D’Var Torah

5785 (October 24, 2024) Shemini Atzeret

Rabbi Micah Friedman

This holiday is almost certainly the least observed and well understood holiday in the Jewish calendar. If we have any associations with Shemini Atzeret, it is the day before we dance with the Torah, the day we say Yizkor and the day we begin to pray for Geshem for the winter rains. 

This year – and for years to come – this holiday will be colored by the horrors which were perpetrated a year ago on this date and by the horrific war which continues to unfold now. 

Today, before we recite Yizkor, I would like to take a few minutes to consider the historical significance and  meaning of this holiday. What is the purpose of Shemini Atzeret and how can this meaning overlap in our hearts with the grief that we mark on this first anniversary of 10/7?

Shemini Atzeret is first mentioned in VaYikra in the context of Sukkot, but no practices are specified other than the sacrifices. We read in Leviticus 23:

GOD spoke to Moses, saying:
Say to the Israelite people:
On the fifteenth day of this seventh month there shall be the Feast of Booths to GOD, [to last] seven days.
The first day shall be a sacred occasion: you shall not work at your occupations; seven days you shall bring offerings by fire to GOD. On the eighth day you shall observe a sacred occasion and bring an offering by fire to GOD; it is a solemn gathering: you shall not work at your occupations. 

Of course, the sages of the the Talmud notice the absence of special ritual actions attached to this Sacred Occasion of the Eighth Day – literally Shemini Atzeret. In the tractate dedicated to Sukkot, we encounter a midrashic parable which is quoted by Rashi in order to help us understand the significance of this day and the mood of the day: 

On Sukkot 55b, we read one version of this parable:

The Gemara teaches A parable about a king of flesh and blood who said to his servants: Prepare me a great feast that will last for several days. When the feast concluded, on the last day, he said to his beloved servant: Prepare me a small feast so that I can derive pleasure from you alone. 

Here, the occasion of the 8th day is a final day of community gathering after an extended period of shared feasting. The King – who represents G-d – asks His servant – representing the Jewish people – to stick around for one more opportunity to spend time together so that the King can enjoy the company of His beloved servant. 

When Rashi references this Midrash in his commentary to Leviticus, strikingly, Rashi makes a substantial change. The people who are invited – or commanded – to stay for one more day of time spent together with the King are not the King’s most beloved servant, but rather the King’s children. 

Like a king who invited his children to a celebration for a certain number of days. When the time came to depart, he said, “My children, I beg of you, linger with Me another day; your parting is difficult for Me.”

In either version of the Midrash, What emerges from this parable is a picture of Shemini Atzeret as about a day of intimate relationship with G-d. This day is one final holy day dedicated to a more intimate opportunity to be in relationship with G-d through love and to bring G-d nachas through choosing to spend a little more time together. 

While the Midrash sees this intimate time as a time of ongoing celebration – continuing the feast,  we could imagine other, more complex emotions emerging from this kind of social context. Perhaps, you have had a similar experience before sitting around the table with your family, or beloved friends at the end of a party or social gathering. You pour one more drink, or cut one more slice of cake, and the conversation shifts in tone. In the intimate context of a small group, there is an opportunity to turn your attention to other topics, perhaps more personal ones than you feel comfortable talking about in the presence of the whole party. 

In my experience, these moments are often some of the most precious moments in a party. When we have the chance to linger a little while. This is how Jewish tradition understands Shemini Atzeret. On Sukkot, everyone makes pilgrimage to the Temple, sets up camp in their booths, brings their beautiful branches to wave in the air as we sing and dance together. Once the big celebration has slowed down, on Shemini Atzeret we continue to sing together, but the tone and tenor allows for more intimacy, for the complexity of feeling that arises when we have the chance to breathe deeply. 

This can help us to understand why we say Yizkor every year on Shemini Atzeret. We bring the intimate experiences of our hearts and our families into the synagogue and center the personal experiences of grief we go through, even years after a loss. Since today is the day when we envision ourselves sharing one more meal around the table of G-d in the Temple, today is our chance to call to mind those people who once shared a seat at this table with us – those dear people whose absence we may feel constantly, and yet, somehow, often feel more intensely when we celebrate a holiday. 

In this sense, the holiday of Shemini Atzeret is perhaps well suited to accommodate and incorporate the grief of the Jewish people from this past year. This is a day when we can take the time to acknowledge all that we are grieving – our personal grief and our collective grief – our grief for our civilians and our grief for our soldiers – our grief for the sense of impenetrable safety provided by the military of the state of Israel and our grief for the apparent ethical shortcomings of the Israeli military in the conduct of the war – our grief for our people’s very personal losses – the trauma of our children – and our grief for those killed and traumatized on the so-called other side – Palestinian civilians in Gaza, the West Bank and now in Lebanon – our grief as our illusions that America might be safe from anti-semitism dissipates around us – our grief for how difficult it has become to speak about this complex web of grief even within the context of our most intimate circles of family and community. 

Shemini Atzeret has long been a day when we slow down – before ending the holiday season – and we take the time to remember all of the grief that we each carry with us – even as we celebrate joyous holidays. 

In our Yizkor service, we both ask G-d to remember our loved ones and we pledge to donate Tzedekah in honor of their memories. We actively recite the names of people we remember and we pledge to act in a concrete, material way in order to influence the world for good in their honor. 

There is in these actions a duality. We both want to be comforted simply by the knowledge that G-d will remember long beyond the context of our lives or even our families’ lives across many generations. Though each of our days on earth will pass, G-d’s capacity to remember is infinite. At the same time, we take into our own hands the imperative to translate our grief into action – to translate our loss into tzedakah – to use our material resources to meet the needs of others, not despite our pain, but precisely because of our experience of pain and loss. 

Today, on Shemini Atzeret, we also pray for rain – Geshem. While we understand that we need to take action – to give tzedakah – in order to meet the needs of others, we also recognize that we are dependent on the grace of G-d. Wholeheartedly, we pray that this year there will be enough rain so that no one will go hungry, so that no one will go thirsty. 

In the wake of October 7th and this year of heart-wrenching war, it feels more clear to me than ever before that we must both act with ethical responsibility and express through prayer our awareness that we need the help of G-d’s powers which are far beyond our ability to understand. 

As we continue in our service today – first with Yizkor and then with Geshem – may we be comforted by the knowledge that G-d wants us to linger here and to have the chance to recall and remember what weighs on our hearts. And, may the comfort of this knowledge and experience support us as we commit ourselves to giving tzedakah in honor of those whom we’ve lost.