Sukkah 035

I am studying Mishnah in memory of Yitzḥak Rabin, son of Rosa and Neḥemya.

1:
Today is the 16th anniversary of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzḥak Rabin. In honour of his Yahrzeit I have revived the banner which accompanied every shiur of the Virtual Bet Midrash during the first year after his death. Of course, this day is also the 16th anniversary of the Virtual Bet Midrash itself — and that is no small achievement!

2:
The three mishnahs that comprise today's shiur are linked. Of course, they derive from the general introduction to these two last chapters of the tractate which was the first mishnah of this chapter [Sukkah 034].

3:
Mishnah 2 is very simple, and, in fact, deals with material that we have already covered; so I shall be brief. Mishnah 1 said that the lulav is waved on Sukkot either for seven days of the festival or for only six. If the first day of the festival falls on Shabbat, as we saw in Sukkah 033, the lulav was waved in Eretz-Israel (and that year there is no Shabbat Ḥol ha-Mo'ed). Thus the lulav is waved on all seven days of the festival. However, if the first day of the festival falls on any other day of the week one of the days of the festival will be Shabbat Ḥol ha-Mo'ed, and on that Shabbat the lulav is not waved. Thus in such years the lulav is waved only on six of the seven days of the festival.

4:
I shall not go into the mitzvah of Willow here because it is the subject of Mishnah 5, and we shall explain it in its appropriate place. What our present mishnah is saying is that if the seventh day of Sukkot falls on a Shabbat the special ceremony of the Willow is carried out on that day; however, if the seventh day of the festival falls on any other day of the week one of the previous days would have been Shabbat Ḥol ha-Mo'ed, and on that day the Willow ceremony is not carried out. (The fixed calendar that we use today ensures, among other things, that the seventh day of Sukkot, which we now call Hoshana Rabbah, will never fall on Shabbat. This fixed calendar has been in use since the middle of the 4th century CE.)

5:
Mishnah 4 explains how the mitzvah of lulav was originally carried out in the Bet Mikdash and why the original arrangement was abandoned.

6:
Everyone would take their lulavs to the Temple Mount on the day before the festival so that they could wave them in the Bet Mikdash on the first day of Sukkot. The authorities of the Bet Mikdash would lay all the lulavs on special tables set up in one of the courtyards. We have already learned [Sukkah 032] that on the first day of Sukkot people must use a lulav that belongs to them, not borrowed from someone else. Because there was no way, in the crush, that each person could identify his own lulav they were required to say that anyone who gets any lulav becomes its owner, by right of gift. The following morning there was usually a scramble when people tried to retrieve a lulav for use during the service, and during that scramble people would get hurt. (That is probably why the elderly left their lulavs in another place, where they could be retrieved quietly.)

7:
When the Bet Din saw that this arrangement, time-honoured as it was, was causing harm (and maybe worse), they cancelled the arrangement completely and instituted that henceforth everyone should perform the mitzvah with its benedictions at home, and only then proceed to the Bet Mikdash (with their lulavs).

In Sukkah 034 I wrote: "We do not reside in the sukkah on Shemini Atzeret". Shalom Berger writes:

In the Babylonian Talmud it is clearly written: "the law is that we do indeed sit [in the sukkah on Shemini Atzeret] but do not recite the benediction". How are we to understand this contradiction?

I respond:

The resolution of the contradiction is to be found in one word in Shalom's query. That word is, of course, 'Babylonian'. In Eretz-Israel we do not sit in the sukkah on Shemini Atzeret. In Babylon they had a problem. They had instituted that in the diaspora every YomTov was to be celebrated for two days and not just one. This was because in the days when the calendar was administered according to eye witnesses to the new moon one could never be sure that the messengers sent out from Eretz-Israel to various places in the diaspora would reach their destination on time. (The journey from Eretz-Israel to Babylon, for example, usually took about two weeks.) So if, in the diaspora, they observed two days of YomTov one of them would certainly be the correct day. According to this diaspora arrangement Shemini Atzeret is unique among the festivals in that not only is it a festival in its own right but it is also the "extra" day of Sukkot. (In the diaspora the "extra" day of Shemini Atzeret is called Simḥat Torah.) The sages in Babylon solved the problem by compromise: sit in the sukkah on Shemini Atzeret because it is the "extra" day of Sukkot, but do not recite the benediction because it is, after all, Shemini Atzeret!

I have no doubt in my mind that when the Sanhedrin is reconstituted one of its first decisions will be to abandon this diaspora arrangement, which, for the past eighteen centuries has been completely antiquated! I know that many Conservative communities in the diaspora have already done so.

(These shiurim come to you from Eretz-Israel.)