Rejuvenation:THE Holiday of THE Land

[Music] hi everybody Eve Harrow and rejuvenation for the Land of Israel Network you are listening to this on supports in the middle of the holidays to cut and I am sitting with Professor Jeffrey Wolfe professor of Tom wood at bar-ilan University who also specializes in the relationship between Judaism Christianity and Islam I figured he would be a great guy to talk a little bit about obviously the Jewish perspective of Sukkot but also why of one of the one holiday in the Jewish calendar this is the one that we also find people of other religions celebrating so thank you so much for joining me my pleasure absolutely okay so first a little bit about Sukkot itself okay so Sukkot is a holiday which has so many different elements to her to it that I don't really know where to start it's unique in the fact that it's the longest holiday the Jewish calendar it's nine days or eight days anywhere you live as opposed to maximum of seven terms of the others it comes at the end of a very very intensive holiday period it ends the it ends the holidays of the month of Tishrei which start with the new year with the Rosh Hashanah continues during the period of repentance and introspection which culminates in yom kippur which was just week ago Saturday and is also the portal into into the new year interestingly there were no holidays that come up on the calendar is all Hanukah so you have this sort of like blank area which is also eight days which in fact I never get to this but Hanukkah was according to many incorporated to sort of be a substitute Sukkot because when the when due to the Maccabee reconquer Jerusalem in 164 163 and 164 the template was still in the hands of the Helenus and the Greeks and they couldn't celebrate Sukkot so sort of Chanukah was some sort of I make a make up of sorts in any event it has it has many many different levels on the one hand it's considered by the rabbi's in the Talmud to be the Holiday Park salon is called hog hog means holiday but when you say the hug it always means the Sukkot one of and so let's go try to sort of how do you say that nowadays and in American English how do your unlit son pack that and try to see how that where that goes so according to the Bible the festival of Sukkot is on the one hand a agricultural holiday it celebrates the end of the harvest of the summer of the summer of the summer crops and as a result by definition is a celebratory because if the harvest was good and we hope the harvest was good we'll have food for through the winter that's number one it also is it anticipates the the next year because it is a holiday in which we pray for rain hopefully then in the future the future harvest will be good so that's on one level so it's very very land rooted in that regard in addition it is a holiday which the Torah which the Bible transforms not only as a to bring it not only from being from its agricultural roots but also gives a historical spin it is the holiday of booths of Tabernacles keep us Sukkot so chef Kieth Benes how about CEO Tom Merritt I am we're bidden to live in temporary dwellings in Sukkot in commemoration of the fact that we traveled the J's relights traveled in in Sukkot in temporary and collapsible tents or in in little Hut's for the 40 years in the desert why of course if it went on for 40 years why why specifically now so there there are a number of number of a number of explanations number one people have a tendency to live out of doors in the spring and in the summer certainly but the month of Tishrei which falls in September or October is the beginning of the winter people generally live in their permanent residences so there were those who explained the need for Sukkot specifically now as an expression of the fact that we are doing it not because it's convenient not because it's nice not because we're going camping but because it's an assertion of faith the period of of the early fall is one where it might rain yet and yet you go out and you stay in your your little tent Metin specifically now to say I'm making a statement I'm REE experiencing what it was like to live in the desert to live in temporary exposed circumstances as an expression of remembering and re experiencing the experience in the desert and also as a statement of faith the combination of faith in history is very very strong in during the hot festival of sukkot and just going and just going in and doing it in an odd time is is is is essential part of it so I mean there's a tour guide I have to throw something in here that has to do is so caught in addition to the fact that I'm taking people down to the Jordan Valley next week so you're sitting under scoff and you have your lulav in the morning it just happens to be the date harvest okay so it's really very Land of Israel agriculturally based but Huy alman who was the director of my tour guide course actually wrote a paper on this that Josephus when he's talking about the history of the great revolt so one of the battles the big battles that happens is a place called the gamla which is up in the Golan Heights and it's been found and it's destroyed in the year 67 it's a fabulous site because everything was left in situ really till after 1967 and we have we have just like the battle laid out there but he went into Josephus just see if his talks about when the Romans first attack on land Gama was built on the side of a hill when the houses are kind of stacked on each other they fall through the roofs now