When my family lived in Jerusalem 6 years ago we met and befriended a Christian family who lived in our neighborhood. We met at the local playground where we took Noam almost every day. I don’t like to stereotype, but a very tall very very blonde family of English speakers attracted a certain amount of attention – if you can imagine Wesley and Princess Buttercup in Yerushalayim. We became friendly when I helped translate for them on the playground from English to Hebrew. I was curious to learn more about them. They seemed so exotic in our Jerusalem playground and so I invited them to join us for a Shabbat meal. It was absolutely fascinating and delightful.
This family belonged to a Protestant church that collected money all around the world and donated it to poor Jews in Israel. This family had just recently moved to Israel from South Africa in order to run one of the distribution centers for this church. They are devout Christians, but part of their particular stream of Christianity was a commitment to celebrate the Biblical holidays, and only the Biblical holidays.
.ד אֵלֶּה מוֹעֲדֵי ה׳, מִקְרָאֵי קֹדֶשׁ, אֲשֶׁר-תִּקְרְאוּ אֹתָם, בְּמוֹעֲדָם
“These are the festivals of the Lord, holy occasions.”
The Biblical holidays that were mentioned in Parashat Emor are the “festivals of the Lord” and that list is all
inclusive. This family does not celebrate Christmas or Easter – those aren’t Biblical holidays they were invented by the Church fathers generations after the rise of Christianity. Instead they celebrate Sukkot and Pesach and Shavuot. We learned, by the way, about how creatively they teach their children about Shavuot..a story for a different day…
This church celebrates Purim because it’s mentioned in Tanakh and they also celebrate Hanukkah because they understand the prophecies of the Book of Daniel to be descriptions of events in the time of the Maccabbees. They were fascinating people, learning about them at our Shabbat dinner was absolutely captivating. As far as I know, they are still living in Israel – they probably speak Hebrew better than I do by now.
In retrospect, I’m not sure that the list of holidays mentioned in our parsha, in Leviticus 23, has to be understood as all-inclusive and limiting.
Indeed, the Torah does say, “These are the festivals of the Lord, the holy occasions.” But then the Torah says, “as you declare them in their season.” What does it mean, “as you declare them?” Rabbi Mier Levush ben Yehiel Michel, the 19th century Torah commentator known as the “Malbim” explained that there are two ways, in Tanakh that the word “call” – kuf, resh, aleph is used. There are things that have independent existence and then come to acquire a different name. The prefix “lamed” is used to indicate this sort of calling. When God names elements of creation, a lamed is used, “vayikra l’or yom” – God called the light, “day.” God gave a name to the light. In contrast, our verse says “asher tirku otam” the holy occasion “as they are proclaimed” with the word “et” instead of a lamed meaning that our declaration of the date determines when the holidays, and their unique sanctities, with occur. The rabbis of old went so far as to say, noting this formulation in the Torah, that even an erroneous declaration of a day as a holiday is efficacious. The holiday is when we say it is.
Classically, this dynamic played itself out in the way that kiddush HaHodesh, identifying the new moon in the sky, and then sanctifying the new month – the very first mitzvah of the Torah – was a task undertaken by the beit din in Jerusalem, making all of the holidays subservient to the court’s decision to declare a new month. This is even more true for the holiday of Shavuot. The Torah never mentions a date for Shavuot, and indeed Shavuot could occur on different dates depending on how long the months were – Shavuot is always 50 days after Pesach. It is the daily and weekly count of the Jewish people, our sefirat ha’omer, that sanctify Shavuot and give it its holiday identity.
There are modern examples too of the Jewish people’s ability to determine and sanctify our own calendar. The 20th century Jewish holidays, Yom haShoah – to memorialize the Holocaust, Yom HaZikkaron, to memorialize fallen Israeli soldiers, and, Yom HaAtzma’ut, to commemorate and celebrate the establishment of the modern State of Israel. These holidays reflect a sense on the part of the Jewish people that the unfolding of Jewish history, no less than in Biblical times, should be commemorated with our calendar. Jewish history still has Jewish meaning.
