By Irvin H. Jacobs

SAN DIEGO, Calif. —Sukkot is the last of the three annual Israelite Festivals associated with the agricultural year.  It has many names, one of which is simply “The Feast.”  The Canaanite Shechemites celebrated a precursor version at the end of the grape harvest.  The early Israelites at Shiloh celebrated such a feast with girls dancing in the vineyards.

Each of the three Festivals, Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot, is associated in the Torah with dual duty, namely celebration of the Exodus and of a harvest.  According to Encyclopedia Judaica, Sukkot is the festival least connected to the Exodus.  After all, it occurs late in the year and the connection is “forced,” since according to the Torah our escaped and wandering ancestors lived in tents (oheleem), not booths (sukkot).

Furthermore, the Tanakh, rich in wordplay, may well be expressing a double entendre when it informs us that the first stop in the exodus from Egypt was in a place called Sukkot.

Along the way, between the texts of Exodus (Ch. 12) and Deuteronomy (Ch 16), there was an evolution in the prescribed location of the festivals from celebration in multiple unspecified centers to a single exclusive site in Jerusalem, namely the Temple.

The Torah and in fact the entire Tanakh writings are ambiguous, such that it difficult for a reader to clearly decipher the evolution of Sukkot from its origins to how we know it today.   I rely on the scholarly research of Harold Louis Ginzberg, (1903-90) former professor of Bible at the Jewish Theological Seminary and editor of the Bible division of Encyclopedia Judaica, who tediously dissected the texts, and published his work in 1982.

The idea of a central cult site had originated in the Northern Kingdom, not long before its fall in 722 BCE to the Assyrians.  The intention then, per Ginzberg, was to designate the North’s Mount Gerizim as the cult site.  The idea persisted in the surviving southern Kingdom of Judah.  After several delayed and failed attempts, the idea was finally executed by King Josiah a century later, who based his edict from text on a rediscovered dusty book during repair of the Temple by his High Priest.  That book likely derived from  Josiah’s great grandfather King Hezekiah, who had attempted centralization that didn’t last past his reign. 

The Festivals, Josiah declared in 621 BCE, were to be celebrated at the Temple in Jerusalem.  Less than two generations later, Judah itself fell with the Temple destroyed, in 586 BCE by the Babylonians. 

In the book of Exodus, Sukkot was a one-day pilgrimage festival to non-central holy sites on the full moon of the month of Tishrei. It was called “Asif” (The Ingathering).  When Deuteronomy (Ch. 16) was much later completed (post re-discovery of the above text), it had become a seven-day festival in Jerusalem named Hag Ha-Sukkot, or Festival of Booths.

Previously, farmers could afford a short one-day pilgrimage to a local shrine, even during the peak of harvest, but a more distant seven-day affair to Jerusalem was quite another thing.  Their agriculture economy accommodated to the new rules by completing produce collection and immediate processing needs, on the threshing floor or vat, for grains or grapes as the case may have been.  There being no hotels then, visitors to Jerusalem needed to construct huts for the duration of the celebration.

Under Deuteronomic law, there were also practical changes for the Festivals of Pesach and Shavuoth.  However, revisions for these holidays, unlike Sukkot, required also date-delay shifts.  

As indicated above, there has been a scholarly debate over the terms ‘booths’ vs. ‘tents.’  In the exodus and wanderings texts, only tents are mentioned.  However, the Torah in Leviticus 23 designates a festival of booths “to remind future generations that G-d made the Israelites to live in booths coming from Egypt."  Over the centuries, numerous often-tortured rationales developed to reconcile these terms.  Akiba weighed in with the notion that the Israelites built booths for shade, in addition to the tents. Rashbam held that those verses loosely used the term ‘booths’ but meant ‘tents.’ 

 Later commentators, both in midrashim and modern times, point out that symbols prescribed in the Torah normally commemorate miracles and there is nothing miraculous about living in either booths or tents.  They add that in Hebrew sukkah literally means a protective cover.   Since it needs to mean something more miraculous than a mundane booth—voila ! they read the Leviticus terminology to mean that it was G-d’s protective cloud that shielded the escaped slaves in their long sojourn in the wilderness.  Furthermore, by assigning double duty to the word sukkah (cloud cover and booth), sukkah comes to symbolize G-d’s protection both in the historic Exodus event and in nature by way of generous harvests.

One aside is worth noting.  The New Testament Gospel of John, the last written of the canonized Gospels, and the one most polemic and revised from the three earlier ones, identifies the Feast of Booths as the time of Jesus’ appearance in Jerusalem.  This is clearly different from the earliest Gospel, Mark, and the conventional belief that Passover was the occasion of Jesus’ appearance, arrest, trial, and death.  After all, The Last Supper is usually considered to have been a seder.  It appears clear that John’s writers attempted to distance Christianity from the signature Jewish festival of Passover.

I’ve uncovered several more Sukkot traditions of interest.  Here are a few:

1)      The specifications of sukkah-building and occupancy were later spelled out in the Talmud and other writings.  These included the mandate for at least three walls and open sky through the roof.  In colder regions, one need not sleep in the sukkah since there is an exemption when severe discomfort is an issue.  Nevertheless the pious may have heated sukkot!  

2) In the16^th century, the Lurian Kabbalists introduced the notion of symbolically inviting ushpizim, i.e. a guest each day into the sukkah.  Guests were Biblical heroes, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph, and David, corresponding to the seven Sefirot of Kabbalah:  (lovingkindness, power, beauty, victory, splendor, foundation, and sovereignty).

3)      The custom of waving harvest products, the lulav and estrog, developed for Succot.  In some synagogues, on the seventh day of Succot, Hoshana Raba, the congregation, after a prayer for a good harvest in the year to come, takes five willow branches from lulavs, binds them together, and beats them. 

4)      In post-Talmudic times, Hoshana Raba became a supplement of sorts to Yom Kippur, another day of judgment on which G-d’s decrees for the coming year are at last finalized!  Accordingly, the custom developed to spend that night in prayer and study, mainly of Deuteronomy—and later Ecclesiastes.

One of the several names of the Sukkot holiday is Z’man Simhatenu, the Time of Rejoicing.  It is the only festival of which we are specifically commanded (Leviticus 23.40) to “rejoice before the L-rd your G-d…”  It is the epitome of our festival joy, ‘The Feast.’ Taking a cue from our tribal ancestors, on the last day of the Festival, Simhat Torah, we carry the scrolls in procession, and even dance with them, around the synagogue.