Yom Kippur and Sukkoth

Jewish date:  20 Tishri 5772 (Parashath Bere’shith).

Today’s holidays:  Sukkoth (Judaism), Feast Day of Luke the Evangalist (Christianity), Feast Day of St. Richelieu (Church of the SubGenius).

Greetings.

This is not the best of times for me to be posting.  I have been noticeably sick (fever, coughing, questionable temperature sensations, lethargy, lack of appetite) since Saturday night.  For the sake of avoiding passing on the disease to someone else, I have stayed inside my apartment since then.  The only reason I was able to post anything on my other blog on Sunday was that I had written the post already.  I am doing better now, though still not fully recovered yet.  Being sick not been good for my Divine Misconceptions-related activities.  I had hoped to visit the Temple Mount as far back as Sunday—and have fun leading the police officer and Waqf official following me over big piles of rubble in the name of creative interpretation of civil disobedience—and at this point I do not realistically expect to be able to do so until next Sunday.  My condition has also made writing unrealistic.  (There is recent material by creationists I have felt needs criticism, and my writing the criticism is going to have to wait a while longer.)  At the moment, I do feel up to reporting a bit about Yom Kippur and Sukkoth in Israel.

Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement):  Largely the same as Ro’sh hashShanah, except a lot of fasting.  Unlike other fast days, spending all day at home is usually not an option.  Since no one (except minors and those medically unable to fast) has any meals to go to, there is no push to keep the services short, and thus they can stretch to fill the entire day.  We only got about an hour’s break between musaf and minḥah.  It also can be very tiring.

Sukkoth (Tabernacles):  I have heard mention of the practice of starting to build the sukkah (a ritually prescribed booth to dwell in during Sukkoth) at night right after Yom Kippur.  My landlord actually did so.  There is also an older practice of using actual fruit to decorate the sukkah.  (Most people these days use plastic fruit.)  My landlord has bunches of real dates hanging in and outside of his.

Sukkah decorations vary a lot, depending on the tastes of the owners of the sukkah.  Two I have seen so far have had mirrored balls in them, ones that would look quite normal on a Christmas tree.  These made me think rather of some pictures by M. C. Escher, such as this one:

I rather like the idea an Escher-inspired sukkah and based on this may eventually make a go at it myself.  Though reproducing certain aspects of his work may prove challenging.  I do think this image may be somewhat doable if executed correctly:

OK, off the creative goofiness and on to other things.

In the United States, one normally acquires the ’arba‘ minim (four species:  palm, willow, myrtle, and citron, which get ritually waved) through a synagogue, except maybe in New York City.  I expected to get them from someone sitting out front of the synagogue, as people had done before for other religious purposes, such as selling scrolls of Esther and checking tefillin.  I ended up buying mine from a group who had a kid hand out advertisements.  There were other such advertisements posted, and the alternative would have been to walk into Bene Beraq, where I had already seen some people trying to sell ’ethroghim (citrons) for outrageous prices.  (See the Israeli movie Ha’Ushpizin, which features a 1,000 NIS ’ethrogh.  None of the ones I saw were quite that expensive, but there is some truth to the premise.)  The set of ’arba‘ minim I got was actually good quality, but with one flaw:  usually one also receives a holder for the palm, myrtle, and willow woven out of pieces of palm frond to make the assemblage easier to handle—and somehow I did not realize I had not gotten one until too late.  This does not invalidate the ritual waving in any way, but it is not ideal, and I have been practically paranoid about trying not to accidentally strip leaves off the willow and myrtle.  Also, waving the four species in an apartment dominated by bookshelves (such as mine) without hitting anything is rather tricky.

In the old days, new moons were declared by a special committee, and people in the Diaspora often had to wait for days to find out when the new moon had been.  As a result, many critical holidays were celebrated for an extra day due to doubt on when they actually were.  When the fixed calendar was instituted—thanks to the Roman persecutions making it necessary—the extra days continued to be observed except for Yom Kippur.  (The reason I was told was that people liked having an extra day off and refused to give up the extra days.)  For liturgical purposes, observing the extra days can make a mess of things, as the original doubt is not implemented uniformly.  Pesaḥ (Passover) and Sukkoth are divided into two parts, yom ṭov (the festival proper, on the first and last days) and ḥol hammo‘edh (intermediate days of lesser holiness).  In the Diaspora, the second days of Pesaḥ and Sukkoth are treated as if they were yom ṭov in every respect, which means the technically correct prayers for ḥol hammo‘edh are not said at all.  On Sukkoth specifically, things are worse.  In the musaf prayer, the special sacrifices for that day are recounted, and since different sacrifices are to be brought on every single day of Sukkoth, not only are the wrong sacrifices specified for the second day, but an attempt to compensate by doubling up the sacrificial readings is made on the following days.  It gets even weirder on the eighth day, the semi-independent festival of Shemini ‘Aṣereth (Eighth Day of Assembly).  Unlike the last day of Pesaḥ, it does get treated a bit as doubtfully ḥol hammo‘edh, with (some) people eating and sleeping in the sukkah.  However, due to the extra day added on to the holiday, there is an awkward second eighth day, which to make things a bit less confusing gets dubbed Simḥath Torah (“the joy of the Torah”) and which marks the completion of the annual cycle of reading the Torah.  Here in Israel, we have none of this weirdness of extra doubtful days, and the liturgy makes a lot more sense.

I think that will be all for now.  Peace.

’Aharon/Aaron

Yom Kippur, Goldstone, the Temple Mount, and a panacea

Greetings.

Jewish date:  9 Tishri 5769.

