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Our Rabbi's Message
June 13th 2008
By Rabbi Aaron KriegelWe have just finished the third of the festival holidays. The first, Succoth, reminded us of our forty-year sojourn in the desert. The second, Pesah, reminded us of our exodus from slavery and from Egypt. The third, Shavuot commemorated the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai.
What you might not know about those holidays is that they existed long before there was a Jewish people. Many posit that they were the original harvest holidays, which were celebrated in Egypt. That was long before the idea of a day off was accepted and it was long before common people really had any days off, save the end of the harvest.
Our people inherited (or perhaps learned) those holidays when they were slaves in Egypt. They liked the idea of time to be themselves. They liked cyclical events that happened with certainty every year. They understood the world just as their neighbors did. All was cyclical. That which happened would happen again. Nothing was new in the world and those harvest holidays just emphasized those points.
When we became a people in the desert we took those holidays and gave each historical meaning. In time the historical meaning was more important than the agricultural meaning. Indeed, those holidays changed the way that we and all mankind looked at the world. No longer was the world cyclical. All happened according to the arrow of time. The future held promise that the past denied.
People did not always have to live with disability. Slaves could look forward to a time of freedom if they fight for freedom. People could conquer disease if they studied disease. Nations could be established where all had rights. That was the essence of the Jewish creation of an historical world, which aimed to become better, and better as was expressed by our firm belief in the Messianic Age.
Our Torah and our sense of history were the very seeds of the world that all people live in today.
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