The Fertility Of Succot

The celebration of Succot has to be the most enjoyable of the three pilgrimage festivals. The Torah commands this by emphasizing the concept of simha (joy), one has to be "altogether joyful" when celebrating this festival (Deut. 16:15). As Succot comes in the autumn, it can certainly be considered as a joyous harvest festival.

It is the time when the harvest is in, when the countryman can relax, sit in his garden booth and admire the crops stored in his granary and fruit basket. He has donated his first-fruits to the priests and the Temple, and the remainder is his, for him and his family to live on until the new crop is gathered in before next autumn.

Thus it is a time of satisfaction and rejoicing, but the canny farmer will know that he has now to prepare for the next season, to see to it that next year's crop will succeed as well as the present one, or if that was not too good, to seek an improvement in the coming year. How is he to do that? His main concern will be for the fertility of the soil and for the right weather. The rains have not yet started but he needs them very soon and then to continue on and off till Pessah, the next pilgrimage festival that comes in the spring.

During that time he has to clear the ground, to plow and to sow, to prune and to plant. But it is not all in his hands.

FERTILITY OF the soil and the right kind of weather are not functions of his hard work; he needs to have the hand of God working for him. It is all very well to fulfill the commandments, but will that ensure fertility and good rains as God has promised? The farmer cannot be sure and so he will seek to do what he can to secure the future, and the symbols of Succot will come to his aid.

He is to sit in his booth, to take his meals there and to sleep there. Why? To remind him that the Children of Israel, when they came up out of Egypt, lived in succot (booths, Lev. 23:43).

But did they? The Torah says quite clearly elsewhere that they lived in tents and not booths made of palm branches. Thus one of the rabbis of the Talmud, R. Eliezer ben Hyrkanus, says (Succa 11B) the booths refer indirectly to the "clouds of glory" that protected the Israelites throughout the Wilderness. At the end of the desert episode these divine clouds disappeared, so how can they now help our farmer on his piece of land in Israel?

The succa, however, has other overtones. On the one hand it can be a small temporary hut that gives shade, as it did to Jonah after the debacle of Nineveh (Jonah 4:5); while on the other hand, it represents the everlasting dynasty of the Royal House of David which, as predicted by the prophet Amos (9:11), will once again rule over Israel. The succa is a structure that is both humble and majestic, both temporary and permanent, and one can safely say that it represents the fragile Jewish home, whether it be modest or not.

THE SECOND ritual that the farmer is urged to perform is to take four plants (Lev. 23:40), the lulav (palm) group consisting of the palm branch, the myrtle and the willow, together with the etrog (citrus) fruit, and wave them to the four points of the compass, as well as upwards and downwards, before the Lord.

Clearly they are a precursor of the fine fruits that the farmer hopes to gather in the coming year, and they are all signs of the future fertility of his land. But how will all this help the poor man in the coming year? In order for the farmer to practice these rites, he must first have confidence in their effectiveness. Today we city-dwellers carry out the rituals in a mechanical manner and give them all sorts of metaphysical interpretations, but to the Israelite farmer they were meant as practical expressions of a religion that would lead to results, and they had to give him results if he was going to repeat them year after year.

To make these rituals believable to the farmer, one can show that they were rooted in earlier symbolism, much of it lost on us today. One basic idea was the power of the tree for fertility, and the notion of the tree permeates the idea of Succot. It is present in three of the plants of the lulav group held in the hand, and in the tree cuttings that are used for the s'chach (roof covering) of the succa itself.

The power of the tree is such that two cherubim (angels) and a flaming sword had to be set by God to stop the way to the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden. Abraham sat under an ancient oak tree when God appeared to him, and He appeared to Moses from an arboreal bush. In ancient Mesopotamia, the power of the Emperor Ashurnasirpal II is shown in his role as Master of the Sacred Tree, for which he is being anointed by a genie with a citron-shaped cone dipped in liquid, as depicted at biblical Kalah (Nimrud), in the ninth century BCE.

The Jewish attitude to the magical tree is ambivalent. The Torah forbids an Asherah tree to be planted next to a local altar (Deut. 16:21; it seems to have been a kind of live totem pole) and it was condemned as a sign of idol worship. On the other hand the Book of Proverbs (3:18) tells us that Wisdom "is a Tree of Life to those that cling to her." The Rabbis take Wisdom to mean the Torah itself, and the quotation graces the front of many synagogue arks. Whichever way we consider such a tree, we see it as having special powers of fruitfulness and endurance, powers appreciated by and necessary to the farmer.

AS FOR the succa itself, as we have seen, it is not really a representation of the dwellings in the Wilderness, which were tents, but rather it is symbolic of the Jewish home, perhaps in a temporary form.

