The Sukka will rise again..

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A more accurate historical record of the Maccabean war is found in the Second Book of Maccabees. This book, written for Jews who lived outside the land of Israel, was composed around 120 BCE – about 300 years after the first Chanukah. The Second Book of Maccabees explains that the mitzvah of celebrating eight days of Hanukkah was actually invented as a substitute for celebrating the eight days of Sukkot. It does not mention the “Miracle of Oil” story.

This “Second Sukkot” story teaches that when the Maccabees recaptured the Temple in Jerusalem, they worked removed the idols and broke apart the altars. They built new altars out of new uncut stones, polished the special holy bowls and tools, put new loaves of challah on the table and hung the curtains. Then they were ready to celebrate. It was winter; Sukkot was long past. King Antiochus, who had forbidden Jews to study Torah or circumcise the male babies, also prohibited Jews from participating in Sukkot celebrations (one of three important pilgrimage holidays). With the Temple holy again, each Maccabee took an etrog and a lulav and made a special, mid-winter celebration of Sukkot. This was the first celebration of Chanukah. Note that Chanukah, like Sukkot, lasts eight days. The message of this “Second Sukkot” account is clear: Judaism is so important that, if necessary, Jews will create new ways to observe our Jewish tradition.

See: https://orami.org/chanukah-as-a-second-sukkot/

see also: https://www.eshelonline.org/rebooting-hanukkah/

The traditional custom is not to recite the prayer known as Avinu Malkenu on Yom Kippur when it falls on Shabbat.

This past Friday night, though, right after Kol Nidre and before the rest of the evening service, someone stood up to announce that the community’s leadership had decided (as did many other synagogues in Israel this year) that we would recite it.

No one needed an explanation, for everyone there knew what Avinu Malkenu says:

Our father, our King, nullify the plans of those who hate us.

Our father, our King, thwart the counsel of our enemies ....

Our father, our King, tear up the evil decree against us. ...

Our father, Our King, be gracious to use and answer us ... and save us.

But the person announcing the change still felt an explanation was in order. She started to say something, stopped, and started to cry.

The explanation was dropped. What was there, really, to say, when nothing at all needed explaining?

From Daniel Gordis _ Israel from the inside on Substack.

“Az Nashir - We Will Sing Again: Women’s Prayers for Our Time of Need,” is an anthology of prayers written by Jewish women in Israel addressing the unique experiences and urgent issues correlated to living in Israel today in a post-October 7th world.

Written by female Torah scholars, teachers, spiritual leaders, activists, poets, writers, and masters of artistic expression, these prayers have given voice to the myriad of complex emotions, ideas, needs, and hopes that have arisen in our time.

This siddur-companion follows in the footsteps of our ancestors, emulating a long tradition of Jewish women writing their own tefillot, techinot, and piyutim, an organic outpouring of our hearts, in our own mother tongues.

Every prayer is presented in both Hebrew and English, side by side, to allow as many Jewish women as possible to access the depths of these texts in their own language of calling out to the Divine.

Israelis, I think, are really at a moment of despair and part of it is just the nature of the region. The nature of the region was really made apparent to us on October 7th. There's just no way to ignore it.

The kibbutzim along the Gaza border as a kind of metaphor, kibbutzim that are full of people who are from the left fringe even of Israeli society, people who believe in peace, people who are in some cases driving Palestinian kids from Gaza to Israeli hospitals and those people are slaughtered by their neighbors in Gaza. So there's really not much left in that old dream that lasted up until 2000 of a peaceful resolution.

At the same time, I think we're seeing the limits of military power. We've been in Gaza for a year. We've been hitting Hamas for a year. And yesterday they fired rockets from Gaza. So there's also a sense that the limits of military power have been reached.

And one of the most striking moments at the families ceremony on October 7th was when Jonathan Shamriz, who's this young man who I mentioned, the brother of a hostage who was killed in Gaza, when he spoke and he's speaking from the heart, and the crowd, which included Israelis across the political spectrum, as far as I could see, it was really kind of a cross-section of everyone who's been hurt by the war.

He said, we have no leadership and we have no vision. And that's a hundred percent true. I mean, I think you can discuss whether or not the Netanyahu government has done a good job of running the war, but there's no question that Netanyahu is a leader who is unable to provide a hopeful vision for the people who live here. He’s a very dark character. He sees threats and claims to be the best person to deal with the threats, but he has no hope to offer a country whose national anthem is literally called The Hope. Hatikva means the hope. Zionism is based on the hope of a better future for the Jewish people, and we have a very dark leadership that isn't doing one of the most basic things that you're supposed to do in a war, as Winston Churchill would tell you, which is provide your people with a vision of a better future. Tell them why they're fighting. Tell them that things are bad now, but they'll be better in the future and say that in a way that people believe in. And Netanyahu has been unable to do that. And I think that's part of the darkness in Israeli society.

But at the same time, in that ceremony, which I encourage listeners to find, you can find it online, you see this young guy who's speaking and he ends his speech, which is a critique of the leadership, a statement that we have no vision, a call for a commission of inquiry into what happened on October 7th, which still has not happened. Most of the people who were in charge of the country on October 7th and in charge of the army are still in charge. And Israelis have not been given good answers about how that could have happened. And the people responsible have, for the most part, not paid the price for what happened. So he's giving this very dark comment on the state of our society a year into this war.

And he ends by saying, what we're seeing now is the birth of the new Israeli generation, that that is not just resilient, but is incredibly powerful and it's the generation that we're seeing now fighting in Gaza and in Lebanon, an incredible young generation. And he ended his speech by saying, get up, Am Yisrael Chai, the people of Israel live. So it's a dark statement about our leadership, but it's a statement of pure Zionism. So I think that you can see kind of a despair about the government, but an incredible energy that's bubbling in Israeli society at this moment of crisis. And our hope is that that energy can somehow be channeled into political change and a better leadership that can take us out of this moment of crisis and into the future.

Interview with Matti Friedman by Dan Senor on Call Me Back podcast: https://arkmedia.org/podcast/episode-271