The end of the Jewish harvest festival, Sukkot, is near. The annual holiday, when Jews build temporary huts known as sukkahs and eat, celebrate and in some cases, sleep under them, ends tomorrow night, Sept. 27. Many Jews throughout St. Louis built...

Sukkot is one of Judaism’s three pilgrimage festivals, when our ancestors trekked to the temples in Jerusalem to make sacrifices. Now, many Orthodox Jews in the New York area make a different sort of holiday pilgrimage — to amusement parks. During...

Sukkot 2021 sure does feel a bit more like Sukkot 2020 than I thought it would a few months ago. We are still in the midst of a pandemic, still physically distancing, still not seeing each other’s lips. Luckily, a sukkah is mainly an open, outdoor...

Given the ongoing concerns about COVID-19 and the fact that gathering outdoors is considered safer than indoors, Sukkot and its huts have provided the perfect circumstances for celebrations. Plenty of St. Louis Jews built sukkahs this year — some...

I was sitting with the truthful linguist, the Sefat Emet, the Gerer, just before he became nifter, er dead, it must have been ’04, maybe ’05 [note: 1905]. The sukkah is a chuppah, he opened with. We wedded God on the way out of Egypt. I am the...

Last spring, Bob Kaiser, a member of Nusach Hari B’nai Zion and Olivette resident, spoke with a Muslim neighbor who had just finished celebrating Ramadan. Kaiser learned that they both missed the same thing: community. “There are lessons from COVID,...

Parashat Haazinu (Deuteronomy 32:1-52) finds Moses calling on heaven and earth to witness his words. Moses begins by thanking the Almighty and describes the special care afforded the people of Israel. To his disappointment, the people have consistently...