Josephus does something very strange in his writing and he gives the Hebrew date and the Hebrew date is so caught so he we examined this and he said that Josephus is giving us a clue it was so caught and what the Jews did at the time is they didn't build booths outside their house like we do now they thinned out their roofs and then after su coche you would because the winter's coming you put a new roof on and you any have a nice roof but the Romans didn't know that and he couldn't say you idiots if you'd only looked at the Jewish calendar you would realized that the roofs can hold your weight normally they can but they can't because the Jews of think that the rose is to coat but he left a clue for us and many many many years later were able to realize that he was telling us something the Jews were celebrating so-called even in the middle of the battle with the Romans and the Romans didn't know and they fell through so we're ready talking about Romans and of other people who here in land of Israel so one of the things that's interesting about circuit is that it seems to be a holiday that's also celebrated as one of the festivals by Christians so how does that fit in what's striking about is effect again Sukkot has so many different levels to it so on the one hand it's a it's a holiday which is heavily is very particular istic it's it celebrates the successful giving umber of forgiveness on yom kippur it's a very Jewish sort of sentence you Judeo centric right Judea centric yet nine days of eating or eight days of eating it's a very Judea centric holiday on the other hand the the there's a there's a huge universal kind of kind of element to it and that has that itself has two elements first of all the rabbi's themselves I if the prophets already see Sukkot as a harbinger as a forerunner of Redemption and there's a very very heavy messianic element in the celebration of the holiday maybe because after your keeper you have this idea that everybody's forgiven so therefore will be redeemed it's not a hundred percent clear but the Prophet Zechariah for example says that all of the nations will come up the world will come to the how to the Temple Mount on that on the festival of Sukkot and in fact one of the things that they did in the time of the temple was to sacrifice 70 the type of Bible says is here there if you add up all the sacrifices comes to 70 animals there according to tradition there were 17 nations of the world so that there's a very so that you pray you're praying not just for Jewish people but also for all the nations of the world so you put this together in Messiah forgiveness all the peoples the world coming together plus you add to something which the rabbi's did which is really amazing the story of Armageddon is actually read in the in the in the synagogue as part of the service on the during during the during Sukkot so there is this very heavily redemptive messianic kind of element that was always in Sukkot anyways you put those all together and is obvious that the Christianity would grow some Christians at least would find would find meaning in that that's sort of like it's not just a matter of of Jews it's all of nations all nations will come to the mountain of the Lord and they'll and the worship together and the Messiah will come and so on and so forth what's striking about I did some it was it was doing some reading recently about this is that the in the early days of Christianity Christians definitely definitely definitely kept the festival of Tabernacles Tabernacles or Sukkot and a day sat a critical stage of the development of Christianity when the church not quite primitive church yet but not quite establishment Church said either was trying to make it very clear what the distinctions were between Judaism Christianity there was a huge push against Christians keeping Sukkot and apparently it took a lot more effort on the part of the church to keep Christians away from Sukkot from Tabernacles then from other Jewish observances that they were trying to separate them from some so there are themselves from with the possible exception of Passover for for because of the Passover Easter kind of connection or a slap show you ever saw exactly but but there was it would took a tremendous amount of effort to get Christians to stop keeping Tabernacles once the Protestant Reformation hit and this year by the way we're marking and what this year in another three weeks we'll be marking the 500th anniversary of Luther banging in the nailing his theses into the cathedral wall in Chapter wall in in Wittenberg there and there was a and and and trends developed in process in some areas of Protestantism to return as much as possible to the Bible which was it was really a major major trend of proud of the development across ins ISM and certainly once avenge a local Christianity began to take off in the West in the in the 18th 19th and certainly in 20th centuries the the attraction of tabernacles of Sukkot as a way of reinsulate Jesus understood and what he what he preached and the idea of universalism and the anticipation of the endtime sort of really sort of came back after 2,000 years of of repression and so you find in in those area in those sectors of the Christian world which are really very very much on tuned in terms of trying to restore certain Jewish elements as a way of living the way that Jesus did so they so there you have for example in the of the the Jerusalem parade in Jerusalem March rather in during the major