Nechemiah's Sukkot celebration: not since the times of Yehoshua bin Nun?

Nechemiah’s description of the Sukkot celebration as something that “the Children of Israel had not done so since the days of Yehoshua bin Nun,” raises profound questions. As a Gemara asks: “Is it possible that [King] David came and yet [the Jews] did not perform Sukkot until the days of Ezra?” We can add to the Gemara’s example many more righteous rulers such as Shmuel, Shlomo, Josiah and Hezekiah who were lauded by the prophets for their punctilious observance and teaching of the Torah and under whose reign it would therefore seem inexplicable for the festival of Sukkot not to have been celebrated as mandated by the Torah.

Furthermore, other biblical sources indicate widespread and enthusiastic participation in Sukkot observance. When Yeravam ben Nevat’s Northern Kingdom seceded from Judah, he “innovated a holiday in the eighth month, on the fifteenth day of the month,” in imitation of the holiday in Judah. The commentaries explain that the pilgrimage festival of Sukkot was so popular that Yeravam could not simply abolish it. Instead he had to fabricate a replacement festival a month later.

The importance of the Sukkot celebration in the Jewish calendar is also apparent from Shlomo’s consecration of the First Mikdash. With the construction work having been completed almost a year earlier, Shlomo waited until the Sukkot festival of the following year in order to dedicate the Mikdash “in the festival of the seventh month.” This delay enabled him to celebrate the dedication and the Sukkot festival in consecutive weeks with the amassed crowd of pilgrims.

The statement in Nechemiah, that the festival had not been observed since the days of Yehoshua, is addressed by Malbim, who highlights the fact that there is only one aspect of the celebration of Sukkot—dwelling in sukkot—which the text records as not having been performed since the days of Yehoshua:

[The people] made sukkot, each man on his roof, and in their courtyards, in the courtyards of the Temple of God, in the plaza of the Water Gate and in the plaza of the Gate of Ephraim. The entire congregation that returned from the captivity made sukkot and dwelt in sukkot. The children of Israel had not done so from the days of Joshua ben Nun until that day…

Noting the clear emphasis placed on the various public locations of the sukkot which the people built, Malbim draws upon halachic and Talmudic sources to propose a solution. Starting by citing the halachic ruling that it is forbidden to build a sukkah in the public domain, Malbim argues that this severely limited the practicality of widespread sukkah construction during the days of the First Mikdash. The festival of Sukkot, being one of the three pilgrimage festivals, would have required a significant proportion of those observing its laws to be away from their private property.

The inability of pilgrims and celebrants to build sukkot was exacerbated following the construction of the Beit Hamikdash by King Shlomo, which meant that the festival of Sukkot would have been observed primarily in Jerusalem. Malbim cites Tannaic sources which teach that the whole city of Jerusalem was not divided among the tribes and therefore remained public property. One result of this would have been that constructing sukkot within its walls was prohibited. Such a surprising phenomenon may have been considered acceptable in light of the Torah’s unusual presentation of the commandment to “every resident [ezrach]” to dwell in sukkot. This is understood by some commentators to mean that the mitzvah is primarily applicable to those in their own property and not to travellers.

When the Jews returned to Jerusalem at the start of the Second Commonwealth, Malbim continues, Ezra legislated a series of key religious and social enactments which included “permission to build sukkot in Jerusalem” [Tosefta, Baba Kama 6:13; see Magen Avraham, who uses this as basis for current halachah].

The first sukkot in the aftermath of this enactment revolutionized the national observance of Sukkot in Jerusalem, leading Nechemiah to list the key public areas which were now filled with private sukkot. It is in the immediate aftermath of this listing of public places—in reference to the new dimension to the celebration of the Sukkot festival—that we find the comment “The Children of Israel had not done so since the days of Yehoshua bin Nun.”

First posted on Facebook 5 October 2020, here.

Sadducees, Sukkot and Simchat Beit HaShoeva

With the conclusion of Yom Kippur, our attention turns immediately to Sukkot. I am honoured to have my essay included in this wonderful book produced by the Habura. In it I survey and analyse the different categories of laws and customs which are observed over the coming weeks.

One of the more mysterious Sukkot ceremonies that I focus on involves the “drawing of water”; the famed “simchat beit hasho’eva” which became a centrepiece of the Sukkot celebration at the Mikdash. Upon closer inspection, this ceremony itself is not a commandment, but rather a preparatory process for the pouring of water on the mizbe’ach each day of Sukkot. Unlike the pouring of the wine, which is explicitly commanded by the Torah, the pouring of the water on Sukkot is listed by the Talmud as a Halachah leMoshe MiSinai, meaning that it is a law with biblical force but devoid of a scriptural source.

