The Essential Book of Jewish Festival Cooking by Phyllis Glazer

Author:Phyllis Glazer [Glazer, Phyllis; Glazer, Miriyam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-062-04121-0
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2004-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

… hold the festival for your God for seven days … for God will bless your crops and all your undertakings, and you shall have Nothing but joy.

—Deut. 16: 15

Send rain … to nurture flowers and plants, … renew the earth and bless its produce. Hosanna!

—From the Hoshana Rabbah liturgy

Sukkot

The Season of Our Rejoicing

The very evening after Yom Kippur ends, the blunt sounds of the tap-tap-tap of the hammer begin to fill the air in Jewish neighborhoods all over the world. For the coming of Sukkot, when Jews from all over ancient Israel made a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem, is heralded with the building of every conceivable version of that famous biblical hut known as the sukkah, bursting into bloom in the days before the holiday like a strange new plant.

The lovely sukkot of our own day, with their trellised roofs covered with palm fronds, are still constructed and decorated much the way they were over a thousand years ago: “With handmade carpets and tapestries, nuts, almonds, peaches, pomegranates, branches of grape vines, oil, wreaths of ears of corn,” as the Talmud says. Yet they had very humble and functional origins. In ancient times, farmers lived in the little huts out in the fields while they harvested their crops, and Sukkot, what is traditionally referred to as “the Festival of the Ingathering,” was held once the crops were in, the grapes and figs dried under the summer sun, and the last of the first fruits brought to the Temple.

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