Sukkot
Coming five days after Yom Kippur most solemn day of the Jewish Year, Sukkot is a time of celebration. It is a harvest festival and also commemorates the 40 years that the Children of Israel wandered in the desert between their liberation from slavery in Egypt and their arrival in the land of Israel. The idea was that the generation who had been slaves would die out, and a new generation, without the slave mentality, would be fit to live as free people.
During those decades in the wilderness they lived, as all nomads do, in temporary shelters or booths (the old biblical word is 'tabernacles') – in Hebrew, sukkot. Today Jewish people build sukkot in their gardens or on their balconies. These are like sheds with roofs covered in branches but still open to the sky, and with decorated with seasonal fruits. People eat their meals in the sukkot and prayers are said over four species of plant: a citron (similar to a lemon) plus branches of palm, willow and myrtle.
The festival of Sukkot lasts for seven days and ends with another celebration, Simchat Torah, 'Rejoicing in Torah'. This marks the end of the cycle of reading the Five Books of Moses each week in the synagogue and the start of the next cycle. There's lots of drinking, dancing and processions round the synagogue carrying the Torah scrolls.