media days of Sukkot when you know thousands of evangelical Christians come marching through the streets interestingly interestingly we there's a you know there's a Jewish prayer that we are waiting for the Messiah so I remember watching the watching the parade one year many years ago and there was that one think they were from Alabama but I'm not sure but there was this woman from Alabama had a sign in Hebrew that says we are we are waiting not for the coming the Messiah we are waiting for the return of the Messiah so you know so that's that's I guess that's what's that's what the that's that that's the major distinction you know whether when the Messiah comes you can ask him is this your first time around your second time around but it's it's it obviously resonates for for Christians on those grounds so after 67 did this take off cuz I wasn't around so is this something the Christians coming to Jerusalem for Tabernacles coming to Israel is this like a post were they coming before there was a Jewish state here and then 1700s when the Crusaders were here at nine hundred years ago where they keep being so caught do we know what was going on that okay so Christians weren't keeping we're not cared for if we're not keeping Sukkot in the in the pre and the pre-modern era however it makes it have to make a distinction Christian Zionism is a very very potent force which begins in the 18th century already and in fact as now minister of a member of Knesset previously ambassador and always dr. Michael Oren writes in his book about the American involvement in the Middle East America was always a the United States was always a profoundly well I was pray Oh American Christianity always had a very very strong proto Zionist kind of even when Jews weren't interested for a very strong proto Zionist kind of trend and this year we're also marking a hundred years of the is that the propagation of the Balfour Declaration but people are not aware of the fact that is that a British aristocratic Society had a very strong or had very strong Zionist elements every single person who was involved in the promulgation of the Balfour Declaration which became the legal the international legal basis for the established of the State of Israel every one of them was a Christian Scientist Martha Lord Balfour and Lord George and the one whose most famous of course the sword is general orde Wingate but there is a very strong Zionist Christians eye nemesis honest element and that got stronger once the State of Israel is established that in people starts the peace will start reading salmon ting scriptures and they see they they see they that what they think to be the to be the is they created krysta scripture scriptural problem of prophecy fulfilled and it gets very exciting so as the as the drama plays itself out then of course that's going to have that's kind of very strong religious responses one of the things that the mainstream media is not aware of the fact is the fact is that there are broad sections huge populations which are very very sensitive to to religious friends just because they're not it doesn't mean that that that that by the way they call it fly over America during fly over America there are people whose biblical biblical antenna are very very acute and and pick up on these things and when you go to the States did you see so many towns that are named after biblical towns cabrones and Bethlehem's and Shiloh's and Jericho's itself as of promiseland right and so you have that there too but you are so Europe but so you know what tell me listeners a little bit about the Talmud um that's your specialty just in a few sentences and why because it's it's post it's a post destruction of the temple that's right it splits when we're in the land here with the rabbi's but we don't we can't sue court has to come become a holiday instead of going to the temple and giving sacrifices what is it you know we don't have a temple now so was there a question about now what to do is to quote you could still bring in the harvest assuming that the food is still growing and you could still thank God for the harvest but there's no central place to do it in so so what happens with when the oral law it becomes really what we do today they're the when the rabbi's uh gear it in that direction you have to make a distinction the rabbinic Judaism which goes back as far as we can tell always has assumed the northwest Judaism still does that the there was always a corpus a sort of a body of tradition which allows for the interpretation of the Bible if you look you can't live a literal according to the Bible is just too many too much information not there and there are many many oral traditions that go back all the way to Moses according to our belief and and the combination of that extra material which passed on orally and and careful interpretation of God's Word creates a corpus an ongoing ever-expanding corpus of interpretations because as more as life gets more complicated you have to go back in and interpret more that creates the oral law all of those and periodically this huge amount of information is organized and sort of and said and sort unsay written down but organized and and made available and summarized and then they keep just keeps growing so the the idea of of world of interpretation is something which is it's always been there that's embodied in the talmud uh in other words around the year 500 in Babylonia and 400 years earlier in the Land of Israel there was a sort