אתר השבת

Yesterday was a sukkot-affair-par- exellent 

at the Moshav of Rabbi Carlebach's followers - 

Meor Modiim not far fro the airport here.

Hundreds of adults and kids jabbered away in EngloHebrew, 

saw old friends or prayed 

or listened to music or had healhy foods or

kids happily did crafts and jumped and played

Until one of the bands sang 

"demand your freedom"

- and a few of us stopped to try to figure where that came in???

Then I heard a Torah thought of Rabbi Buchwakd the founder of NJOP who taught (and I quote"

"(While) as much as Sukkot is a nature-oriented celebration, 

it is much more a G-d-centered festival,

and therein lies the essential revolutionari-ness 

of Sukkot.

... the ancient people saw themselves at the mercy of the environment, 

as victims who had to face the destiny that nature had carved out for them,

there was an inevitability of death, defeat, poverty and oppression. 

They hoped that by celebrating nature, their god would have mercy on them, and give them rain in its proper time and make certain that the harvest was secure.

While this (similar)  idea 

of declaring independence from nature is found in each of the Jewish holidays, 

it is the central focus of the Sukkot festival.

It is by dwelling in Sukkot that the Jews proclaimed that

human beings were indeed masters of their fate, 

that they could break out of the spiral of imprisonment that nature had bestowed on them.

Jews celebrated the freedom, not only of the ancient Exodus, but the freedom of the local farmer as well.

They celebrated their freedom to achieve and accomplish,

to work with nature, to control nature, to innovate, to discover new and more effective ways to irrigate, to plant, to sow and to harvest, and to produce much more through human inventiveness....

because humans were created in the image of G-d, ... 

they could now free themselves from poverty, sickness, illness and death."

YES to FREEDOM

FREEDOM we were given by Hashem

FREEDOM to celebrate in our Sukkot - the vehicle for Peace for the Whole World

as one friend recently put it

"if only the whole world spent a week in their sukkot and visiting us in ours ...