Seasons Of The Sun, Seasons of The Moon

...Ready to experience the darkness fully, and to light the lights of Chanukah...

...Purim...

...And so it is also the moment of history that has not yet happened, the moment of fulfillment when all our work is done and the Messiah comes...

...As the seasons follow each other in a profound pattern, as a human life grows and falls in a profound pattern, as a whole society grows and changes in a profound pattern—so do the Jewish holidays...

...Historically it is the moment of the death of Moses: the death that moves at once toward new life, toward the crossing of the Jordan and (in the cycle of reading the Torah) toward the Creation of the World...

...We forget how to do them, we depend on the rabbis to "do" them for us...

...So Chanukah at every level concerns moving from dark despair to sowing seeds of light and hope...

...Indeed, they were intended to teach us how to experience more fully the profound patterns of the world—how to enrich them, learn from them...

...Let us first look at the oval cycle, the one based on the sun...

...Rosh Hashanah...

...And they thus provided ceremonies to renew the human spirit in its moments of faint hope, abandon, sunny pleasure, bitter grief, deep despair...

...But ghettos in time are no more comfortable than the ghettos in space used to be...

...after Pesach: at the onset of summer, the peak of nature's glory...

...And here the two cycles begin to diverge again, as the oval and the circle move apart...

...It is the moment of the rebirth of the moon...

...Lag B'Omer, in the sweet and gentle moment between spring and summer...

...The other, with its historical freight of utter destruction and disaster, has been much harder for large numbers of Jews to observe in any fashion...

...The one whose history more accords with the sense of spring and celebration—Yom Ha'atzma'ut—has become a mass event in America in the form of rallies and parades for Israel Independence Day...

...the birth of the Jewish people, of freedom...

...Chanukah—Dark of the moon (the 25th of Kislev) closest to the dark of the sun (winter solstice...

...Indeed, according to tradition Yom Kippur marks the day God forgave the sin of the Golden Calf and gave the Israelites the second set of Tablets, the second copy of the Ten Commandments...

...3. Sukkot (the Feast of Booths) after harvest in the fall: a festival of ingathering, of reaping the benefits of all our work, of fulfillment, of rejoicing...

...And that's all...

...In a sense, Sukkot is itself the Messianic moment when, as Isaiah prophesies, "the light of the moon will be the light of the sun...

...At that moment, again, the Jews acted—used the oil against all reason—and were redeemed by a miracle...

...The Jewish holidays began with those described in the Torah...

...Together they form an oval with a circle set inside it...

...The first thing to notice in that basic pattern is that there are two cycles: one based on the sun and one on the moon...

...For us it is the moment of deepest, highest striving...

...Indeed, this moment is itself one of fulfillment—the merger of the two great cycles of Jewish time...

...As Sinai was the moment when the whole Jewish people felt closest to God, so Yom Kippur is the moment when each Jewish individual does...

...how Haman decides to wipe out all the Jews—and thereby brings on the destruction of his family and his faction...

...So if we can learn how the cycle of the festivals works as a cycle, we can learn how to live better with the earth and air and water...

...Later in Jewish history, the yearly cycle was enriched with holidays that fit into the cycle of the year—Tu B'Shvat or the "new year of trees" when there is the first glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel of winter...

...The twentieth-century Jewish thinker Franz Rosenzweig Pesach the festival of Creation...

...Most of us do not think of the Jewish holidays this way...

...So it parallels Shavuot in the cycle of the sun...

...When it is time to be angry, we should be furious...

...It is the moment when we pray for the chilly rains of winter—because we know those rains will grow new food to nourish new life...

...There are four festivals, representing the four seasons of the year, four moments of history, four stages of human life and four states of spiritual consciousness: 1. Pesach (Passover) in the spring: the moment of birth and newness...

...Both of them fall in the period of Omer, the time between Pesach and Shavuot...

...The rains would come when they were due, the sun would shine more warmly in its season, the crops would grow—and die, and grow again...

...The sun cools down, the breezes help refresh us, we drink to ease the thirst that has dried us since mid-summer...

...Second, all of them arevricher than we may remember, because they fit together into a coherent whole...

...the Israelites rise up against Pharoah...

...Just as Judaism makes holy the seventh day and the seventh year, so it makes holy the seventh month...

...in part, they merge with each other...

...Finally, in our own day there has been the effort to proclaim two (among some groups three) new holy days commemorating the earthquakes of this past generation: Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Yom Ha-Atzmaut, the anniversary of Israeli independence...

...Jewish tradition encourages us to know that all these emotions are part of human life—and that specific actions can make them clearer...

...The flowers rise up against winter...

...If it is time for happiness, we dance with joy...

