Sukkot

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.

The festival preserves memories of a lost Temple splendour. The rabbinic sources describe the water-drawing celebration (Simchat Beit HaShoevah), a nightly festivity of light, music and dancing around a water libation on the altar, of which it was said that one who had not seen it had never seen rejoicing; the custom is revived today in various forms. The seventh day, Hoshana Rabbah, is marked by seven processions around the synagogue with the four species and the beating of willow branches, and is regarded as a final sealing of the year's judgement.

Sukkot is immediately followed by two linked days that are technically separate festivals: Shemini Atzeret, the "eighth day of assembly", on which the prayer for rain begins in the Land of Israel, and Simchat Torah, the rejoicing over the completion and immediate recommencement of the annual Torah-reading cycle (treated in its own entry). In the Diaspora these fall on two days, in Israel on one. The festival closes the great autumn cluster, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, that shapes the Jewish year's beginning, ending the season of judgement in joy and thanksgiving.