During the Maccabean era, the aristocratic and priestly classes became increasingly dominated by Sadducee doctrine, which rejected the notion of a transmitted oral tradition. Laws – and details of laws – which lacked an explicit scriptural source were challenged and disputed. The pouring of water on Sukkot, which was a public act of worship carried out by the kohanim, seems to have been a particularly contentious matter. In one particularly infamous incident near the start of the Maccabee era, the Sadducee High Priest who had been honoured with pouring the water onto the mizbe’ach instead spilled it on his feet to demonstrate his opposition to the practice. The assembled crowd expressed its outrage by pelting him with the etrogim.

Consistent with a pattern that can be found throughout Rabbinic Judaism, the Sanhedrin and leading sages sought to emphasise and celebrate the importance of laws which the Sadducees (and later the Karaites) objected to on account of their rejection of the oral tradition. Thus the transmitted commandment to pour water on the mizbeach during the week of sukkot was transformed into a ceremony of celebration and joy – the simchat beit hasho’evah.

A Mishnah sets out a process for the daily water-drawing ceremony, replete with golden vessels and repeated blasts from the trumpet and shofar which would publicise the event. In the following chapter, the Talmud describes the associated festivities in detail, including the lighting of an immense candelabrum in the Temple courtyard which generated such intense light that it illuminated every courtyard in the city. A Levite orchestra of flutes, trumpets, harps, and cymbals accompanied torchlight processions, and men of purity, character and scholarship danced enthusiastically to the hand‑clapping, foot-stomping, and psalm‑singing crowds. The account reaches its climax with the Tannaitic proclamation that “whoever who did not see the rejoicing at the place of the water-drawing has never seen rejoicing in his life”.

The Pharisaic expansion of the water-pouring ritual into a week of mass-celebration demonstrates just how significant the debate with the priestly Sadducees over the legitimacy of the practice had become. This is particularly understandable when one takes into account that the ceremony was performed at the Mikdash at a time when pilgrims from across the nation would have been in attendance to witness it. The establishing of this week of water-drawing celebration must also be seen in its historical context.

At the very start of the Maccabee period, the Sadducees appeared to be successfully wresting control of the priesthood and Sanhedrin from the Pharisees. Seeking a more flexible approach to interpreting the written text in a way that could support their Hellenistic reforms, Sadducees saw a string of high-profile successes; Yochanan Kohen Gadol defected to their ranks at end of his life, and Yochanan’s son King Yannai was a loyal Sadducee. Yannai executed a number of leading Pharasic sages and sent many others into exile. Megillat Ta’anit details a number of traditional laws which the Sadducees were able to overturn temporarily during this period. In the words of the Talmud “the world was desolate of Torah until Shimon ben Shatacḥ came and restored the Torah to its former glory”. With the help of his sister, queen Shlomtzion, Shimon managed to restore the court to the Pharisees. For a while, however, the very existence of the oral tradition had seemed under threat, and the priesthood in particular remained clouded in suspected Sadducee association. As a possible reaction to this perceived existential threat, the Pharisees repeatedly emphasised the importance of the traditional interpretation of the Torah, and sought to publicise its observance in any way possible.

I conclude with a broader analysis of other Mikdash rituals which had been the subject of Sadducee challenge and were therefore transformed into high-profile events. These include the harvesting of barley for the Omer, which the oral tradition maintains is to be performed on the second day of Pesach – and which the Sadducees disputed (rendering mimacharat haShabbat literally to mean Sunday) – is also depicted as an elaborate and protracted ceremony. When it came to the Para Aduma ritual, the Pharisees were even prepared to perform this in a less than ideal manner in order to publicly distance themselves from Sadducee doctrine. The emphasis placed by the sages on observing the commandments in a way that demonstrated loyalty to the oral tradition rather than Sadducee sensibilities is also seen in non-Temple laws. While Sadducees, for example, would sit in the dark over Shabbat in line with their reading of “you shall not burn a fire in any of your dwelling places on the day of Shabbat”, the Pharisees’ emphasis on lighting Shabbat candles has led to it being widely regarded as embodying the spirit of Shabbat through to this very day.

This attitude is not solely of historical interest. The concept that one must go to an extreme to combat a perceived threat to Jewish tradition was drawn upon in recent years by Rabbi Herschel Shachter in his firm ruling that halachic ground should not be ceded to the feminist movement - here.

We are left wondering at what stage does an apparent deviation from previously accepted halachah represent a threat to Jewish tradition? Are we living in an equivalent era to the one in which the Sadducees attempted to take over the Sanhedrin – the body which was charged with maintaining and transmitting the oral tradition?

First posted on Facebook 6 October 2022, here.