An Anniversary, Three Birthdays, and Sukkot in Yosemite (Lora)
October contains some dates worth noting in the Brody family, as well as the Jewish Holiday of Sukkot.
On October 11 our youngest son Samuel and his wife Maryann will celebrate their second anniversary. They were married in Look Park just outside of Northampton, MA on a gorgeous fall day. They light up our lives and the lives of everyone around them with their energy and their love for each other.
Also on October 10 we celebrate the 9th birthday of our grandson the remarkable Elijah Frankel Brody, best described by one of his teachers as, "Someone who brings his own party." How he got to be 9 years old so fast is beyond me. He has the most awesome parents who met thanks to their mothers, who knew that this was a match made in heaven.
On October 4th David and I celebrated our birthdays. This year are a collective 147 years old. You can do the math. Of course we marked the occasion with a very nice piece of pie.
To see Sukkot celebrated in Yosemite National Park by several dozen school children from San Fransisco was an absolute delight and way beyond anything I ever expected to see. I saw a bunch of kids running around wearing these tee shirts:
I introduced myself to the accompaning adults and excitedly shared my own connection to Brandeis (where I am a Resident Scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center). While theirs is a Jewish Day School in San Francisco and mine is a large University in Waltham, Massachusetts, we had one of those magical 'Jewish geography' connections. They explained that the school was there to celebrate the harvest festival of Sukkot and invited us to visit the Sukkah they had contracted at a nearby campsite.
Sukkot is a holiday I've always associated with the fall harvest. Every year our synagogue community built a Sukkah - an rustic hut decorated with fruits and vegetables. The 'roof' was made of woven reeds so, in accordance with tradition, it was open to the sky. You can read more about it below.
Theirs was decorated much the way I remember ours was.
But had a modern twist which made it as portable as it was practical:
This was yet another chance meeting that gave both of us such pleasure. Lots more to come as we travel on.
The Hebrew word sukkōt is the plural of sukkah, "booth" or "tabernacle", which is a walled structure covered with s'chach (plant material such as overgrowth or palm leaves). A sukkah is the name of the temporary dwelling in which farmers would live during harvesting, a fact connecting to the agricultural significance of the holiday stressed by the Book of Exodus. As stated in Leviticus, it is also intended as a reminiscence of the type of fragile dwellings in which the Israelites dwelt during their 40 years of travel in the desert after the Exodus from slavery in Egypt. Throughout the holiday, meals are eaten inside the sukkah and many people sleep there as well.