Debbie Schlussel: To My Readers: On the Jewish Holiday of Sukkot (Tabernacles)
To my friends and readers:
Tonight at sundown, the Jewish holiday of Sukkot begins (and ends next weekend - it lasts seven days). Therefore, in observing it for the next two days, I will be out of blog commission, but I have some things I've written ahead of time to be posted in the next two days, including my movie reviews on Friday. Stay tuned for those. I'll be back full-time on Monday.
A bit about the holiday: Sukkot (also called Sukkos, Succos, or Succot) is called Tabernacles in English. It is one of the three Jewish harvest festival holidays, and we commemorate the Jews' temporary existence (and temporary dwellings) in the Sinai desert. To do so, Jews build temporary huts (called "Sukkot" for plural) outside their homes. They decorate the Sukkah (singular of the word) and eat all meals there during the holiday. (My father used to sleep in it, too.) It is very fun for kids because they also visit other Sukkot in the neighborhood and get candy and other treats there, sort of like on Halloween.
I will miss the Sukkah my father built every year and the many decorations he put up. As I wrote before, my favorite was a laminated aerial photo of the Old City of Jerusalem with thick white tape covering up the mosque built atop the Temple Mount.
More on Sukkot here, here, and here.
Posted by Debbie on September 26, 2007 03:57 PM to Debbie Schlussel