Part of the High Holidays, Sukkot marks both the successful result of the previous agricultural year and a clean start of the new one. As with the other agricultural holidays, Sukkot has both a historical and metaphorical significance for contemporary Jews.
The holiday its own vocabulary, all relating to the harvest.
- Sukkah – hut with no roof and easily assembled walls to shelter from wind and dust; good in desert.
- Tabernacle – temporary enclosure; also a hut for religious use.
- Festival of Booths – a booth is a hut is a tabernacle is a rough desert shelter in the fields.
- The ingathering – a term for harvest
Relevant biblical references include Deuteronomy 16:13 (on the ingathering of summer crops and fruits, the close of the agricultural year) and Exodus 34:22, which sets Sukkot at either the autumnal equinox or the full moon time in the appropriate month.
Humanistic Jews find human significance in the original Sukkot celebration:
- Agriculture was the first step toward human mastery of the environment.
- As farms grew into settlements, which became towns and cities, human ingenuity and courage propelled civilization toward the secular age and even greater human achievements.
- Tribute to human achievement – agricultural, industrial, technological, and cultural.
- Recognizing the interconnectedness of humanity.
- Acknowledging our responsibility to the environment.
- Building and taking down the sukkah remind us of the transitory nature of human existence and experience.
- The covering of the sukkah is organic, suggesting our dependence upon nature, as well as our mastery of it.
- Recognizing that the fullness and beauty of the harvest may focus our attention on the abundance of beauty in the world.
