The Essence of Jewish Festivals

by Norm Finkelberg

Delivered at Exploring the Essence of Religious Festivals: An Interfaith and Multicultural Eid Celebration presented by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama'at at Kitchener City Hall

April 6, 2025

Good evening and Eid Mubarak. I'm delighted to share with you a little about the essence of Jewish festivals. First of all, we must speak of essences, in the plural, when we talk about Jewish festivals As in other traditions, religious festivals in Judaism serve many purposes, They commemorate historical events, they preserve collective memory, they define theological and philosophical positions and they solidify identity and community. It is said that our scripture, the Torah, has seventy faces and that by holding it up to the light, multiple meanings and truths are revealed. To start with, the Jewish calendar, in which our festivals are embedded, is neither solar nor lunar- it is both! Our months follow the lunar cycle but in seven out of nineteen years there is a whole leap month. In other words, in those seven designated years there are thirteen months. What is the reason for this hybrid calendar? It is so that the festivals always fall in the same season from year to year. Our Torah designated three Pilgrimage Festivals when every able Israelite was expected to make a pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem to participate in festivities and ritual worshíp which included animal sacrifices and agricultural tithes. Each of these festivals coincided with important harvest times in the Land of Israel. The beginning of Spring marks the festival of Passover when barley was harvested and the first plantings of wheat were made. Seven weeks later, in late Spring, the wheat was harvested at the time of the festival of Shavuot. And in late Autumn, the festival of Sukkot is celebrated, which marked the conclusion of the fruit harvest. So our hybrid calendar ensures that these agricultural festivals fall in the right season every year. And, of course, in an agrarian society it would be very important to implore/thank the Lord for the precious rains that would make these harvests successful.

Each of these festivals also celebrates historical events that are central to the Jewish story. Passover marks the time of our redemption, when God freed the Israelites from enslavement in Egypt and made of them a nation. Seven weeks later, at Shavuot, the Israelites experienced their revelation, the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. And Sukkot means “booths", a form of temporary dwelling that represents the shelter that God provided to the Israelites during their wanderings in the desert before they entered the Promised Land.

So we've got the hybrid Jewish calendar- lunar and solar. We've got the hybrid nature of the Pilgrimage Festivals which honour both their agricultural and historical roots. I'd like now to shift gears a little and explore the crucial role of memory in Jewish thought and in the celebration of our festivals. The injunction to “zakhor", to remember, appears multiple times in the Hebrew Bible; I97 times by one count. To remember, for Jews, is described by many as a religious obligation. One of the first commandments in the Torah is to: "Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy." The commandment not to oppress the stranger in our midst appears no less than 36 times. In Exodus 23:19: "Also you shall not oppress a stranger for you know the heart of a stranger seeing you were strangers in the land of Egypt." In other words, remember where you came from and treat others accordingly. Memory for Jews can also act as a kind of early warning system. The injunction to “Remember Amelek” in Deut 25 instructs us to remember the attack by the Amelekites on the Israelites as they were leaving Egypt which targeted the most vulnerable; the women, children and the elderly. This can be interpreted as a warning to recognize evil where it exists and to take the necessary action. We are also repeatedly instructed to remember the covenant that we have established with the Lord and to fulfil its obligations. Interestingly, memory is described as an attribute of God's as well. Moses invokes this memory to prevent God from destroying the entire Israelite nation after the sin of the Golden Calf. He pleads with God to remember the covenant He made with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to make of them a great nation and God relents.

So how does this intense focus on memory trạnslate to our festival observance? Joshua Foer, a renowned US memory expert observes that: "In Judaism, observance and remembering are interchangeable concepts...Other people remember by thinking. Jews remember by doing." Every Sabbath when we remove our holy scrolls from the ark, we are remembering the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. Every Chanukah when we light candles for eight nights, we are enacting the miracle of Hasmonean times when one days worth of consecrated oil lasted for eight days. But perhaps the best example of actualization of memory through ritual is the Passover festival which we will celebrate next weekend. We observe by performing a Passover "seder", which means order; a highly prescribed set of actions, readings and songs which describe the biblical exodus from Egypt. We are instructed to immerse ourselves in this experience to the extent that we regard ourselves as having personally gone out of Egypt and to eat only unleavened bread during the eight day festival to remember how our ancestors left Egypt in such a rush that they had no time to let their bread dough rise. The youngest at the seder is instructed to recite the Four Questions which must be answered in order to fulfill our obligation to remember our redemption from slavery. The first question is: "Why is this night different from all other nights?" It is tempting to give the tongue-in-check reply used to describe all our festivals: "They tried to destroy us, we survived; now let's eat." The more serious reply is that on this night we remember and celebrate God's deliverance to freedom. Perhaps the more important question we are left with is: What do we now do with this freedom?"

The late great Rabbi Jonathan Sacks made an important distinction between history and memory. History, he said, answers the question: "What happened?" Memory answers the question: "Who, then, am I?"

Thank you.

Norm Finkelberg