A More Intimate Celebration
Shemini Atzeret 5780
by Rabbi Paul L. Saal
Congregation Shuvah Yisrael, West Hartford, CT
When I was a boy growing up in New York our family gatherings were like a scene out of the Barry Levinson movie Avalon. On Thanksgiving and Chanukah our get-togethers would involve not only our immediate family, but also an extended family of grandparents, aunts and uncles, great aunts and uncles, multiple generations of cousins, and friends. Later the guest list would include our machatunom (in-laws) after my sister and I were married and beginning our own young families.
This large ensemble of personalities would all crowd into my family’s 5½-room apartment. Our dinette table would be extended by multiple leaves as well as folding bridge tables and would continue from the dining area into the front entry and into our living room. The beds were covered with coats and discarded layers of sweaters, since the apartment was always intolerably hot due to overcrowding and large cast-iron radiators. The windows were always open in our first-floor apartment to ventilate the crowded rooms. As guests approached the front entrance of our apartment building, there was no need to guess where the party was, because our windows were directly over the entrance and the loud conversation and laughter could be heard at street level.
What stands out in my memories of these parties is the food. Amid the excess of bodies, the excessive noise, and the excessive heat, the excess of food was the most excessively excessive. We spent days shopping, cooking, and baking in preparation for the holidays. The refrigerator in our tiny galley kitchen could never accommodate the food, so the majority was stored during the winter out on the fire escape. When the time came, the heirloom china was taken out from the back of the closets and the enormous quantities of food was laid out for consumption. We would usually begin eating in the early afternoon and would not cease until the early evening, when the leftovers would be meticulously put away. We would then wait until our guests left and we would break down the tables, clean up and vacuum, and store all of the collapsible tables and chairs in the back of closets and under beds.
Then we did something really strange! I don’t know when or why we developed this ritual, but at about 10pm, after everyone was gone, we would take out all the food again, sit down, and begin again with our immediate family to eat, talk, laugh, and enjoy one another’s company. It was as if to say “the family’s gone, let’s have a party with the family.”
These fond recollections help me understand the otherwise inscrutable Shemini Atzeret (celebrated October 20–21 this year), a holiday that on first blush has no apparent reason. Shemini Atzeret is like a divine afterthought, an impromptu party for the “fam.” In Leviticus 23, which is essentially the beginners’ handbook for moedim (the prescribed sacred festivals) in the Torah, Hashem commands through Moses the keeping of Sukkot for seven days (23:33–43). He gives terse instructions for bringing libations, building sukkot, and taking the lulav and etrog. Of course the rabbinic tradition more fully develops the instruction based upon the Torah. What is most curious, however, is that this chapter has nothing whatsoever to say regarding a supplementary eighth-day festival that we call quite unceremoniously Shemini Atzeret (approximately meaning an auxiliary eighth). It’s not until the book of Numbers that we get an indication that there is a one-day party after the party (29:35–30:1).
Let me explain a little further. Numbers 29 gives precise instruction for the sacrifices and libations that the children of Israel are to offer throughout the fall festivals prescribed in Leviticus 23. Instructions for the Sukkot sacrifices start in verse 12. For each of the seven days the offerings of lambs, goats, grain, and wine remain the same as the other fall festivals – only the number of bulls, the sacrifice of the people, changes. And what an odd and excessive offering between the people and their God it becomes! On the first day of Sukkot thirteen bulls are offered. Twelve are offered on the second day, eleven on the third, and so on, until seven bulls are offered on the seventh day. What is so striking about the descending size of the offering is not only how large it is compared with the single bull for the other fall feasts, but the apparent statement being made with the oddly sized, yet descending quantity of bulls. Perhaps the real instruction is in the seven-day total and not the size of the offering on each individual day alone: After seven days the bull body-count is seventy.
Even the most casual student of Torah cannot miss the repetitive heptatic structures (matrixes of sevens) throughout Torah. Seven is the magic number of Torah, the number of sanctifications, of completion; it is the number of a finished and perfect world that imagines the kingdom of God overtaking the incursion of chaos in the previously unfinished world. It is the number of shalom that anticipates all the world living in harmony, the lion lying down with the lamb, and as, Woody Allen once said, “the lamb getting up to tell about it.” Seventy is seven on steroids. It is the number that extends out beyond the family of Israel and invites the family of humanity to the party.
In this sense Sukkot anticipates more than the agricultural harvest, the ingathering of crops, but rather it foresees the harvest of souls, the ingathering of humanity from all the nations of the world coming together to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Zechariah 14, the haftarah portion for the first day of Sukkot, prophesies that after a last cataclysmic battle, God will intervene and punish those from the nations that took up arms against Israel. Then, we are told in a vivid apocalyptic picture, all the nations that remain will participate with Israel in the celebration of Sukkot. Only those from the human family who join Israel’s party will enjoy the favor of Israel’s God. The message is clear: The God of Israel is the God of the world – but one cannot worship the God of Israel apart from the people of Israel. All the people of the world come before God, but do not lose their individual and ethnic identities. They remain individually accountable and ethnically responsible. Most importantly, unless Israel is Israel the entire model collapses.
This brings us back to Numbers 29 and its description of the sacrificial system for Sukkot. This is where Hashem prescribes an eighth-day celebration through the hand of Moses:
On the eighth day you shall hold a solemn gathering; you shall not work at your occupations. You shall present a burnt offering, a gift of pleasing odor to the LORD; one bull, one ram, seven yearling lambs, without blemish; the grain offerings and libations for the bull, the ram, and the lambs, in the quantities prescribed; and one goat for a purification of the offering, its grain offering and libation. (Num 29:35–38)
As obvious as the addition of an eighth day celebration is, so is the downsizing of the offering. The prescribed menu is back to an Israel-only buffet. So of course, this raises the questions why, and why? The Talmud attempts to answer these questions by picturing Hashem as a flesh-and-blood king who hosts an enormous party to which all in the kingdom are invited. As the party comes to an end and the other nations depart, the Holy One says to Israel, “Stay here with me a little while longer for a more intimate celebration” (BT Sukkot 55b).
This past Sunday, on Erev Sukkot, we at Congregation Shuvah Yisrael dedicated our sukkah and ate our first meal in it as a community. As is the tradition we recited Ushpizin, an invitation to our honored guests, the matriarchs and patriarchs as well as the great heroes of the biblical Jewish faith. But as the rabbi I acknowledged that we were all the guests of one another and that we honor God by honoring each other. I especially acknowledged our friends from local churches who joined us as part of our extended family. We highlighted the anticipatory nature of such a celebration, which imagines the world God has promised where the nations of the world will come up and celebrate with Israel the feast of Sukkot.
We have plans to expand our already very large sukkah to super-sized. It is our hope that additional churches will join us and that in years this proleptic event will grow in size, stature and acceptance, and inculcate in many churches God’s economy of mutual blessing, in which the nations draw close to the God of Israel by being in union with the people of Israel. We trust other Messianic synagogues will do likewise. But we understand this can only happen if Israel maintains its integrity as Israel, and sustains its unique, though not exclusive, relationship with God.
As great as the party was on Erev Sukkot, on the eighth day we party alone and welcome the Holy One into the unique tents of Israel. Erev Sukkot was wonderful, large, celebratory, and loud. We hope it will grow year by year. The eighth day will be small, quieter, but no less joyful. At the beginning of the week we invited the whole family; after the family has left we will have a party with the family – a more intimate celebration.