Magic Jewball

all signs point to no

 

Oh, waitress, can we have the booth?

Filed under : Judaism
On October 6, 2006
At 1:10 pm
Comments : 26

Tonight begins yet another exciting holiday, Sukkot (soo-COAT), or the Feast of Tabernacles. It lasts 7 days and has another fun holiday tacked on at the end (more on this next week), so it’s kind of like eight. My friends used to be able to keep track of this because my answering machine would have the message, “Hi, you’ve reached Becca. I can’t answer the phone right now because I’m out in my tabernacle.” Yes, we Jews build little structures outside where we eat, drink, and make merry. Some people even sleep in them but I was never much into camping. The sukkah, or booth, is made of wood or canvas or whatever but the roof has to be made of something that grows, like branches or bamboo and you have to be have more shade than sun. Most people make all sorts of fun decorations and hang things from the s’chach (that’s the roof material).

Having a sukkah in the chilly Northeast is somewhat of a challenge. Plus you have raccoons and bees to enliven your meals. When I was growing up we used to hang fruit from the s’chach and the raccoons used to pull up the string, eat the fruit, then leave the core hanging there. Good times, good times. Nowadays, I live the city life so I usually go away for at least part of the holiday so I can eat in a sukkah. This weekend I’ll be in fabulous New Jersey where the forecast is for rain. But hey, at least that will chase away the bees.

So why do we do all that, you may wonder. Because we’re crazy! But aside from that, it’s to commemorate the time when upon our exodus from Egypt (see Exodus, the book or Bob Marley song, for more) we lived in temporary dwellings in the desert, where presumably there were no raccoons and hanging apple cores.

The picture at the top is of my sukkah. Well, no, it’s just a cute cartoon I found on the Internets. But let’s pretend. Here’s a picture of former ROTMs’ Celia & Alex’s sukkah. Lovely!

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is also a great day for the Jewish people because it’s my birthday but, well, I still haven’t been able to find that anywhere in the Torah. I’ll keep looking.

 

This one goes out to, um, me.

Altered Images – Happy Birthday