IB World Religions 6.2.4. Festivals: Shabbat, the Pilgrim Festivals and the High Holy Days Notes

6.2.4. Festivals: Shabbat, the Pilgrim Festivals and the High Holy Days

Shabbat in the home

1. Shabbat runs from sunset on Friday to nightfall on Saturday, and it is the first thing in the Torah that God is said to call holy. The commandment appears twice, in Exodus as a memorial of creation and in Deuteronomy as a memorial of the exodus.
2. The day is brought in with candles, usually two, lit and blessed before sunset. In most households a woman of the family lights them, and once they are lit the day has begun for her.
3. Kiddush is said over a cup of wine at the table, sanctifying the day aloud. Two covered loaves of challah stand beside it, recalling the double portion of manna gathered before the sabbath in the wilderness.
4. Parents bless their children before the meal, and the household sings zemirot, table songs, between courses. The meal is long by design, since nothing else may be done with the time.
5. Three meals are eaten across the day, and the afternoon goes to study, walking, sleeping and visiting rather than to errands. Many families read the week's Torah portion together.
6. Havdalah closes Shabbat after nightfall on Saturday with blessings over wine, sweet spices and a plaited candle. Jews explain the spices as consolation for the departure of the extra soul that tradition says the day brings.

Shabbat rest and worship

1. Shabbat rest is defined by category rather than by effort. The Mishnah lists thirty-nine melachot, kinds of work drawn from the building of the wilderness sanctuary, and those categories are what the day forbids.
2. The list covers sowing, writing, cooking, tying, kindling fire and carrying between domains. A Jew may shift heavy furniture indoors and may not tear a sheet of paper, because the category decides and not the exertion.
3. Orthodox authorities extend kindling to switching on electricity, so lights and ovens run on timers and observant families walk to synagogue. Cooking is done in advance and kept warm on a covered hotplate.
4. Friday evening worship opens with Kabbalat Shabbat, psalms and the sixteenth century hymn Lecha Dodi, which greets the sabbath as a bride. Saturday morning carries the week's longest Torah reading and a musaf service after it.
5. Conservative Judaism's law committee permitted driving to synagogue in 1950 where distance would otherwise cut a Jew off from the community, a ruling contested inside the movement and rejected by Orthodoxy. Reform and Liberal Judaism treat the prohibitions as guidance and often centre worship on Friday evening.
6. What holds across the movements is the positive claim. Jews call Shabbat a taste of the world to come, a day on which the work of improving the world is deliberately set down.

Pesach and the seder

1. Pesach (Passover) runs seven days in Israel and eight in most of the Diaspora, and commemorates the exodus from Egypt. It is one of the three pilgrim festivals, the shalosh regalim, on which Israelites once travelled to the Temple.
2. Every trace of chametz, leaven, is cleared from the house beforehand, and the search finishes by candlelight the night before. Kitchens are scoured or their utensils changed, and bread gives way to matzah.
3. The festival opens with the seder, a ritual meal ordered by the Haggadah, a book of text, song and instruction. Seder means order, and fifteen numbered steps run from the first cup of wine to the closing songs.
4. The youngest person present asks the four questions, and the answer is a retelling of the slavery and the deliverance. The Haggadah tells each Jew to see themselves as though they had personally come out of Egypt.
5. Four cups of wine are drunk, a cup is filled for Elijah and a door opened for him, and in many households a further cup now stands for those still unfree. Reform and Liberal haggadot have added readings on the Holocaust, on Soviet Jewry and on modern slavery.
6. The later days carry synagogue services, and the counting of the omer begins on the second night, marking forty-nine days to the next festival.

Shavuot and Sukkot

1. Shavuot (Weeks) falls at the end of the omer count, fifty days after Pesach. It began as the wheat harvest and the offering of first fruits, and the rabbis identified it with the giving of the Torah at Sinai.
2. Many communities keep a tikkun leil Shavuot, studying through the night, and the Book of Ruth is read for its harvest setting and its convert joining Israel. Dairy food is customary, explained in several ways, one being that the new law left no time to prepare meat.
3. Reform congregations placed confirmation on Shavuot in the nineteenth century, a group ceremony for older teenagers accepting the Torah. Many Reform and Liberal communities still keep it alongside bar and bat mitzvah.
4. Sukkot (Booths) begins five days after Yom Kippur and lasts seven days. Families build a sukkah, a temporary hut roofed with cut branches loose enough to show the stars, and eat and sometimes sleep in it.
5. The hut recalls the shelters of the wilderness years and the huts of the harvest field, and its fragility is the point. Jews live in it a week and then take it down.
6. The arba minim (four species), a palm branch, a citron, myrtle and willow, are held together and waved in the synagogue. Sukkot closes with Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, on which the Torah cycle ends and restarts and the scrolls are danced round the building.

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur

1. The High Holy Days open with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, and close ten days later with Yom Kippur. Jews call the span between them the Ten Days of Teshuvah, of turning back.
2. Rosh Hashanah is kept for two days in Orthodox and most Conservative communities and often one in Reform. Its liturgy names God as king and as judge, and Jews describe the day as the world's judgement rather than a celebration.
3. The shofar, a ram's horn, is sounded a hundred times across the service in three distinct calls. Maimonides read the sound as a summons to wake the sleeper, and the horn recalls the ram substituted for Isaac.
4. Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement, kept as a full fast and spent almost entirely in synagogue. It opens with Kol Nidre, a legal formula annulling vows, chanted at dusk to a melody that has become the sound of the day itself.
5. The confession is said in the plural throughout, so the congregation confesses every listed sin together, striking the chest at each line. The day closes with Ne'ilah, the locking of the gates, and one long blast of the shofar.
6. Yizkor, the memorial for the dead, is said on Yom Kippur and on the pilgrim festivals. Reform and Liberal congregations, which draw their largest attendances on these days, keep the structure while shortening the liturgy.

The symbolism of food

1. Food carries meaning at almost every Jewish festival, and the meanings are taught by eating rather than explaining. A child tastes the exodus before understanding it.
2. The seder plate is the clearest case. Maror, bitter herbs, stands for the bitterness of slavery, charoset, a paste of fruit and nuts, for the mortar the slaves worked with, and salt water for their tears.
3. Matzah does two jobs at once. The Haggadah calls it the bread of affliction and the bread of haste, baked before the dough could rise, so one object carries both the slavery and the escape.
4. At Rosh Hashanah apple is dipped in honey for a sweet year, a round challah replaces the plaited loaf to suggest a year coming round, and pomegranates are eaten for their seeds.
5. Shavuot brings cheesecake and blintzes, and Sukkot brings the autumn harvest into the hut itself. Yom Kippur carries the opposite signal, since a fast marks a day by taking food out of it.
6. The pattern holds across the movements even where the law does not. A Reform household keeping no kashrut will still put maror on the seder plate, because there the food carries the story rather than the law.