Today’s holidays:  ‘Erev Yom Kippur (Judaism), Twenty-Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time (Roman Catholicism), Feast of Cosmus & Damianus (Thelema), Greater Eleusinian Mysteries (Thelema).

Worthy cause of the day:  Give blood.  I cannot say this enough.  Just do not do on a day when you are fasting or the day before, which is just asking for trouble.  Also:  “Sierra Club:  Help Us Reach Our Goal of 100,000 Champions for National Parks by October 4th!”

My apologies to those who have received an earlier version of this post.  Blogger did something really stupid and published prematurely.

Topic 1:  “Israel TV Laughs at Goldstone”.  This is a comic look at the perverse morality of the anti-Semitic Goldstone Report.  Anything I can say pales in comparison with what comedians can get away with.

Topic 2:  Tonight starts Yom Kippur (the Jewish Day of Atonement).  Two articles on practical questions about Yom Kippur:  A) “'Doctor, should I fast?'”, which deals with the medical issue of when someone ill should fast, which is not a trivial question.  B) “Halachic arbiter: No Crocs on Yom Kippur”, which deals with the less-famous issue of what footwear is appropriate for Yom Kippur.  Wearing leather shoes, which are traditionally associated with comfort, is prohibited on Yom Kippur.  Currently, people tend to wear relatively casual shoes on Yom Kippur, such as sneakers, and thus Crocs are a question.  It sounds a bit odd, but in any living religion strange practical questions are bound to be asked.

Image via Wikipedia

Topic 3:  A case of religious discrimination in Israel:  “Intolerance on the Temple Mount”.  The discrimination is against Jews, who are prohibited from praying on the Temple Mount.  The point of this is an attempt at appeasing Muslims, who can do pretty much whatever they want up there.  This appeasement, it is correctly noted, has done nothing to curb Islamic intolerance, destruction of Jewish archaeological remains, and terrorism.  (See “Two policemen injured in riots on the Temple Mount”.)  And this has been going on for decades.  Behavioral psychologists should see this as rewarding bad behavior, an extremely bad idea since it only makes further bad behavior more likely.  This is why I believe, if only for the sake of peace, that Israel should take the politically counterintuitive step of knocking down the Muslim structures on the Temple Mount, banning Muslims from setting foot in the 500 × 500 cubit area which has the status of the Temple Mount in Jewish law, and rebuilding the Temple.  If the Muslims actually can see that they have something to lose by failing to behave properly, that there are negative consequences to intolerance and terrorism, they will actually have a reason to learn to get along with other people.

Topic 4:  “Where Tutu (and Gandhi) went wrong”:  More dissection of poorly though-out anti-Semetic thinking on the part of Desmond Tutu and Mohandas Gandhi.  (Actually, is there such a thing as well thought-out anti-Semitic thinking?)  Notable is the idea that nonviolence is always better than violence.  While nonviolence indeed is probably likely to have better results that violence when one’s enemies have no interest in violence, nonviolence is likely to result in pointless slaughter against murderous enemies.

Topic 5:  “Yom Kippur 2009”:  The latest Dry Bones cartoon.

May all of you who are fasting have an easy and meaningful fast, and may you all be sealed in the book of life for a good year.

Aaron

Black cats and animal rights violence

Greetings.

Jewish date:  28 ’Elul 5769.

Today’s holidays:  Laylat Al-Qadr.

Worthy causes of the day:  “Help us hold the line:  All major advertisers have left Beck:  Help us keep them from returning” and “Send a Message to The New York Helmsley Hotel”.

Before discussing any topics today, I would like to note that the Days of Awe, Ro’sh hashShanah (one of the Jewish new years; we have four) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) will be here very soon.  One of the themes of these holidays is repentance.  In that spirit, I would like to apologize to anyone I have inadvertently offended.  I am human and have my own share of faults, and I make my fair share of stupid mistakes to try to avoid repeating in the coming year.  (YHWH help me, please!)  I also grant forgiveness to all of those who have inadvertently sinned against me, whether or not they apologize; there are enough problems in this world, and I do not want to make them any worse by bearing a grudge which will seem stupid and pointless in the long run.

Topic 1:  “Honey, call the exorcist.”:

Basement Cat, of course, is a joke.  But he is a joke with roots in the idea that black cats are connected to evil, as the familiars of witches or otherwise.  I have no idea where this notion comes from, and if anyone has any idea, please let me know.

Topic 2:  “Scientists targeted by opponents of animal research speak out”:  My problem is with the people who are opposed to animal research.  Firstly, unless these people are strict vegans, they seem to be inconsistent since they find it unacceptable to harm or kill an animal for the sake of helping humans yet acceptable to kill an animal for their own pleasure.  (Humans do not need to eat meat in order to live.)    I will presume that some of these people are strict vegans, but this leads to the second problem:  animals in the wild regularly do horrible, cruel things to each other, such as hunt down and eat each other.  Why are only humans subject to censure for cruelty to animals?  Why are these people not up in arms over predations of lions, tigers, and bears?  Humans are just as much animals as the rest of the animal kingdom.  Why are humans being held to a higher standard?  Thirdly, some animal rights activists commit acts of violence against or murder those who perform research on animals.  However, since, as mentioned, humans qualify as animals, attacking or murdering a human is attacking or murdering an animal—the very sort of behavior these people are supposed to be against.  Fourthly, these attacks and murders are done without any evidence of immediate danger or fair trial.  As such, there is no guarantee the victims are in any way guilty of the offenses they are accused of, and people who may have done nothing to hurt non-human animals may be harmed in the process.

Topic 3:  “Jewish New Year (1994)”.  Just a topical Dry Bones cartoon for Ro’sh hashShanah.

Have a minimally-stressful day.

Aaron