It is the woman who rules the home, as expressed in the talmudic term for wife as debaitha, "she of the house," just like the English word "housewife." When it comes down to the Israelite farmer, the succa represents his wife, and she was of course the important element in the fertility of the family, and indeed of the land as well.

A barren wife, so often depicted as a figure of misery in the Tanach (Hebrew Bible), was considered to be casting a blight on the fertility of the farm and flocks of her husband. That is why she always had to entreat God for a child, to save her and her husband's prosperity. For the good of the next year's harvest, it was essential that the wife reproduce successfully and thus guarantee a good crop in the coming year. Succot was the time for this endeavour and it was expressed in visual and symbolic form.

There can be no clearer visual symbolism than the shaking of the lulav (the palm branch and its associated fruits) in the succa. When you see the lulav group, the rigid lance-like palm branch surrounded by the two bushy branches and the cone-shaped etrog, who can doubt that it represents the male organ, and to see it waved vigorously in six directions within the succa womb, that really is the ultimate fertility symbol of Succot

Soup Kitchens Gear Up For Special Succot Meals

Last year, Ya'acov (not his real name), his wife and his two young daughters spent Succot at the soup kitchen of Hazon Yeshaya in Jerusalem. For the family, living below the poverty line and relying on government benefits to get by, it was their seventh year receiving food donations from one of the country's largest humanitarian aid organizations.

"[My daughters] grew up at Hazon Yeshaya," he explains. "We all went there to eat.

"It is very easy for a person to fall between the cracks," adds Ya'acov, describing how his wife got sick, then he was fired from his job and suddenly the family had to rely on others to feed them. "But if people really want to, they can learn how to get out of a desperate situation. They have to learn to take advantage of what is on offer around them."

Throughout the years that he visited the center for food, Ya'acov said he also volunteered in the kitchen until eventually he gained enough confidence to take a course to become a professional chef. "I could see how much pressure the kitchen staff was under. People were waiting a really long time for their food, so I decided to help them out."

It wasn't easy at first, recalls Ya'acov. "But the kitchen staff encouraged me and told me to give it a try. They said if I helped out it would give me the confidence to continue."

The 39-year-old finally qualified a little less than a year ago, and three months ago he found work in a Jerusalem hotel. This Succot, Ya'acov says, even though his family no longer needs the services of Hazon Yeshaya, he will again volunteer during his free days.

By doing so, he has become one of thousands of volunteers who will offer their services this year during Succot at various soup kitchens and outreach centers around the country for many different non-profit organizations.

According to the National Insurance Institute's recently released poverty report, 26.2% of Israelis, more than 1.6 million people, lived below the poverty line in 2005. And a spokesman for the Ministry of Social Affairs estimated Thursday that three thousand people live on Israel's streets.

"Succot is meant to be a happy time, a time when the Jews in the desert were protected as a nation," says Moshe Lefkowitz, director of Meir Panim, another non-profit organization devoted to feeding and caring for Israel's needy. "While a country cannot provide that kind of warmth, a neighbor can, and the role of the individual during this time is to give love and help the weaker people in society."

Both Meir Panim and Hazon Yeshaya have built succot at their centers to ensure that those in need have at least one festive meal during the holiday. Lefkowitz estimates that more than 6,000 people will be fed during the holiday at one of Meir Panim's 15 succot.

At Hazon Yeshaya, founder and CEO Avraham Israel says that a quarter of a million hot meals are prepared each month for its 38 distribution centers around the country.

"It is important for these people to feel the harmony and joy of the holiday," continues Israel. "If we don't do these things then it will feel like any other day of the year. We are Jewish people and we should celebrate the holidays properly."

Twelve succot have been built by the organization, with the one in Jerusalem set to host more than 500 people like Ya'acov, who is now giving back to the organization that helped him and his family.

"I try to return and help whenever I can," he says. "I know how to repay kindness."

As a recipient of free hot meals at the soup kitchen, he noticed the overwhelming burden facing the kitchen staff. "The media do not know what really goes on there," says Ya'acov. "They say they do but they don't and the politicians live in a different world. None of them know what it's like to stand in a line for hours to receive food."

Israel and Lefkowitz highlight the growing poverty among citizens in the North of the country following this summer's war.

"The situation in the North is adding more poverty to this country," says Israel, adding that 12 more Hazon Yeshaya centers are set to open in the coming months. "Since the war many people have lost their jobs or gone out of business, unemployment in that region is almost double of what it is elsewhere in the country."

His comments are backed up by figures collected by organizations such as Latet, which oversees distribution of food packages to more than 100 aid organizations around the country, indicating increases of at least 27% in the number of people requesting aid compared to last year.

Jerusalem Post10.08.2006