When Noam was two, we sent him to a Chabad school. This was not a Chabad school like many Chabad schools that cater to the broader community. This was a Chabad cheder designed for the children of the Chabad shluchim in our area. We were, in fact, the only family in the school that weren’t Chabad shluchim.
One element of the school’s education that was challenging to us was the way that, periodically and without warning, we were told to send our child to school wearing “bigdei yom tov” formal holiday clothing. Sara and I had no idea what holiday we were supposed to observe. Functionally, we were Jewishly ignorant. Each time we got one of these letters we would frantically Google to find out which holiday was coming. Eventually, we found a website with a list of special Chabad holidays and then we at least understood what each holiday was about! The Chabad cheder did not observe Yom ha’Atzma’ut but we knew exactly what to do to show that it was a special day for us – we sent Noam to school in “bigdei yom tov.”
What does it mean to treat Yom Ha’Atzma’ut as a holiday, a “sacred occasion” like the yamim tovim mentioned in Parashat Emor? How does this community act on Jewish holidays? We come together for festive prayers. We add songs of praise and thanksgiving to our tefilot. We study Torah and think about the themes of the day. We even dress a little fancy.
I want to encourage you to celebrate Yom HaAtzma’ut with the community. We’re having tefilot early on Monday afternoon – Mincha followed by festive holiday prayers begins at 6:10, you can bring your children, we will sing and recite a special Yom Ha’Atzma’ut service. And, again on Tuesday morning, we will recite Hallel as a recognition that the birth of the State of Israel has been a blessing of historical proportions that obligates us to express our thanks to God.
And, we have a chance, as I mentioned last week, to participate with the broader community as well in a public reading of megillat Ha-Atzma’ut, Israel’s declaration of Independence. There are neighborhoods in Israel, particularly non-religious neighborhoods were people do not flock to the synagogue on yom Ha’atzma’ut – were large crowds now gather every year, out of a desire to commemorate the day in a significant and meaningful way, and have taken to reading and studying and explaining the significance of Israel’s Declaration of Independence. Perhaps our Lakeview event will spark a similar trend in the diaspora as well.
In the listing of the holidays that we read this morning in Parashat Emor, Sukkot is singled out for being a joyous festival. The rabbi’s noticed this and called Sukkot “zman Simhateinu the season of our joy” in the siddur. Elsewhere in the Torah, Shavuot is also referred to as a happy holiday. But Pesach is never described in the Torah as a joyous holiday. Why is Sukkot described twice as a joyous holiday and Pesach never described that way?
There are at least two reasons. Each of the Biblical pilgrimage festivals, Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot, commemorates a historical event as well as an agricultural season in the Land of Israel. On the level of agriculture, Sukkot is a happy day because the harvest is over. Pesach is the beginning of the grain harvest, there is still a lot of anxiety for the farmer who still must harvest his crop.
But on the historical level as well, Sukkot is a more joyous festival than Pesach. Pesach commemorates the moment of our exodus from Egypt – when we shook off the chains of slavery. Sukkkot commemorates the booths that our ancestors lived in for forty years of wandering in the wilderness, protected and guided by God.
Joy does not come from a moment of liberation, from a peak experience, joy comes from a process, from a life lived in a relationship with God, marching along a long and difficult journey – but feeling God’s presence and God’s protection and knowing that one is playing a role in God’s plan. That’s z’man simhateinu. In the words of Rabbi Yitz Greenberg:
“The real achievement of freedom does not come in one day; there is no quick cure for slavery. The liberated person is the one who learns to accept the daily challenges of existence as the expression of self-fulfillment and responsibility. Sukkot commemorates the maturation of the Israelites, achieved not in crossing the Red Sea but in walking the long way to freedom.”
That’s also the joy of Yom Ha’Atzma’ut. The State of Israel did not solve any of our people’s problems, but it gave us a way to confront them together. The joy of Yom Ha’Atzma’ut is the joy of Sukkot. The joy that comes from being on a journey but knowing that we aren’t marching alone.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 