rain --but hopefully not before you’ve had a chance to run out onto the patio and get your sukkah down, since although a sukkah is many things, one of them is not being waterproof – which we’ll also get into in greater detail later.
Incidentally, since we would have just finished celebrating the harvest, it’s unclear why on earth we would only then start praying for rain. Possibly to give the Power-that-Be a good running head start for next year –thereby avoiding the unfortunate impulse to bring us a much higher concentration of dampness 40 days and nights straight in a row.
Like Sukkot, the Thursday, October 16th observance of Shemini Atzeret, of course, begins Wednesday the evening before – quite possibly to get a jump on the hordes of non-Jews around the world who would be clamoring to celebrate our holidays, but aren’t entitled to. However, unlike Sukkot, this is a one day deal – but only in
Israel. Every place outside of Israel it lasts two days (Oct. 16 and 17 -- honest) possibly to make up for one or two holidays they celebrate over there that we haven’t even found out about. Or maybe just to increase the odds on rain.
In the world of "not Israel" where Shemini Atzeret lasts two days, the second day of that is also a third holiday: Simchat Torah. As everyone knows, for many years Simchat Torah has been married to the actor Ernest Borgnine, although she went on to her own fame and fortune manufacturing and marketing a personal line of rejuvenating face creams – the formula and application for which, she has always clearly kept secret from her husband.
Simchat Torah is more than just an opportunity to make the
chhhhhhhhhhh sound. It is the holiday in which we celebrate the completion of our reading of the Torah by starting to read it all over again. This is one of the reasons the Book of the Month Club never made any real headway in ancient Judea. But at least it gets us through the fifth book of Moses,
“Deuteronomy”– which doesn’t have the
chhhhhhhhhhh sound, but still feels kinda’
bouncy. In addition, since, as you are already aware, we hate to leave things uncomplicated, in Israel, Simchat Torah is also still part of Shemini Atzeret, because, there, if you’ve been paying attention, it’s the same day. Are you following me?
Let’s recap. Outside of Israel, Shemini Atzeret is stretched into Simchat Torah. Inside Israel they’re conjoined. Fortunately the benefit of hindsight makes all of that perfectly clear. This completes the Guinness record for saying the words "Shemini Atzeret" eleven times in eight paragraphs. Make that twelve.
So all over the world, Oct. 16th will be Shemini Atzeret, except in Israel, where it will also be Simchat Torah– and in Al Queda, where it was once apparently celebrated in the mountains as Simchat Tora Bora.
Just so you shouldn't get too comfortable, sometimes Simchat Torah is also actually thought of as part of Sukkot. But that’s only so you can leave the bridge chairs out and get away with just one gift. It has also been interpreted that while Sukkot is a holiday for all mankind, Simchat Torah -- or Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah – is an extra day (or two) just for the Jews. This distinction is apparently lost on everybody else. As previously suggested, if you can find a non-Jew who is counting the shopping days until Shemini Atzeret, I will eat my skullcap.
While Simchat Torah celebrates the Torah, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, Shemini Atzeret is superfluous – which does, however, add a fourth "s." (Editor’s Note: The confusion over the three holidays is understandable, because their dates are determined by the Jewish calendar, not by our regular January-through-December Gregorian calendar. This simplifies everything by putting all of our Jewish holidays on a different date on the calendar we actually use for everything else.
Should you be interested in a side-splitting discussion of the differences between the Gregorian calendar, the Julian calendar, the Jewlian calendar, the Aztec calendar, and even
Marie Calendar – Julian’s mother, who brought everything full circle by inventing the concept of
pi – you can easily find that using this link to our earlier September post:
Rosh to Judgment: Ben Stein Explains the Bush Rosh Hashanah Faux Pas.
As some also may be aware, Simchat Torah and Sukkot used to be pronounced Sim-CHAS Torah and Sue-KOS, like in Yiddish, but to be clear, even then, had nothing to do with this website. The old “Ashkenazsi” pronunciation was before we switched over to Israeli Hebrew, so we could pretend we were only away on a short vacation for 2,000 years and never entirely gave up any kind of an easement on the West Bank.
