The Agudagram

Sukkot, also known as the Feast of Tabernacles or Feast of Booths, is a Torah-commanded holiday celebrated for seven days, beginning on the 15th day of the month of Tishrei. It is one of the Three Pilgrimage Festivals on which Israelites were commanded to make a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem. Originally a harvest festival celebrating the autumn harvest, Sukkot’s modern observance is characterized by festive meals in a sukkah, a temporary wood-covered hut, celebrating the Exodus from Egypt.

Summer is coming to an end and the High Holidays are soon approaching! Thankfully, the
Jewish tradition has a special way of easing into the
High Holiday spirit: Elul.
What is Elul? Simply put, Elul is the last month of the Jewish calendar year. This year, it begins at sundown on Wednesday, August 16, and culminates in Rosh Hashanah. Traditionally, Elul is meant to be used as a time for introspection and reflection. The point of Elul is to set the tone for the High Holiday period, so it’s all about taking personal stock of the past year and thinking about the year ahead. Leading up to Rosh Hashanah, Jews engage in cheshbon hanefesh (“an accounting of the soul”). The entire month is a ‘preparatory period’ to make repentance more meaningful, genuine and intentional. What sort of customs are practiced?

The 17th of the month of Tammuz is observed as a minor fast day, with eating and drinking forbidden from dawn until sundown. Like Tisha B’Av, which comes just three weeks later, the 17th of Tammuz (often called by its Hebrew name, Shiva Asar b’Tammuz) is said to commemorate not to just one calamitous event in Jewish history, but several tragedies of the Jewish people. The Mishnah in Taanit 4:6 lists five events that occurred on the 17th of Tammuz: Moses broke the tablets of law he had been given on Mount Sinai, the priests in the First Temple stopped offering the Tamid (daily) sacrifice because Jerusalem was besieged and they ran out of sheep, the walls of Jerusalem were breached by the Romans in the Second Temple Period, a Roman general named Apostomos burned a Torah scroll, and an idol was erected in the Temple by the Romans.

In preparation for God’s appearance on Mount Sinai, Moses and the Israelite
people “stood at the foot of the
mountain” Exodus 19:17 waiting to see and to hear what transpires. The unusual preposition — be-tachtit (“at the foot of”) — is understood in the Midrash to mean that the Jewish people were literally standing under the mountain. That is, at the moment God speaks the Ten Commandments, God also
uproots Mount Sinai from the ground and holds it over the people, as if to say, “If you accept the Torah, fine; if not, here shall be your grave.” Avodah Zarah 2b The implication is that the
Jewish people accepted Torah only through coercion.

Seven Holocaust survivors whose lives were affected by the October 7 onslaught on Israel are preparing to attend this year’s March of the Living event in Poland. The march, which the March of the Living nonprofit holds annually at the Auschwitz former death camp on Israel’s national Holocaust memorial day, Yom Hashoah, is set to happen on May 6 this year, with the October 7 delegation leading. Bella Haim, grandmother of the Yotam Haim, who was kidnapped during the attack and later accidentally killed by Israeli troops in Gaza while trying to escape; Danit Gabay, who was with her children at Kibbutz Re’im during the terror onslaught; and Daniel Louz from Kibbutz Be’eri are among the members of the delegation. They are among 55 Holocaust survivors set to attend
the march, along with thousands of Jews, many of them members of youth movements from This year’s event also features a commemorative march in Budapest to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the destruction of Hungarian Jewry, organizers say.

The hold of the holiday of Pesach on the people of Israel is one of the remarkable historical facts of our people. After all, over thirty three hundred years have passed since the Exodus from Egypt. Throughout human history, great events have been forgotten, simply because of the passage of time and the
remoteness of that event from
current society. Even those historical dates that are yet remembered – July 4, Bastille Day, most other national holidays – have been transformed by time and society into less of a commemoration and remembrance than of being merely a day of leisure and no work. All of this certainly points out the uniqueness of Pesach and its continued influence and meaning in Jewish life and amongst all types of Jews.

Passover in July and Rosh Hashanah in January? That’s what could happen were it not for the
ingenious invention of the Jewish leap year. That’s because lunar calendars like this one work
beautifully until the end of the year when the 12 lunar months will inevitably miss the solar
year by an 11-day shortfall. It wouldn’t take long for such a disparity to wreak havoc with the
holidays; hence, the specter of a snow-covered Rosh Hashanah.
And the Torah makes it abundantly clear: Passover must be “in the month of springtime”
(Deuteronomy 16:1) and Sukkot must fall at harvest time when “God will have blessed you in
all your crops and in all your handiwork.” (Deuteronomy 16:15).

These are some of the places I
recited Kaddish with my
fellow mourners: grocery store
aisles, airports, restaurants,
cafes, subway stations, ATM
lobbies, cars, street corners,
doctors’ waiting rooms, the
beach, the woods, my office, my bedroom, my kitchen, my daughter’s gymnastics gym, my son’s flag football game, and the middle of Park Avenue with traffic blaring around me. I stopped to say Kaddish while in the midst of cooking, cleaning, working, driving, answering emails, tending my houseplants, doing errands, running in the park, and biking over the Manhattan Bridge. At various points in the compressed period since both of my parents died—my father in March 2021, my mother in November 2022—alarms dinged on my phone throughout the day to alert me that a minyan was about to begin.