Do you think that headline is a bit of a stretch? I don’t. I had no idea about this phenomenon before I came to live in Israel but, having just concluded my fifth Sukkoth here in Israel, I’ve made a personal observation about the weather and the climate here in the Holy Land.
For outsiders the defining feature of Sukkoth is that Jews build a Sukkah: temporary, flimsy structures built on any available surface near their homes and then they eat all meals in them for 7 days. Christians call these “tabernacles” and Sukkoth is the Feast of the Tabernacles. In fact, if one follows Facebook pages where moderately observant Jews look for trips to make with their family, a constant theme is people asking if there is a Sukkah to eat in at their destination. Most coffee shops and restaurants (that are vaguely Kosher) and nearly all the parks and tourist attractions build these to accommodate visitors that want to eat all their meals in one.
For the first time in my life, this year, I built a Sukkah with my kids. In days gone by I would have made it from 2×4’s and some bed sheets but these days you swing by the Home Centre (like Home Depot but four times the price) and pick up a kit. I bought a 2m x 2m kit (6’ 6” for those of you still living in imperial lands). Of course they’d run out of the appropriate 2m long bamboo poles for the roof so I took 3m ones. Which don’t fit in a standard apartment elevator. So I had to walk up to the 7th floor with those.
But all of this is a personal preamble, why does rain prove Judaism’s connection to the Land of Israel? Ryan Bellerose, our resident Native American, non-Jewish expert on Indigenous peoples has explained how you work out who is indigenous to a piece of land. Two of the criteria he speaks of are:
- Culture in general, or in specific manifestations (such as religion, living under a tribal system, membership of an indigenous community, dress, means of livelihood, lifestyle, etc.)
- Religion that places importance on spiritual ties to the ancestral lands
All Jewish festivals are timed with reference to the moon in Israel. There is a further, very important, timing shift involving a “leap month” that keeps Jewish festivals locked to an annual cycle. This is what makes Jewish holidays stay fixed in their time of the year while the strictly lunar calendar that marks out Islamic festivals is not synchronised to the year: their holidays like Ramadan can be found moving all around the Gregorian calendar from year to year.
Jewish festivals therefore move back and forth with reference to the Gregorian calendar, but they are synchronised with the seasons. I’ll go further: they are synchronised to an astonishing degree with the seasons in one part of the world: Israel and only Israel.
Sukkoth (as it is written in Leviticus) occurs “when you have gathered in the fruit of the land, you shall keep a feast to the lord seven days: on the first day shall be a sabbath, and on the eighth day shall be a sabbath.”
During these past millennia when large populations of Jews lived in exile all over the world, they observed all the festivals with reference to the moon in Israel. Those Jews who remained continuously in Israel made these important astronomical observations and sent word out around the world (yes, we did not all leave and have almost always been a majority in Jerusalem and elsewhere).
To this day Jewish communities around the world still observe two day holidays while Jews in Israel observe a single day. This stems from communication delays when trying to determine the precise day on which the observable moon in Israel marks a festival. I’m not sure why, in the days of modern communication and astonishing accuracy of predicting astronomical events, this still occurs. However it is rather handy having two nights, think about two Christmas days, one for each set of in-laws, to solve familial arguments.
The upshot of this is that Jews in South Africa or Australia are observing Sukkoth at completely the “wrong” time of the year for their location. They’re at the beginning of summer, not the end of the harvest. But they are marking an event thousands of miles away in the ancestral home of Judaism.
Growing up in London, my family didn’t really observe Sukkoth. But as it usually falls toward the end of September and into October (as this year) it had usually turned cold and rainy there long before. Not conducive to eating all one’s meals al-fresco.
Anyone who knows Israel knows from around the middle of April (Pessach or Passover) Israel starts to get hot and keeps getting hotter. There is almost never any significant rain during the summer. As we arrive at the series of holidays that begins with Rosh Hashona (the Jewish New Year) and takes us through Yom Kippur and to Sukkoth, the weather starts to turn. The mornings feel fresher and cooler and clouds appear again in the skies.
This change in the weather happens far more reliably linked to the Jewish holidays here than the arbitrary Gregorian Calendar.
And then a funny thing happens when Succoth arrives and observant Jews start trying to sit outside for every meal: it rains! We’ve had four or more months of almost absolutely 100% reliably no-rain weather and the minute we try to sit outside (because lets face it we spend most of the summer indoors with the air-conditioning on) the weather breaks and it rains.
This year was a classic. In the week before Sukkoth there were a couple of dispersed showers but nothing much. More of a warm up than the real gig. As I stood on my balcony building my new Sukkah with my brother in law the clouds darkened and, right on schedule the heavens opened with a thunder and lighting show and a (somewhat brief) torrential downpour on my balcony in Tel Aviv. I even had to hold an umbrella over my BBQ at one point.
And this made me remember that each of the five years I’ve been here, I’ve been invited to sit in a Sukkah and that was the moment when it rained.
This is a PhD project that needs to be done: track the correlation between first significant rain of the (Jewish) new year in Israel versus the Sukkoth festival. In my limited experience there is a clear correlation but if someone has done the academic work I’d love to see it.
Think of what such a strong correlation would show:
- A system of marking the calendar that is ancient and was first calculated reliably around 2000 years ago is tied to the weather in Israel;
- The weather in Israel is reliably predictable with a model that hasn’t changed in thousands of years;
- This calendar is disproportionately significant for the Land of Israel.
My personal feeling is that the moon and sun are most definitely a massive influence on the climate and weather: our Gregorian calendar is almost completely detached from these two phenomenon and that makes the Gregorian calendar a lousy one against which to measure the seasons in any given year. Why on earth should rainfall in a given Gregorian month match up from year to year?
Modern astronomy (following Galileo Galilei) now knows about the sun’s roughly 11 year cycle: when Jews started to periodically add months to the lunar year to keep things aligned, they fell in with this cycle thousands of years before anyone could have observed it.
The influence of the oceans on the weather is huge and the moon is obviously a huge influence on the oceans. We just have to watch the tides to know that.
Putting this all together, Judaism came up with something astonishing regarding the weather in Israel. Man made climate change hasn’t managed to derail these ancient, pre-computer models!
If you want to acknowledge a religious higher power, you’ll say the Jewish calendar was given to us by God. If you don’t want to believe you’ll just have to see it as yet another amazingly freaky connection between Judaism and the Land of Israel.
Either way, Judaism was written in Israel and Israel is written into Judaism.
A couple of extra bits of explanation here and Sukkot is how Dave spells it so I’m adding that at the end to make sure the search engines find it:
Here is an explanation of Sukkoth:
Sukkot is one of the three “pilgrimage” holidays mentioned in the Bible. Together with Pesach and Shavuot, these were the three times of the year that people came to Jerusalem to celebrate. Here are some excerpts from the 23rd chapter of the Book of Leviticus:
“The fifteenth of this seventh month shall be the feast of booths for seven days to the Lord…
…Also on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you have gathered in the fruit of the land, you shall keep a feast to the lord seven days: on the first day shall be a sabbath, and on the eighth day shall be a sabbath. And you shall take for yourselves on the first day the fruit of the tree hadar, branches of palm trees, and the boughs of thick leaved trees, and willows of the brook…
…You shall dwell in booths seven days…that your generations may know that I made the children of Yisra’el to dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt…”We see that the Torah gives two reasons for the celebration, one agricultural and the other national. Both are ways of celebrating the service of the Lord at the change of seasons, from the summer to the winter.
From Ha’aretz, a long explanation of the history of the Jewish Calendar.
