Holiday Progression:
1. Rosh Hoshana - Happy New Year! Traditional prayers for rain.
2. Yom Kippur - Day of Atonement - very solemn
3. Sukkot - Thankful for the harvest, let's celebrate!

These holidays came in quick succession during my first couple of weeks in Israel. During Sukkot people build temporary shelters where they eat their meals and sometimes sleep for a week. In early times during harvest people would sleep in tents near their fields. This also commemorates the flight from Egypt when the people of Israel wandered in the wilderness, lived in tents, and were sustained by the hand of God. Our neighbor, Ann, invited us one evening for an open house and we spent an engaging couple of hours sitting in her sukkah talking to her and her friends about all kinds of things Israel.

 Below: an evening in Lydia and Eldon's sukkah. Eldon is a Hebrew language professor. It was a refreshingly open time of conversation about Judaism, Christianity, scripture, faith, history, anti-Semitism. They were very gracious and generous hosts.

The last day (8 days total for Sukkot) was Simchat Torah. We wandered to the Old City and were caught up in some happy celebrations with the faithful circling with the Torah, dancing, singing, shouting, laughing. Depending on whether a group was Orthodox, Conservative, or Reformed apparently made the difference in whether the women joined in. Sometimes the women formed their own circle to dance. Sometimes they stood aside and watched the men. One young man walked through the women's area, shouting encouragement to the women with, "Form your own circle! Change the world! Form your own circle! Change the world!" (He was Perchik all over again!) Here is a small window into that world including some really unlikely bandfellows and one video with terrible quality but great audio. We loved it all.