Sukkot 5769: Death, Sukkahs and Christmas

What is it about Sukkot that gets me nostalgic? What I feel in some way for Sukkot, is a lot like some people feel about Christmas. Hanukkah has its merits as a solstice holiday but Hanukkah still pales in comparison to decorating the house and the Christmas tree and having Christmas parties. Yet, for those that observe the mitzvah, Sukkot succeeds in doing what marketers only tell people about Christmas.
The mitzvah of having a sukkah is mentioned twice in Torah:

40. And you shall take on the first day the boughs of goodly trees, branches of palm trees, and the boughs of thick trees, and willows of the brook; and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days. 41. And you shall keep it a feast to the Lord seven days in the year. It shall be a statute forever in your generations; you shall celebrate it in the seventh month. 42. You shall dwell in booths seven days; all who are Israelites born shall dwell in booths; 43. That your generations may know that I made the people of Israel to dwell in booths, when I brought them out of the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God. [Lev 23]

13. You shall observe the Feast of Booths seven days, after you have gathered in your grain and your wine; 14. And you shall rejoice in your feast, you, and your son, and your daughter, and your manservant, and your maidservant, and the Levite, the stranger, and the orphan, and the widow, who are inside your gates. 15. Seven days shall you keep a solemn feast to the Lord your God in the place which the Lord shall choose; because the Lord your God shall bless you in all your produce, and in all the works of your hands, therefore you shall surely rejoice. [Deut 16]

In both of these passages, it is clear this is a festival for rejoicing. It is also clear we are to live in the booths. Leviticus tells us to make sure to do this every year in every generation. Like Passover, it is reminder of the Exodus from Egypt. While Leviticus tells us it is for Israelites, Deuteronomy makes clear this is isn’t personal holiday, but one that is inclusive of the entire congregation, servants and the underprivileged as well as family. Zechariah includes others as well. In messianic times, everyone on the planet will celebrate in the Sukkah. [Zech 14:16] Yet even Israel did not follow this mitzvah for much of its early history. In Nehemiah we read the fourth passage about Sukkot, the first one after returning from exile:

16. So the people went out, and brought them, and made themselves booths, every one upon the roof of his house, and in their courts, and in the courts of the house of God, and in the open space of the Water Gate, and in the open space of the Gate of Ephraim. 17. And all the congregation of those who had returned from captivity made booths, and dwelt in the booths; for since the days of Joshua, son of Nun, to that day the people of Israel had not done so. And there was a very great rejoicing. [Neh. 8]

The people rejoiced because it was Sukkot, but also they rejoiced in restoring a tradition from the time of Joshua. The beginning of the second temple period saw the revival of the Sukkah, even though Torah mandates observance from generation to generation. This provides us with a startling implication: After Joshua, there was never a sukkah when the Mishkan and the first temple stood in Israel.
In those first sukkahs of the second temple period, the Aaron Hodesh, the Holy Ark was not in the holy of holies as it was in the first temple or the Mishkan. The object where the presence of God was found hovering was no longer part of the temple. The best facilitator of the divine-human relationship was gone. So it is an odd, even ironic proposition to state that the fine craftsmanship of gold and acacia wood that was the Ark is to be replaced with a rickety, leaky shack that is a sukkah. From the destruction of the temple, the Aaron Hodesh was taken away and replaced with the sukkah.
Abraham Joshua Heschel in his book The Sabbath describes architecture of time in Judaism instead of space. Sukkot for example is a commemoration of a time when we lived in booths in the wilderness. The Sabbath is a commemoration of the completion of creation, one completely dependent on a time period of seven days and independent of space. Other religions in contrast have architecture of space. The place where something happened is more important than the time it happened. Encompassing Space and Time is relationship. There is foremost our relationship to God. Shabbat is a commemoration of our relationship to Creation and its creator. To rest on Shabbat we take the time to pause and look at creation. But often we observe Shabbat in a synagogue or in our houses, blocked off from much of the original creation by walls, doors, heating and air conditioning. Yet on Sukkot we take that step further, we spend time in creation in a hut so rickety we might as well have nothing. Its decorations are often not man-made but grown. It is to have, for seven days a year a certain experience, one Kohelet writes:

4. For to him who is joined to all the living there is hope; for a living dog is better than a dead lion. 5. For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know nothing, nor do they have a reward any more; for the memory of them is forgotten. [Ecclesiastes 9]

