Under The Shadow Of The Sukkah | Jewish Diaspora Report

On our last episode, we talked about the holiday of Rosh Hashanah, a very important day in the Jewish calendar.

Last week, we missed an episode because it happened to be Yom Kippur, another very important holiday in the Jewish calendar, the Day of Atonement.

This week, I decided that I would round it off with the final high holiday of Sukkot.

For those of my Jewish listeners, you know that Sukkot is a very important holiday that has a lot of symbolic history behind it.

For any of my non-Jewish listeners, you might not have heard of the term Sukkot before, but Sukkot is a very important holiday on the Jewish calendar, also referred sometimes as the Feast of the Booths.

The booths being these temporary homes, shacks, whatever you want to call it, that many Jewish people will put up in their backyard, or you might even find community ones around your neighborhoods.

On the most basic level, Sukkot is a festival harvest, celebrating the finished harvest for the year.

In the land of Israel right now, you would be harvesting the things you had planted and celebrate the fact that you had a great harvest this year.

Which is always pretty funny when you think about how many people say Judaism and Israel have no connection whatsoever.

However, most of the Jewish holidays are based on geography or weather patterns in Israel.

Even when you live in New York or Toronto, you still celebrate at the time when Israel has finished the harvest.

What never ceases to amaze me is how the Jews were always so before their time.

Or we could say the secular Western world took a lot of things from Judaism.

Like, for example, Thanksgiving in America and Canada and some of the Western nations.

Thanksgiving is literally the non-Jewish version of Sukkot, where people gather around and have a harvest festival, which usually falls around late November.

We're going to get a little bit more into detail about how the Jewish version of Thanksgiving requires you to live in an outdoor temporary home, but we'll get to that in a little bit.