Likewise, the aforementioned structure we build can also be pronounced either like SUE-kah or BOOK-ah. But never like "suck-ah" -- as in "For you I’ve got such a deal on this hut."
Now, would you please come a little closer to the monitor, this is sensitive information and I don't want everyone to hear it. There are reportedly something like 157 strict specifications in the
Jewish Building Code (JBC) for these hovels – which probably average maybe 32 square feet for those of you keeping score . That comes to approximately 5 building specifications per foot. And yet, not one ever seems to have required a permit – at least from anyone terrestrial. So get a pencil and write these rules down.
To celebrate the harvest, your sukkah can only be made from things that grow up from the ground – like reeds, bamboo, sticks,
or a post prandial David Hasselhoff. (Kids, feel free to replicate the preceding linked video at home, but like Hasselhoff, at least remember to use a plate between repast and floor so as not to violate the 5-second rule -- or 3-second, depending on whether or not you've ordered off of the advanced placemat menu.)
As a construction material, brick is out, which is how we know that at least one of the three little pigs couldn’t possibly have been Jewish -- although, between you me and the lamppost, a Jewish neighborhood still probably would have been one of the safer places for a pig to invest in real estate.
Strangely, although you’ve probably never seen them growing in the wild, the tubular steel frames supplied with the many prefab sukkah assembly kits you can now buy, apparently also qualify as plant life -- in much the same way ketchup was once redefined as a vegetable for bookkeeping purposes. In the 70’s hemp was considered acceptable for the walls, but it was hard to make that last 7 days. Hey, it was the 70’s, all right?
Today, the sukkahs you build from scratch are still most commonly just plywood, canvas or latticework walls held up by 2’x 4’ frames. Hence the popular mnemonic:
When your rabbi’s loading lumber
at Home Depot (pronounced de-POTE)
in a couple of days, it’ll be Sukkot."
Bearded rabbis maneuvering home construction material are not a common sight during other parts of the year. In fact, while we are supposed to "dwell" in the sukkah for seven days, many frequently spend the first day in the emergency room.
This has led to a minor boom in sukkah contractors, who are often employed simply to pull your sukkah kit out of storage and assemble it for you. It should be pointed out that this is done just as a matter of safety and convenience and not aesthetics. Unlike the increasingly competitive neighborhood outdoor Christmas light installation, there is no need to employ professionals moonlighting from their day jobs as Hollywood set designers and Superbowl halftime lighting technicians.
As holidays go, Sukkot is more like Thanksgiving than Christmas – although, lately, many individuals on the professional sukkah installation circuit seem to be named Jesus. Generally pronounced with an "H" in deference to the ancient Hebrews, because as one put it, "In my country, señor, it is common knowledge that the Hewish people speak Jebrew." (Please don’t write me; write Bill Dana. I'm just repeating from an early Steve Allen Show.)
If it didn’t only have one floor, the roof of a sukkah would be another story altogether. Under the code, the roof also must be made of natural materials emanating at some point from the ground, like palm leaves, reeds, branches, latticework, the combination of same, or perhaps a nice floral arrangement -- woven loosely so as not to block the sunlight or rain from entering. But not so loose, the rules say, that you get more than 10% of the sunlight. Admittedly, this is still contrary to the nature of a roof in most other cultures.
To keep things authentic, you aren’t allowed to waterproof the roof—forgetting that made a lot more sense in the desert than where your personal Diaspora ended up in Vancouver. To protect your patio furniture, you can throw some kind of tarp up there while it’s raining. But it can’t be a sukkah again until you lose the tarp. We are not making this up; you can look it up on the website Jewfaq.org. At least that sounds a little better than faq-jew, and also doesn’t require a hand gesture. (Lightning round bonus question: What's Irish and stays out all night in the rain? Paddy O'Furniture.)
OK, just so we don't leave anything out, your sukkah also cannot have any fewer than 2-1/2 walls. "Why," you ask? Because there are 3 Hebrew letters in the word sukkah – one of the letters has 4 sides, one has 3 sides, and one has 2-1/2 sides. Did we mention this is also the festival of obsessive compulsive disorder?