To join to all life is to observe and experience all life. In this time of year we might feel the warmth of the sun on a dry day or the stinging cold wind and rain. It is to see the beautiful full moon on some years, and nothing but clouds on others. Every meal in the sukkah, everything changes. As Kohelet describes, the world is in constant flux, always changing and thus it is vanity to do anything. At the end of Sukkot we will begin Genesis again, and its repeated phrase “and it was evening and it was morning” If a year was compared to a day, then we are in the evening of the year. This is the time before the death of sleep we call winter as geese fly overhead, escaping to warmer climates. To be outside and experience this reminds us of Death and joins us to the living.
As much as the Days of Awe are often masses of people grouped together involved in a very personal event of getting written into the book of life, Sukkot flips this around. The sukkah itself is small but an incredibly social place. Only a few can fit there. In my family we never had our own sukkah. Today I have no where to put one of my own. My dad on many occasions built the synagogue ones, and the experience of building in a back parking lot some rickety construction of chicken wire and pipe, often under the gray overcast skies and snow flurries of Rochester NY, still make my hands chill but my heart warm. From some of my earliest memories to the present I have often been the visitor in another’s sukkah. As the mitzvah requires, it is a week of rejoicing, because one is not only in relationship with Nature, but with people. Sukkahs tend to be as unique as their owners the decorations of the sukkah as personal as the ornaments on a Christmas tree. For most who build sukkahs, what they put in their sukkah is just as important to them as those who decorate Christmas trees. Jumping from sukkah to sukkah tell us a lot about people and our relationships with them, both those who own that sukkah and those who are just visiting.
Sukkot is a holiday of relationship. Kohelet tells us of desiring many things, but all are vain and empty. They are like chasing after the wind. All we can do is enjoy the relationships we have in our lives, however momentary. To make them permanent is chasing after wind. But it is important to appreciate them while they are here. I disagree with Kohelet. There is something new under the sun – the memories of our relationships and our interactions with others. However small, they spread out like the ripples of a fallen leaf on a pond. Yes, some memories will disappear with our deaths, but others will remain, spread throughout the consciousness of those we leave behind.
Like a secular Christmas, Sukkot is about visiting and eating with friends and decorating some ritual object. The sukkah itself, however has a deeper spiritual meaning, a conduit for divine connection, through the experiencing of the world as it goes through it yearly death throes heading into winter. It finds divine connection in our relationship to other people we eat with during Sukkot in our booths with roofs so open we can appreciate the moon and stars. We read the book of Kohelet, which explains how temporary and fleeting our existence is, a lot like a sukkah. To celebrate Sukkot, maybe it is Kohelet who best describes how to celebrate.

Go your way, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has already accepted your works. [Ecclesiastes 9:7]

Winter Solstice 5768: Why We Eat Chinese Food for Christmas

After spending most of Friday wishing people “happy solstice holiday of your choice” The idea for this came about twenty minutes before sunset Friday. Since I was taking my weekly trip to Shabbosville, so I had to wait till today to write this.

My thoughts on one of the beloved Jewish American traditions related to this time of year, Chinese food on Christmas Eve, started actually at work. As a restaurant consultant, I once did a site meeting a few days after Christmas at an upscale Chinese restaurant, one of several restaurants in a chain of restaurants with a variety of cuisines. The chef had just been transferred from an Italian restaurant a few months earlier, and so this was his first Christmas Eve.

“So were you open Christmas Eve?” I asked him.

He looked at me. “Yes, we were the only restaurant in the chain open which I thought odd, until I was shocked at how busy we were” he replied.

Smirking, I asked “A lot of takeout business I suspect, and I bet they were all named Cohen, Levy or Schwartz”

He looked at me like I was a magician. “How did you know that?”

So I explained to him the great Jewish American tradition of Chinese and a Movie on Christmas Eve.

