![]() U'semachtem lifnei Hashem Elokeichem shivat yamim, and you shall rejoice before Hashem your God, seven days.Īmi: There's that word simchah, right. Avot means thick.Īmi: V'arvei nachal, and river willows. Kapot temarim, palm fronds, va'anaf etz avot, and a branch of an etz avot. It's a pretty tree, a beautiful tree.Īmi: A fruit from a beautiful tree. The word hadar – what do you make of that word? U'lekachtem lachem bayom harishon, and on the first day you will take for yourselves pri etz hadar, a fruit from an etz hadar. It's the holiday that's happening when you're gathering your harvest, and you're celebrating for seven days. So this is the first thing we hear about what's happening on this holiday. Bayom harishon shabbaton uvayom hashemini shabbaton, the first day will be a shabbaton, a kind of festival observance day, and the eighth day will be shabbaton, a festival observance day. It says the following (Leviticus 23:39-40): Ach bachamishah asar yom lachodesh hashevi'i, but on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, b'os'pechem et tevuat ha'aretz tachogu et chag Hashem shiv’at yamim, when you gather the harvest of the land, you will celebrate God's holiday for seven days. This is in Vayikra (Leviticus), where we sort of get introduced to a lot of the holidays for the first time. I want us to start by looking at actually the first place that the holiday of Sukkot appears in the Torah. What is the joy associated with Sukkot? Why might Sukkot be this particular time of joy? I think actually the kind of joy that we encounter there, or the quality of that joy, has the potential to raise some really interesting directions for us here. Part of what I want to do with you here today is explore the nature of that joy. Now, what's interesting is that if we look in the Torah's description of Sukkot, we actually do find an element of joy in it. Sukkot actually has quite a lot of particularity about it as a holiday. So they gave it a generic thing – simchateinu, it's a holiday, it's a joyous time. If I were to just look at them and I'd think, well, maybe the rabbis didn't have a good thing to call Sukkot. The whole holiday of Shavuot, the reason for this holiday, so to speak, is that it is dedicated to celebrating the day of – that the Torah is given.Īnd Sukkot, it's the time of our happiness. ![]() The whole holiday of Passover is about celebrating the liberation from Egypt. The Time of Our HappinessĪmi: With Passover and Shavuot, not only did they make sense, but it's the essential identity of that holiday. And Sukkot is – this is where you're going, right? ![]() It's Shavuot, the holiday of Torah giving. What's Shavuot called in the festival prayers, do you remember? Zman – ![]() It totally makes sense for Pesach to be zman cheruteinu. So for example, Pesach is called zman – do you remember, zman what?Īmi: Cheruteinu, time of our freedom and liberation. Because in the liturgy of the three festivals, for Pesach (Passover), Shavuot, and Sukkot, there is a special kind of description of what that day is. C hag sameach (a joyful holiday)!Īmi: So Imu, before we dive into any text, I'm going to kind of just ask you some holiday trivia.Īmi: Here we'll refer to the liturgy of the festivals. So, without further ado, here is me and Imu. Does the four species, this very strange and mysterious mitzvah, have something to do with joy? And if it does, might it actually be a key to understanding the joy of the holiday of Sukkot itself? And it’s actually not so obvious why that is.īut I started to explore this. Because Sukkot itself, this holiday, is known as zman simchateinu, as a potent time of joy. And strangely enough, the Torah seems to indicate that the mitzvah of the four species actually has something to do with simchah – with joy, with happiness. So I started to look a little more deeply into it and go back to the source itself. But then the Torah is saying: Beyond the sukkah itself, you need to make sure to take these four very specific kinds of plant species – lulav, etrog, hadassim, and aravot – and you just kind of hold them together in your hands. I mean, we build a sukkah for the holiday. What you’re about to hear is a conversation between me and Imu Shalev, exploring the mitzvah of the arba minim – the four species that the Torah commands us to take during the holiday of Sukkot.Īnd to me, this mitzvah has always been of the stranger things that we do throughout the year. This is Ami Silver, one of the scholars at Aleph Beta.
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