In February 1997, then-president of the State of Israel, Ezer Weizman, paid the first, and thus far the only, state visit to Britain as the guest of Her Majesty the Queen. The custom is that on the first night of such a visit the queen hosts a state banquet at Buckingham Palace. It was, for the Jews present, a unique and moving moment to hear HaTikva played in the banqueting hall of the palace, and to hear the queen propose a toast to the president with the word LeĤayyim.
There is a protocol for such visits. Present are many representative figures, ambassadors, members of the government and other members of the royal family. At the end of the evening, after most of the guests have taken their leave, there is a small and intimate gathering for just a few individuals, on that occasion the Queen, Prince Philip, the Queen Mother, the prime minister and a few others, for a more relaxed and personal conversation with the guest of honor. It was this kind of occasion with its royal protocol that led the sages to their particular understanding of Shemini Atzeret.
It is a strange, even unique day in the Jewish calendar. It is described as the eighth day, and thus part of Sukkot, but it is also designated by a name, Atzeret, of its own. Is it, or is it not, a separate festival in its own right? It seems to be both. How are we to understand this fact?
What guided the sages was the detail that whereas on the seven days of Sukkot seventy young bulls were offered, on Atzeret, the eighth day, there was only one. Connecting this to Zechariah’s prophecy that in the Messianic Age all nations would celebrate Sukkot, they concluded that the seventy sacrifices of Sukkot represented the seventy nations of the world as described in Genesis 10. Even though Zechariah’s vision had not yet been realized, it was as if all humanity were in some sense present in Jerusalem on the festival, and sacrifices made on their behalf. On the eighth day, as they were leaving, it was as if God were inviting the Jewish people to a small private reception. The word Atzeret itself was interpreted to mean, “Stop, stay a while.” Shemini Atzeret was private time between God and His people. It was a day of particularity after the universality of the seven days of Sukkot.
In some versions of this narrative the emphasis was on the length of time before the people would return to the Temple, virtually half a year until Pesaĥ. Others stressed the sudden shift from seventy sacrifices to one. The memorable phrase, though, that shines through, is the one mentioned by Rashi (commentary to Lev. 23:36), in which God says to Israel, “It is hard for Me to see you go.” This is the language of intimacy.
As we noted earlier, Sukkot represents more clearly than any other festival the dualities of Judaism. The four kinds are a symbol of the land of Israel, while the sukka reminds us of exile. The four kinds are a ritual of rain, while eating in the sukka depends on the absence of rain. Above all, though, there is the tension between the universality of nature and the particularity of history. There is an aspect of Sukkot – rainfall, harvest, climate – to which everyone can relate, but there is another – the long journey through the wilderness – that speaks to the unique experience of the Jewish people.
This tension between the universal and the particular is unique to Judaism. The God of Israel is the God of all humanity, but the religion of Israel is not the religion of all humanity. It is conspicuous that while the other two Abrahamic monotheisms, Christianity and Islam, borrowed much from Judaism, they did not borrow this. They became universalist faiths, believing that everyone ought to embrace the one true religion, their own, and that those who do not are denied the blessings of eternity. Extra ecclesiam non est salus, “Outside the church none is saved.”
Judaism disagrees. For this it was derided for many centuries, and to some degree still today. Why, if it represents religious truth, is it not to be shared with everyone? If there is only one God, why is there not only one way to salvation? There is no doubt that if Judaism had become an evangelizing, conversion-driven religion – as it would have had to, had it believed in universalism – there would be many more Jews than there are today. As I write, there are an estimated 2.4 billion Christians, 1.6 billion Muslims and only 13 million Jews. The disparity is vast.
Judaism is the road less traveled, because it represents a complex truth that could not be expressed in any other way. The Torah tells a simple story. God gave humans the gift of freedom, which they then used not to enhance creation but to endanger it. Adam and Eve broke the first prohibition. Cain, the first human child, became the first murderer. Within a remarkably short space of time, all flesh had corrupted its way on earth, the world was filled with violence, and only one man, Noah, found favor in God’s eyes. After the Flood, God made a covenant with Noah, and through him with all humanity, but after the hubris of the builders of the Tower of Babel, God chose another way. Having established a basic threshold in the form of the Noahide laws, He then chose one man, one family, and eventually one nation, to become a living example of what it is to exist closely and continuously in the presence of God. There are, in the affairs of humankind, universal laws and specific examples. The Noahide covenant constitutes the universal laws. The way of life of Abraham and his descendants are the example.
What this means in Judaism is that the righteous of all the nations have a share in the world to come (Sanhedrin 105a). In contemporary terms it means that our common humanity precedes our religious differences. It also means that by creating all humans in His image, God set us the challenge of seeing His image in one who is not in my image: whose color, culture, class and creed are not mine. The ultimate spiritual challenge is to see the trace of God in the face of a stranger.
Zechariah, in the vision we read as the Haftara for the first day, puts this precisely. He says that in the End of Days, “The Lord shall be King over all the earth; on that day the Lord shall be One and His name One” (1:49), meaning that all the nations will recognize the sovereignty of a single transcendent God. Yet at the same time Zechariah envisages the nations participating only in Sukkot, the most universal of the festivals, and the one in which they have the greatest interest since they all need rain. He does not envisage their becoming Jews, accepting the “yoke of the commands,” all 613 of them. He does not speak of their conversion. The practical outcome of this dual theology – the universality of God and the particularity of Torah – is that we are commanded to be true to our faith, and a blessing to others, regardless of their faith. That is the way of Abraham.
Shemini Atzeret reminds us of the intimacy Jews have always felt in the presence of God. The cathedrals of Europe convey a sense of the vastness of God and the smallness of humankind. The small synagogues of Tzefat, where Isaac Luria and Joseph Karo prayed, convey a sense of the closeness of God and the greatness of humankind. Jews, except when they sought to imitate the gentiles, did not build cathedrals. Even the Temple reached its greatest architectural grandeur under Herod, a man better known for his political ruthlessness than his spiritual sensibilities.
So, when all the universality of Judaism has been expressed, there remains something that cannot be universalized: that sense of intimacy with and closeness to God that we feel on Shemini Atzeret, when all the other guests have left. Shemini Atzeret is chamber music, not a symphony. It is quiet time with God. We are reluctant to leave, and we dare to think that He is reluctant to see us go. Justice is universal, love is particular. There are some things we share because we are human. But there are other things, constitutive of our identity, that are uniquely ours – most importantly our relationships to those who form our family. On Sukkot we are among strangers and friends. On Shemini Atzeret we are with family.
When the Temple stood, it was as if God had said to His people: Stop. Pause. Stand in My courtyard, in Jerusalem the holy city, and feel My presence in the quiet of the day, the still blue sky, and the breeze gently rustling the trees. And even though the Temple has not been rebuilt, and Israel remains surrounded by enemies, and all we have of the Temple Mount is a wall, the most abstract of all religious symbols, yet still today in Jerusalem you can feel the Divine Presence as nowhere else on earth, a presence that does not have to be announced with clarions, robes and rituals, and we know that though God is God of all the world, to us He is also father, husband, neighbor, shepherd, king, and we are His children, and this is our private time together, breathing each other’s being, blessed by the gift of being present to one another.