The comprehensive list of festival in Parashat Emor (Leviticus 23) emphasizes the agricultural dimensions of the three pilgrimage festivals – Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot. The Passover sacrifice and Festival of Matzot appear as adjacent but separate events without explicit mention of the exodus. Shavuot is described as the day when the first fruit offering is brought but not named. Dwelling in Sukkot is mentioned but reading slowly reveals something interesting. The verse, “You shall live in booths seven days; all citizens in Israel shall live in sukkot, in order that future generations may know that I made the Israelite people live in sukkot when I brought them out of the land of Egypt” comes after the seemingly final declaration: “Those are the set times of the LORD that you shall celebrate as sacred occasions.”
A reasonable explanation for this (in my mind) is that this section was added that this passage was added after the return to Zion to reinforce the holiday, and attachment to the Land, especially when considering this account in the Book of Nehemiah (chapter 8):
And on the second day [of the seventh month] the heads of fathers’ houses of all the people, the priests, and the Levites gather before Ezra the scribe, to give attention to the words of the Law. And they found written in the Law, how the Eternal had commanded by Moses, that the children of Israel should dwell in booths in the feast of the seventh month … And all the congregation of them that were come back out of the captivity made booths and dwelt in the booths; for since the days of Joshua the son of Nun until that day the children of Israel had not done so. And there was very great gladness.
It would seem that dwelling in sukkah (as I understand it, not the whole holiday) was forgotten after one generation of settlement. The second generation celebrated the harvest but not the desert years. It is difficult to comprehend wandering and settlement at the same time, yet power of Torah is in its ability to help to hold on to opposites and keep moving forward.
Time passed; the people of Israel were exiled. The experiences of wandering and transience took center stage. After the return, Ezra saw fit to emphasis the component of the holiday that commemorates the wandering, to that temporariness would remain in the people’s consciousness.
Also note that this is the only place where dwelling in sukkot is mentioned. Elsewhere in Torah, the Israelites in the desert lived in tents. But the sukkah was not created only for holiday use; rather sukkot were shelters that farmers used as temporary dwellings during the harvest. Therefore, the sukkah integrates the memory of wandering and the reality of settled life. It holds opposite together.
When I first investigated and wrote about this almost a decade ago, on Erev Sukkot 2014, I wrote, “We have returned to the Land. We still remember exile but are beginning to forget. The facts are known but the feeling is blurred.” I felt that we were losing the complexity, that our permanent settlement in our Land was “going to our heads” and we felt ourselves not only sovereign over ourselves but also over others.
On October 7 – the final day of Sukkot 2024 – the experience of vulnerability returned with a painful, bloody blow, a warning that excessive overconfidence (personal or national) can be obstacle even within the rightful borders of our own country.
We are looking ahead towards a period of rebuilding. May we build strong, secure permanent homes on a foundation of suitable humility.
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