While jokes about Chinese food mandated in the Talmud abound, this curious tradition however does have its roots in the Talmud, In the tractate that describes how a Jew is supposed to live in a idolatrous world Avodah Zarah, there is a Mishnah that deals with the issue of Saturnalia and Kalenda, the Hellenistic winter solstice festivals, forbidding business transactions with idolaters on those days. But in explaining these two festivals, the rabbis provide us with a fascinating passage about the origins of these two festivals:

Our Rabbis taught: When primitive Adam saw the day getting gradually shorter, he said, ‘Woe is me, perhaps because I have sinned, the world around me is being darkened and returning to its state of chaos and confusion; this then is the kind of death to which I have been sentenced from Heaven!’ So he began keeping an eight days’ fast. But as he observed the winter equinox and noted the day getting increasingly longer, he said, ‘This is the world's course’, and he set forth to keep an eight days’ festivity. In the following year he appointed both as festivals. Now, he fixed them for the sake of Heaven, but the [heathens] appointed them for the sake of idolatry. [Avodah Zarah 8a]

The rabbis claim the holidays not just for themselves but all humanity, dating back to the time of Adam. And there may be something to this. Primitive man may have seen the days growing shorter and thought the end of the word was coming, and then rejoiced when the daylight began to increase. Besides Kalenda, there was another Roman related festival at this time of year, the birth of Mithras, a sun god prevalent in both the Middle East and the Roman military. Mithras was born (or resurrected depending on your point of view) three days after the solstice, on the 25^th of December. The sun was literally born on the 25^th, which was a time for some serious partying and feasting, and possibly a few human sacrifices. Most scholars point out that the “tax rolls” of the New Testament that Joseph and Mary were traveling to Jerusalem for had to be one of the harvest festivals, of which are spring and fall festivals. For the early Christians, however, all this festive activity around them made it difficult to get converts or keep converts from celebrating the idolatrous holidays. So they made a simple change: It was not the birth of the sun god Mithras, but the birth of the Son of God -- Jesus.

The Church fathers were not the first to pull this stunt. Several hundred years earlier, someone else did too. Judah Maccabee re-dedicated the temple on the same day of its desecration two years earlier: the 25^th of Kislev (I Maccabees 4:52-54). From the texts in I and II Maccabees, it’s likely that the desecration of the Temple which started the revolt may very well have been a Saturnalia or Kalenda festival. The Maccabees celebrated for eight days, claiming that since they were so busy fighting they could not observe Sukkot, and this was a replacement for Sukkot. Coincidentally, Kalenda and Saturnalia were eight days long, and this might have been a ruse to once again get people to celebrate within their religion at a time when the world was very busy partying.

Yet the book of Maccabees is not included in the biblical text, and Hanukkah is an extra-biblical holiday. The Maccabees, later called the Hasmonean dynasty, were extremely violent fundamentalist rulers. What’s worse, they asked for help in their activities from Rome, who would eventually destroy the temple. Neither of these facts enamored them to the Rabbis of the Talmud, who has very little problem banning the books of Maccabees from the Biblical canon. But Judah Maccabee’s assessment that there needed to be a religious cover for the solstice holidays was right on the mark. The rabbis just couldn’t have the military victory be the reason for the holiday. So they told this story:

What is [the reason of] Hanukkah? For our Rabbis taught: On the twenty-fifth of Kislev [commence] the days of Hanukkah, which are eight on which a lamentation for the dead and fasting are forbidden. For when the Greeks entered the Temple, they defiled all the oils therein, and when the Hasmonean dynasty prevailed against and defeated them, they made search and found only one cruse of oil which lay with the seal of the High Priest, but which contained sufficient for one day's lighting only; yet a miracle was wrought therein and they lit [the lamp] therewith for eight days. The following year these [days] were appointed a Festival with [the recital of] Hallel and thanksgiving.[Shabbat 21b]

The military victory was replaced with a miracle, using the rest of the story to maintain the tradition. Like the Church fathers, The Rabbis maintained the tradition by keeping the dates and changing the story slightly. Yet the 25^th of Kislev provided a problem in this observance. Jewish calendars are of course lunar. The date of Hanukkah tends to wander when compared to the solar calendar. Hanukkah might be celebrated before Christmas, and sometimes even after.

Yet halfway around the world, Chinese civilization influenced the calendar of most of the Asian nations around them. Using both a lunar and solar calendar the post-solstice festival occurs not days after the winter solstice but two new moons after the winter solstice. Chinese New Year usually occurs in late January or early February. The December holidays to most traditional Chinese was meaningless.

All this came together with the immigrant populations of the United States. Because their calendars used lunar dates, The Chinese and the Jewish immigrants had nothing to do on a day where everyone else, who was Christian, had closed their shops. The Chinese had found selling food was a profitable business, and Jews like to eat, particularly a food which was relatively easy to maintain the dietary requirements of kashrut. Thus a tradition was started.

In short, one could say the tradition of eating Chinese on Christmas was started by a bunch of American lunatics.