of a general summary summarizing of everything else but at that point the Talmud becomes like the Constitution and then all subsequent interpretation and application and expansion and dealing with new issues and so on and so forth it takes the Talmud as its point of departure so yes contemporary traditional Judaism is Talmudic in the sense that the Talmud with its 60 volumes or 63 volumes is the point of departure just like the American Constitution you can't you or a law in the Constitution or the Constitution Constitution it doesn't have a lake it can be overturned it can't have it can't be felled similarly no ruling every everything in Judaism today's ultimately has to find some kind of anchor in the Talmud and it's commentaries now who write so who are the people that are allowed to do the interpretation these are the scholars who mastered a man and by dint of their scholarship and their mastery of the oral law and the written law and their piety and probity and integrity are the people who were in doubt in every generation with the authority to do that to make those interpretations so coming back to Sukkot with the destruction of the temple the destruction of the temple was a a trauma which was which is just it's so hard to explain it's hard to gauge from it from looking at it from - almost 2,000 years it's a distance how do you have a religion which was so temple oriented and and and continue going into I I would mention by the way that it's pretty clear that sizable success parts of the Jewish people because of their despair at the destruction in Temple simply disappeared within 100 200 years something on the order of there were those historians think up to set up to 70% of the Jewish people in the world sort of like gave up because they just couldn't they couldn't deal in any event the a lot became Christians or so a lot became Helenus it depends on where but in any event the the the Quai the COI so the question was what do you do so to a certain degree a lot of Sukkot did not require the temple I mean to make us look to make us have burn Akal you don't need a temple to take the four species the lulav the the palm branch and the Citroen and the and the Myrtle and the willow you don't need a temple for that however there were certain things which were unique to the temple which a very great man who was responsible for the transition from temple based to synagogue based to Judaism a man named rabbi yohanan ben zakai did was to take certain practices which were unique to the temple and say you know we don't need a temple for that we can do that in the synagogue hence in the synagogue freezing in in the in the temple for example they used to parade with the with the four species with the are Bob meaning him all seven days of the holiday and in the rest of the country they would only do the first day robbing y'all commands like I said no reason why not we will do it seven days as well in memory of the temple similarly with regard to walking around what we call the the hosannas ocean not walking around that rocking around the synagogue with the love and a truck that is not a synagogue ritual it's a temple ritual which was co-opted similarly there is the they used to have the water festival in the in the temple the the libation of the water that would go down to if you come to your shalad to Jerusalem you'll see you go down to the bottom of Silwan of the City of David and you go to the pool where the key with a high priest used to go and take and take water from the pool in fact they found if I remember correctly they found a bell from his from the high priest a pomegranate a bell which apparently fell off of the high priests robes and they would and what they would then pour water on the altar for reasons that I mentioned earlier because we're about to get into the rainy season and in Israel right now is is suffering from a terrible water shortage and if I if any of the me elicits listeners would like to put in a prayer for us to have some extra water that would be phenomenal we need your prayers the so what would happen is so what was so that was a certain specifics have a sacrifice but there was also partying and celebrating and praising God that went on in the temple and so instead of having that there we have today something called simcha smajo debate Osho Ava where you celebrate the drawing of the water sort of the symbolically and people celebrate and they sing and they dance and they stand they and they then they study to around so on and so forth so that was basically as much as possible to give keep the temple alive and but with sort of a this in Hebrew expression li li o to believe a largish him to have to lack something but to feel like you still have it and what ends up happening interestingly is that as part of a general trend which you find in actually in in in in ancient Jewish synagogue art if you come visit for example in the in the Galilee especially you find that all of the synagogue wall walls are decorated with temple imagery and actually wanted them at the best example of this unfortunately is something that none of us are gonna see not of none of it either even or nor I nor or any of our listeners there is a dirtier up us there is a there was a synagogue on the eastern edges of the Roman Empire which is in the center of centre of Syria the city was actually destroyed the remains were destroyed by Isis but happily it's hard to say this but happily the panels were actually preserved in the museum of