...Most of them relate to nature, to history and to our inner Arthur Waskow is the editor of Menorah, a monthly journal of Jewish renewal published in Washington, D.C., and is at work on a book on the Jewish festivals—Seasons of our Joy, to be published in 1982 by Bantam Books...

...Purim in the early feverish spring...

...And the cycle would also help us feel deeply, more intensely, the cycle of feelings that makes us fully human...

...4. Sh'mini Atzeret (the "Eighth Day of Assembly and Completion"): this is the festival I must explain at greatest length, because this is the one that is least known, that is least visible...

...We plant trees and hold a mystical Seder in which we eat four kinds of fruit and drink four kinds of wine, to renew the Tree of Life that sustains all life...

...This is the round of the year, the cycle of life...

...First of all, each one of them is richer in its meanings than we may remember...

...And if we celebrated the cycle, we believed, our deliverance from slavery would come again...

...These holy days were also, with something like spiritual genius, so crafted as to fuse the mood of the "nature cycle" of the sun with the meaning of the historical moments they recalled...

...In the human spirit it represents the harvest of creativity—the creative work fully achieved...

...We commemorate one of the darkest times of Jewish history— when not only was Antiochus, the Hellenistic king, defiling the Temple and insisting on our assimilation, but also many Jews joined the Hellenistic tide...

...Let us then join the circle and begin the dance...

...Rosenzweig calls it "Redemption," but Fulfillment may be a better word...

...If the holidays are only ghettos, we tend to forget them...

...The very interweaving of the themes of history and nature, the human life-cycle and moments of spiritual experience—remind us that in some sense all the realms of life are dancing with each other...

...Yom Kippur...

...These are the festivals the Torah teaches...

...Tisha B'Av, in memory of the burning of the Temple, at the hottest, driest moment of mid-summer...

...Chanukah . . . the candles, the dreidl, the Maccabees fighting for our freedom...

...the noise-makers drowning out the sound of wicked Haman's name, laughter, drunkenness...

...They reinforce each other by teaching the same lessons in two different ways...

...The Torah itself provided that from Pesach to Shavuot there should be a counting, day by day, of the Omer—a sheaf of barley from the spring crop, arriving day by day from different fields in the land of Israel...

...Like Pesach in the sun cycle, it is a feast of "beginning...

...It thus plays in the moon cycle the same role it does in the sun cycle, when it comes at harvest in the fulfillment of the sun's work of growing food...

...Some groups have urged the celebration of "Yom Yerushalayim," commemorating the day in 1967 when Israel and the Jewish people once more gained access to the Western Wall, the Temple Mount, and the rest of the Old City of Jerusalem...

...And then we move to Rosh Hashanah...

...It reminds us of the era of sojourning in the wilderness, gathering in the lessons of the Teaching at Sinai...

...of a single human life, and an entire people's history of renewal...

...of every quiet act of newness, birth, creation—all are echoes of One Circle...

...We ridicule their efforts to be tyrants...

...This is the day of intense relationship with God, the moment when the high priest would enter the Holy of Holies in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem...

...and how to live better with ourselves...

...We read of Abraham's renewal from the well-spring of Beersheba, and we take ourselves to a nearby river on Rosh Hashanah afternoon...

...the era of dwelling safely in fragile huts, dwelling safely with God's presence in the very midst of Israel...

...The tradition also provided introductions and departures—a kind of connective tissue—for several of the major holy seasons...

...In a spiritual process it is when our creativity shows its developed abilities...

...Before Tisha B'Av there arrives the shadow of our mourning, and afterward there are the seven Sabbaths of Consolation and in Elul, a month of study and preparation just before Rosh Hashanah...

...So in this sense it is a second Shavuot, a second giving of the Torah...

...Tisha B'Av—Close to the summer solstice, feeling overwhelmed by the fire of the sun, we remember the burning of the First Temple by the Babylonians and the second by the Roman legions...

...The second dance moves to the rhythm of the moon...

...The circles of the sun, and of the moon...

...our creativity first rises up against dullness and routine...

...But this has been much less widely accepted...

...we even forget some of them exist...

...We read in a bawdy, hilarious way the bawdy, hilarious story of Vashti and Esther, Haman and Mordechai...

...The spiral of history would keep on circling upward if we lived through the spirals of our past...

...The month of spring, according to the Torah, is the "first of months"—and according to this counting, the seventh month is Tishri—in the fall...

...What we sing, what we eat, what we read, what we wear, how we move, what houses we live in— all can be channeled, focused, to clarify the whole range of our feelings...

...For more and more of us, this is either too much—or not enough...

...Tacked on to the end of Sukkot—a signal of the onset of the rainy winter—it is the festival of inwardness, contraction, starting over again...

...Here the two cycles touch and for a moment merge, as Sukkot stands with Sukkot...

