My younger son goes to a Jewish preschool and it is closed today and tomorrow for Sukkot. This is the harvest festival where we build (and supposedly move into) a wood hut outside and celebrate nature and the abundance of the harvest. The ceremonial fruits associated with this holiday are the lulav and the etrog. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of them, you wouldn’t have unless you’d celebrated this holiday….
Eric (and the rest of the family) loved to make fun of the lulav and the etrog. I mean why these fruits? I’m sure there is some reason that goes way, way back like in the rest of Judaism, but the meaning is completely lost on today’s children. Why not celebrate grapes and strawberries? Or any other fruit that we actually eat and might find in our refrigerators? Why are we teaching kids to be thankful for things they’ve never heard of?
I think in my house, were we to actually celebrate this holiday, we would have to go through the refrigerator and find the things we eat and discuss being grateful for those. Thank you for carrots and celery and cucumber. Thank you for apples and peaches and blueberries. Thank you for snow peas, broccoli and green beans. Thank you for bananas, pears and oranges. As for the lulav and etrog? Thanks for those too, I guess, but we’ll stick with what we can get.
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