For months now at CBS we’ve been growing our own produce in the Sukkot garden. A lot of people have put a lot of work into it.  A garden is the best metaphor we’ve got so far for the growth a community is capable of.  A pomegranate waits for planting, squashes will be harvested soon, corn and leafy greens will be at our table. Sukkot, the autumn harvest festival is also called Zman Simchateinu, the time of celebration. It’s time, we can all use a simcha.

The High Holy Days come every year and every year Rosh haShanah and Yom Kippur may feel similar to the ones that came before them.  “Repentence, prayer and charity, teshuvah tefilah u’tzedaka help temper the severe decree” of God judging us. You’ve heard it before and probably didn’t believe it then either.  I struggle with it. God forbid, when every year when you walk into the synagogue you may feel unworthy of the life you’ve lived, the contributions you’ve made, or the problems you’ve created and can’t get out of.  There’s a relief from surviving that spiritual work and it’s called Sukkot. It’s time.

Yes, the High Holy Days are a time when Judaism offers its contemplative and ethical tradition. It’s time to pull kids out of school for just two days and make some kind of teshuvah (amends) with the people you love, then look closely into the mirror and examine your own actions.

That’s the heaviness of Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur and you’ve already heard it already.  Aside from the splendid community tzedakot (charity functions) I’ve attended, at CBS we are growing into the habit of observing the Jewish tradition as it observes joy.  We make shabbes joy of course, and it continues along a familiar path with the monthly traditional minyan. 

But once a year, Sukkot says: bring out the fruits, offer them up to one another, the vegetables and the wines you’ve been producing and share them in sacred community. Sukkot is ancient tradition made contemporary. The food we grow and the wine we consume remind us that Jews are attached to the earth by an agricultural tradition.  As we’re attached to this Napa soil, so too are Jews attached to the cycles of planting, harvest, and springtime with a holiday for each.

So yes, you’ll beat your breasts for Al Chet, the Yom Kippur confessional. But then, come for sukkot---or sit in someone else’s sukkah---and find joy in our synagogue-grown produce, the teachings of Sukkot, and the joyousness of a contemporary Judaism that relates to our lives, if we just make the time, sit down and take it in.

For a change and for the future I am offering Sukkot Study and Preparation course: September 18^th and 25^th at 7pm.