Once again reviewing now, both the roof and walls must be some kind of plant matter that grows up from the ground. What kind of plant matter doesn’t grow up from the ground has never been specifically identified, although in the back of my mind I seem to recall a couple of Talmudic scholars almost coming to blows over algae. Oh wait, you should pardon the expression -- mistletoe? Right, there’s also root crops, but they’re disqualified to begin with, because you’re also not supposed to use anything edible. Does Aunt Sylvia’s pickled herring l’orange count?
Now before you start throwing around accusations of anti-vegetism, let us stress this falls under the broader restriction that nothing used in the construction of your sukkah should be of any possible benefit to you other than simply being part of the structure – at least during Sukkot. Undoubtedly, without this precaution, many of our tribe would be tempted to yank an ear of corn off the roof, start nibbling and ruin their appetites.
Bottom line: you can’t just toss a comforter over a tree limb and say, "It’s soup." Or maybe you can say it’s soup, but woe unto him for whom it actually is soup. Presumably matzos would also be out as shingles, even when they're stale and taste like plywood.
In the event this concept of psychiatric-disorder-as-festival still hasn’t sunk in yet, one must also not violate dozens of other religious requirements including minimum size, maximum board width, and how close to the ground even canvas walls hung from a frame must reach.
In addition, the sukkah must also be able to withstand the "average wind velocity" for your particular location. We’re pretty sure this injunction preceded Doppler by at least a hundred years; so for a long time, it was pretty much hit or miss. You’ll recall how well a similar, albeit riparian, concept worked with the New Orleans levees – or in Hebrew,
Levis.
The order of assembly is also specified. For example don’t make the mistake of emulating traditional gentile methods of building construction, i.e. putting up the frame and then getting a roof on as fast as possible so you can work in inclement weather.
Nuh-uh. The walls have to be completed first. But if, in a moment of madness one finds he has proceded out of sequence, all is not lost. Once the walls are up, you can lift up the roof, set it down again and everything’s kosher. In ancient Aramaic this is known as a mitzvah Mulligan.
It is unclear why the roof issue makes a difference either way, since even if the roof does go up prematurely, it’s still only legal with holes big enough for a meteor shower to pass through. By now we assume you have stopped asking yourself "why" in regard to either the original rules or their authorized method of circumvention. As always, the trick is to establish inviolable rules, with rigid interpretations. Then spend 2,000-4,000 years pondering ways one might persuade the Almighty to look the other way.
For example, to keep the Sabbath a day of rest and contemplation, one is not permitted to work. To be certain there would be no doubt about what’s work and what’s just annoying or tedious, our forebears came up with exactly 39 categories that constitute occupational activity: plowing, reaping, threshing, baking, shearing, weaving, sewing, slaughtering, curing, writing, erasing, building, either starting or extinguishing a fire, etc. One assumes this must have pretty much covered most of the guilds of the day -- farmer, tailor, builder, butcher, scribe, and what we now would call the energy sector.
Ah-ha, you say --or even if you don’t -- that sure provides a big loophole for all of the occupations we’ve created since then. Again, nuh-uh. Anything that operates on the same principal as any of those 39 SABBATH-DON’TS is considered the same as doing the don’ts. So you can’t turn on a stove or even an electric light, because that’s like lighting a fire.
Driving will get you two citations: one a moving violation for transporting something in public, and a second count for lighting a fire by starting your internal combustion engine. Time to be served concurrently. Incidentally, making an actual loophole, not just a figurative one, probably also falls into one of the 39 specifically forbidden activities – we’ll guess sewing.
To comply with these rules the more orthodox of us resort to exercises like taping down that little button inside of the refrigerator, so the light won’t go on when the door opens. The four Jews who took shop class in high school, figured out how to just unscrew the light bulb instead. The Talmudic rabbis have always debated exactly how many Jews it takes to unscrew a light bulb - quite prescient for the 4th and 6th centuries.
As another creative accommodation, we leave the oven on low from Friday afternoon, the equivalent of crockpot slow cookery – apparently a combination of heat and bacterial decay. When walking to temple it is not uncommon to hear a Jew worry, "Oh G-d, did I remember to leave the stove on?"
To figure out which modern day activities comply at least with the spirit of the law and which don’t, you almost need a lawyer. Fortunately, we have a few.
