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Five days after the most serious day on the Jewish calendar -- Yom Kippur -- here are the seven days of joy called Sukkot (also referred to as Succos). Sukkot begins on Friday, October 2nd at sunset.
This is a celebrative harvest festival that involves the construction of fragile, decorated huts, called sukkah, or booths. While the huts may be made of a variety of materials, it is required that the sky be visible through the roof of the sukkah.
While it is commonly said that these huts are a reminder of the way that Jews lived when they wandered the desert for 40 years, I did find a Rabbi who contests that, saying the Jews lived in tents in the desert, not huts, and adds "The sukkah is in fact reminiscent of the temporary shelters used during the autumn harvest in which both harvest and harvesters took shelter."
During Sukkot week, all meals are to be eaten in the sukkah, which has been festively decorated by the family. Sukkahs vary from family to family, climate to climate. Some are wooden, others canvas -- they all follow a set of instructions about general size and certain qualities, but they differ widely based on the builders. Kits can be purchased for "pre fab" sukkahs, design plans can be obtained on the web or they can be built from scratch.
Even families living in apartment buildings find ways to build a sukkah.
This is a huge contrast to the holy days and deep inner contemplation that have preceded it. It is a sort of grand exhalation, a stretching of the spirit upwards, a shout of Halleluia.
Nina reminds us that this holiday has lessons in it for people of all faiths:
The sukkah symbolizes the fragility of all life, which can be taken down, removed, at any moment. Much like our bodies, it offers temporary shelter, and if we take the time to look through the cracks in the roof we can see through to essence of who we are and to our connection with Source. Jews decorate these sukkot (plural for sukkah) with things that represent that which sustains all of humanity-all the goodness and abundance of the world around us, such as the harvest items.
Then, inside these structures, they feast and pray by getting up and shaking ritual items in a physical celebration of life. They joyously celebrate another year of their own life as well as the life of the earth itself, the essence of physicality, and all that She gives to sustain us.
The ritual items she mentions are these :
"The Four Elements" (list taken from Wikipedia)
* Lulav – a ripe, green, closed frond from a date palm tree
* Hadass – boughs with leaves from the myrtle tree
* Aravah – branches with leaves from the willow tree
* Etrog – the fruit of a citron tree
Some groups of Jews build the roof of their sukkah with the Four Elements. Most, however, gather the branches of the elements together to ritually wave them as they pray special Sukkot prayers.
Sarah gives a good Biblical summary of the roots of Sukkot:
In Leviticus, God told Moses to command the people: “On the first day you shall take the product of hadar trees, branches of palm trees, boughs of leafy trees, and willows of the brook” (Lev. 23:40), and “You shall live in booths seven days; all citizens in Israel shall live in booths, in order that future generations may know that I made the Israelite people live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt” (Lev. 23:42-43). In the time of Nehemiah, after the Babylonian captivity, the Israelites celebrated Sukkot by making and dwelling in booths, a practice of which Nehemiah reports: “the Israelites had not done so from the days of Joshua” (Neh. 8:13-17).
This festival is a family and neighborhood event, with families helping others build their sukkahs, and everyone admiring and often visiting everyone else's.
The spiritual joy is also in the reminder that fragile dwellings saw the Jews through their exile, because the real substance was their relationship with G-d. Home quite literally was where the heart was, where the faith was.
Debbie describes a bit about the sukkah here :
They decorate the Sukkah (singular of the word) and eat all meals there during the holiday. (My
