Rabbis For Human Rights - North America

Divrei Torah

“A certain non-Jew came before Shammai and said to him, ‘I will convert to Judaism, on the condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.’ Shammai chased him away... He came before Hillel and said to him, ‘Convert me.’ Hillel said to him, ‘What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor: that is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary; go and learn it.” (Shabbat 31A)

Sukkot without a Guilty Conscience

A D'var Torah for Sukkot 2011/5772 by Rabbi Jill Jacobs

 

 

Sukkot is a holiday of joy. The Talmud refers to Sukkot simply as “the holiday.” The Siddur calls Sukkot “the season of our joy.”

All of the holidays should be joyous: Pesach celebrates the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery. Shavuot commemorates the revelation at Sinai. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we are grateful for the chance to repair our ways. But only Sukkot takes on the moniker “season of our joy.”

The Maharil (Rabbi Jacob ben Moses Moellin, Mainz 1360-1427) comments, “the Blessed Holy One gave four days (between Yom Kippur and Sukkot) as a gift to the Jewish people, for God forgives all sins on those four days, and does not begin counting sins until the first day of Sukkot.” (Laws of Yom Kippur 33)

On Yom Kippur, we repent for our sins, and resolve to be much better people in the coming year. Since we are human, most of us immediately backslide. We might push someone aside in our rush to get a bagel at the break fast. We might start the morning after Yom Kippur by gossiping about something that happened the day before.

According to the Maharil, the four days between Yom Kippur and Sukkot constitute a grace period, in which none of these missteps count.

We thus enter Sukkot with a clean slate. We can celebrate with pure joy because we are not bogged down even by a few days’ worth of a guilty conscience.

The trick, then, is to sustain this level of joy throughout Sukkot.

On Sukkot, we express our joy through enjoying the bounty of the harvest. We decorate our sukkot with bright orange gourds, strings of juicy red cranberries, and fresh pumpkins. In the sukkah, we eat elaborate meals, which often feature new fall vegetables.

This year, my own enjoyment of Sukkot will be tempered by my experience, a few weeks ago, meeting some of the men and women who pick the tomatoes we will eat all winter. In September I was one of seventeen rabbis who traveled with Rabbis for Human Rights –North America to Immokalee, Florida to learn about the conditions in the tomato fields there. We learned that 1000 tomato pickers have been freed from slavery since 1997. We learned that workers get paid only 50 cents a pound for tomatoes—not enough to earn minimum wage many days. We learned that workers often spend several hours waiting around for the picking to start—and that they do not get paid for this time. We learned that most women have been sexually harassed or assaulted in the fields. We learned that the pesticides that the workers handle have been linked to illness and birth defects.

Most importantly, we learned that these workers, through the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, are working to transform this situation. Already, major retailers such as McDonalds, Burger King, and Taco Bell have agreed to a Fair Food Pledge that guarantees better wages and working conditions. Today, the focus is on persuading Trader Joe’s and other supermarket chains to sign this pledge as well.

This year, I want to finish Sukkot just as I entered it--without a guilty conscience. So during the holiday, I will call my local Trader Joe’s to ask them to sign the Fair Food Pledge. I hope you will join me. Please see this link for more information.