the art museum in damascus where where you walk into the synagogue and you just feel like you're transported to - to the temple the idea there was is something i actually i recently participated in a TV show in israel called and the land was void and full of chaos about the history of land of israel the title is a little bit he was a little hinky but anyways the idea was when you go into a synagogue you actually transported to a sort of virtual virtual temple that exists or eventually will come down and settle on the land on the on the temple mount so the the idea was that the tenant gog is I'm not just a synagogue but it's also a portal to the ideal temple and that way the rabbi's emphasize the fact that ultimately we we keep our temple awareness very very strong and very very keen and so that you again you don't you lack it but you feel like you still have it and I what's really striking I was recently there's a new database it was just opened up like last week or two weeks ago in Jerusalem in which you can saw in which you can see almost every single piece of Jewish art that ever was and as part of the Battelle darkest sense of a Jewish art nati / University and this kind of portraiture we where you decorate the synagogues by with temple imagery continues down to the 20th century certainly in Eastern Europe and in southern Europe Sephardic synagogues and Arab countries generally have less of this because as with in general as with in general there's no portraiture in in in mosques so that Sephardic synagogue sort of have a similar kind of kind of trend to them but this this idea that the temple is still with us even though it's physically not there is very much part of Jewish spirituality and and self-definition anything else want to say that's a good most important part is to celebrate and to and to enjoy and it's an interesting merger one of the interesting thing about Judaism is the fact that we're there are aesthetic elements there elements denial we just had Yom Kippur we fasted and so on and so forth but one of the amazing things about Judaism is the fact that it always gives space both to the physical and to the physical enjoyment and to the spirituality and the two are not the two are not distinct rather than merge and and and you can you can get something you can get a spiritual high from from eating as well as sigh while simultaneously studying or singing and so on we also the roads are going to be full of people going on trips so if you like sitting in your car if you like your car that's the one thing you can do but so go out and enjoy that's the most important part if you're lucky enough to be in Israel really go out and enjoy and look at the nature and look at the land is blooming again and you can really get a feel for what it was like then the joy of the harvest is in the figs are in the pomegranates you know like we said the olives are ripening on the trees now almost going into that that harvest is a sign of divine providence and we pray for rain and that's what's so interesting advantage so we don't have an ayah we don't have Euphrates we've got this Jordan River that's about as wide as a car and that's about it and you really feel they were late yeah and you really feel the relationship with God if he is happy with us it will rain and even though we talk a lot about water security now because we desalinate and we recycle we still need the rain we have not become independent from Hashem we still need and we see it as a sign and that's why that there's such intense prayers on Sukkot for rain uh and if you really have never really seen child children happy till you've seen his little Israeli children running around enjoying the first rain it's it's something which is really striking I've never seen anywhere else in the world and I've gotten to be able to all kinds of places this idea of the first rain and the end of in the smell and to see little kids running around just splashing in the puddles because it's the first rain it's this is it's this thing that we have here which is worth taking the trip to coming here and seeing it just to see these little kids you can you really can find God in anything we have special words for you I almost write the first rain in the last rain we actually awards for that which show us how tuned we were in tune we were to that it's not just weather here every nothing is just anything here it's a sign of fashion being happy or not being happy or what we're doing and how we're doing it for each other as well so if you are in Israel enjoy Sukkot try not to go like you really don't want to get stuck in traffic but but wherever you can go and it's really a family holiday you see people Israel is always something nearby that you can go visit that's interesting so it's not like you have to drive them far away and if you're not enjoy the holiday with family with friends with good food but remember the bigger picture it's not just a holiday like to eat out in a booth outside remember why we're doing it and then it is really a sign as as professor wolf just said of something uniquely Jewish which is that melding of historical memory but very very now and then something that we keep through and will for a long long time so I take everybody have a wonderful holiday or what hugs the max leave Harrow rejuvenation thanks to Tabitha and to them and everyone else at the Land of Israel network you can always write to me Eve at the land of visual comm take care everybody goodbye for now [Music]