...Long ago our people believed that if we celebrated the cycle, the cycle was more likely to continue...

...2. At the phase of the swelling moon, the tenth of Tishri, Yom Kippur ("Day of Atonement...

...The date of Yom Ha'atzma'ut, was a given...

...If we celebrate the cycle, the cycle is more likely to continue...

...Ready to come full circle...

...For of course the cycle of the festivals begins again—with Pesach...

...It is the moment for us to begin our spiritual lives, our sense of decency and holiness...

...At later times—even up to our own generation—new holidays were added, greatly enriching our experience of the year—but the basic pattern was set 3,000 years ago...

...This article © 1980 by the author...

...We focus especially on the moment when, after political and military victory, came a moment of spiritual despair—when it seemed impossible to rededicate the Temple with but one bottle of sacred oil...

...In part, the two cycles are like each other...

...Purim—The holiday of spring fever...

...According to tradition, it is the anniversary of the creation of Adam—the birthday of the human race...

...fasting, crying, trying to reckon up our misdeeds, feeling a great sense of release at day's end...

...2. Shavuot (the Feast of Weeks, Pentecost) seven weeks and a day The two circles move in their diferent speeds towards darkness—and rebirth...

...Chanukah, close to the winter solstice, the darkest moment qf the year...

...Thus Sh'mini Atzeret completes the cycle: it is the seed gone underground seemingly in death—but really only in order to be ready for the spring to give it new life...

...What do we accomplish by acting out the cycle, using the symbols, telling the stories...

...In a human life it represents the fullness of a "full life": the children grown, the task accomplished...

...We learn from these days that when it is time to grieve, we are to grieve deeply...

...the shofar blasting out its eerie sound, crowds of people in the synagogue, old friends reappearing after a summer's absence...

...Here both move, in their different speeds, toward darkness—and rebirth...

...But more and more of us are experiencing a thirst for the water of our spiritual wellsprings, a hunger for the roots of our Jewish ethnic origins...

...We read how the pompous fool, King Ahasuerus, decides that no woman will ever give him orders— and ends up taking orders from Queen Esther...

...It reminds us of the moment at the pinnacle of Sinai when the Jewish people met God face to face in what Jewish tradition calls a great wedding ceremony, to receive the Ten Commandments and the Torah...

...We wear costumes, get drunk, make carnival—almost as if to get out of our systems the riotous emotions of early spring, in order to address the themes of liberation more profoundly in the Pesach Seder...

...Tu B'Shvat—At the "new year of trees," when the sap begins to rise in the trees of the Land of Israel, the seeds of light sown at Chanukah show a glimmer of growth...

...And indeed, the festival itself is small and hardly visible, just as the seed gone underground...

...The holidays have become a kind of "ghetto in time"—a little enclave in our everyday world where we can withdraw into our Jewishness...

...In our own lives, Sh'mini Atzeret represents the time of inwardness, rethinking, summing up, that infuses a healthy death...

...And so we enter the moon-cycle that brings us out on Sh'mini Atzeret—on the verge of winter, ready to move into it more fully...

...Instead, we remember them individually: Passover . . . matzah, wine, the bitter herb, liberation from slavery...

...In the cycle of creativity, it is the comment when the burst of creativity is exhausted and what is needed is rethinking and review—so that a kernel of new understanding can be passed on to the next stage...

...Therefore, the darkest moment of the year—at which we light a growing number of candles to herald the return of light...

...spiritual lives—and sometimes the same symbol can call forth all those levels of response...

...how to live better with each other...

...And one reason more: from the beginning, the Jewish people has celebrated the festivals in order to honor the Unity that underlies all life...

...We fast so as to let ourselves feel the heat and thirst of the refugee, and we let ourselves feel the exhaustion and dryness that can follow any burst of creativity...

...the date of Yom Hashoah was set ten days before it, an arbitrary choice...

...4. And finally, Sh'mini Atzeret comes on the twenty-third of Tishri, when the moon is fast diminishing...

...There is also, as always in Jewish life, another voice, another dance—for Jewish life is always the conversation, the wrestle, between two partners...

...So here also the festival of approaching winter and the disappearing sun merges with the festival of disappearing moon...

...In a human's life it represents the peak of early maturity, the onset of adulthood, the moment of pairing when a human being first fully reaches out to another...

...and then, at this dark point, the Maccabees turned the tide...

...3. Sukkot comes at the full moon, the "fulfillment" of the moon, on the fifteenth of Tishri...

...Rosenzweig calls it the festival of Revelation...

...One way to satiate that thirst and feed that hunger is to open up to what the holidays can be...

...In that month there come four festivals: 1 .At the new moon, Rosh Hashanah ("Head of the Year...

...So goes the year, the circle dance of life in tune with the music of the sun...