Here’s a typical technicality that frequently favors you the defendant. Ever hear of a Sabbath elevator? No, that's not a Robert Ludlum thriller. Since the more religious among us are not allowed to push a button that starts any electrical activity from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, some hotels and other tall buildings in Israel rig at least one of their elevators to automatically stop and open the door on every floor. You can look it up. How this doesn’t still qualify as transportation would be an excellent topic for The View, but maybe the inside of a hotel isn’t considered a public place? Otherwise it could be swarming with paparazzi.
The truly orthodox don’t buy this end run, and elect to use the stairway. How pushing button number 16 constitutes work, but walking up 16 flights isn’t work remains one of the eternal mysteries. And furthermore, oy.
The precedent for this extended day of rest concept is that on the seventh day of creation, the Lord rested. However, a closer reading of the Book of Genesis suggests the Lord didn’t just rest on the seventh day – he was finished. Nowhere is it written that on Friday night G-d told everybody, "Look, there's so much more to do. Let's pick up where we left off on Sunday, OK?" The Lord did not observe casual Friday until much later. So this bears looking into. Either way, for consistency, our parents should be advising, "Sheldon, if G-d jumped off a bridge – would you jump off a bridge? This raises the question: it’s no use arguing.
Now to finally exhume the buried lead, this is where the Jewsy-fruit comes in. Somewhere in the sukkah, you’ve got to have an etrog, or in English, a citron, which is essentially either a hydrocephalic lemon or a French motor vehicle. (Etrog, of course, used to be pronounced S-rog).
An equally important prop is the closed date palm frond called a lulav. It’s always been a lulav, so you can forget about the t/s confusion there. To be absolutely honest, many of us have been reluctant to employ the words date and palm in the same sentence since, oh, about the time of our Bar Mitzvahs.
The lulav and etrog have enjoyed fantastic press over the millennia. But another symbolic tree and shrub essential to the holiday haven’t gotten anywhere near the recognition. There’s the
arava – two willow branches generally bound to the left of the lulav, and 3
hadas or myrtle branches bound to the right. (Myrtle being the Yiddish diminutive of the larger
myrt bush.) Nobody cares why the willows are named collectively and the myrtles individually, but by now you know there’s got to be an explanation.
But hold on, that would be too simple. Your arrangement doesn't just sit there like some garnish galoot. There’s a crazy ritual where you shake all the fruit and veggies in 6 directions, like a Navajew.
"How can there be six directions," you ask? Well, you’ve got your traditional north, south, east and west – and then you wave it up and down. I tell ‘ya, nothing gets by us. And then you hang the etrog on the wall all week to keep your sukkah lemony-fresh.
A lot of people theorize that the Pilgrims modeled Thanksgiving after seeing this holiday in the Book of Leviticus. But then there wouldn’t have been any ham – except maybe Noah’s kid. Of course there’s no actual pilgrimage involved on Sukkot, although, in Israel, sometimes they take the children to Sea World to see
Shlomu, the killer whitefish.
Which also reminds us, Jewish kids are supposed to accept that this is another make-good holiday for Christmas – like Chanukah. We say they get as much joy helping build the sukkah as gentile kids have decorating the tree. Our kids are supposed to liken it to building a fort and sleeping out overnight in the yard – as long as you remember to bring your inhaler. Of course, if we had actually
built a fort, instead of these reedy RV’s, we could have defended ourselves in one place and not had to wander around aimlessly for 40 years.
And yet somehow we believe. Let's just call it a test of faith.
Roger Burke was the film commissioner for Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, centrally located between Lubbock and Lufkin with ample free parking. He indulges the alternate persona of A. Buck Short while also being affliated with a Native American film company, where he works as Low Man in the Totem Pole Division under his Pawnee name Pa-ho-ka-ta-witz (loosely translated, "
Meteor that lands in seltzer."). So you can see this isn't the only place he's trying to get away with something. His wife is a teacher and still talks to him like he’s five. Both are deeply sorry his mind goes in these directions, yet relieved that there's almost a full year to atone.
Staircase photo - Québec, Casse-Cou stairs, ca. 1870-1872. © Public Domain
Source: Library and Archives Canada/C-035636