Festivals

The heartbeat of our living earth is the 365-day solar year, in which our journey around the sun and the tilt of the earth’s axis produce a biological pulse of birth, growth, death and rebirth, which we recognize as the seasons.  In even the most carefully controlled, mechanically cooled or heated environments we never stop feeling the planetary rhythm pulsing through our lives.

The Jewish festival year is a melody, our particular Jewish song-line dancing along the rhythmic pulse of the seasons. 

Long, long before the earliest Jewish beginnings, a festival was born in the springtime, a cluster of rituals and meals and songs and stories, an eruption of joy at the newborn lambs suddenly covering the hills and the surge of budding and blossoming bursting into leaf and flower.

Under the full moon, a festival arose, with roast lamb and bread baked from new unfermented dough, and our shepherd ancestors sang: “Rise up, my love, my fair one and come away.  For lo, the winter is passed.  The rains are over and gone and the voice of the turtle dove is heard in our land.”   Stories, questions, slavery and Exodus all come later. Pesach begins as a song of springtime.

Exactly one-half year later, around the autumnal equinox, all growth and flourishing reach their fulfillment and are gathered in with the harvest. A sacred seventh month evolved over long centuries, laden with prehistoric rituals awakening deeply sleeping memories: the inhuman cry of the ram’s horn, the wind and rain rustling in branches of palm, willow and myrtle, and a fragrant golden citron shining like the sun and the moon.

The full moon of our sacred seventh month was called “the turning of the year,” signaling the ingathering of crops and also of the people, who sensed in the turning earth beneath them, the need to return to each other, and to God. 

Pesach in the spring and Sukkot in the fall, exactly six months from each other, establish the poles of the axis of our festival year.

Both of these axial festivals begin under the full moon, and then extend for a week of song and worship, feasting and storytelling.  The songs and storytelling teach the old master narratives of the midnight escape from slavery, the mountain in the wilderness on fire with the voice of God, and the magical shade which sheltered us during our desert childhood.  These narratives, one might say, are our Jewish 'lyrics' to the ancient festival melody, dancing year after year, upon the silent, rhythmic heartbeat of our living earth.