Booths in the Harvest

Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles or Booths, is a seven-day autumn festival beginning on the fifteenth of Tishrei, five days after Yom Kippur; the sombre season of judgement gives way at once to what the tradition calls "the time of our rejoicing". The Torah gives it a double meaning. It is a harvest festival, the ingathering at the year's end, one of the three pilgrim feasts on which Israel came up to Jerusalem; and it is a memorial of the wilderness, recalling the temporary shelters in which the Israelites lived during the forty years after the Exodus.

The commanded observances follow from this. Jews build and dwell in a sukkah, a temporary hut whose roof of cut branches (sekhakh) must be loose enough to see the stars through, eating and, where the climate allows, sleeping in it for the week, a deliberate exposure to impermanence in the season of plenty. And they take up the four species, the palm branch (lulav), myrtle and willow bound together and the citron (etrog), waving them in the six directions in a daily rite of thanksgiving.