Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah 101

That's right! It's just about time to turn the pages back and start anew on the Torah reading cycle as we celebrate Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah. How much do you know about the traditions and customs to observe during the final days of the Sukkot festival? Here's a little primer from CHABAD.ORG.

These two days constitute a major holiday, when most forms of work are prohibited. On the preceding nights, women and girls light candles, reciting the appropriate blessings, and we enjoy nightly and daily festive meals, accompanied by the Kiddush. We don't go to work, drive, write, or switch electric devices on or off. We are permitted to cook and to carry outdoors (unless it is also Shabbat).

The first day, Shemini Atzeret, features the prayers for rain, officially commemorating the start of the Mediterranean (i.e., Israeli) rain season, and the Yizkor (prayer supplicating G‑d to remember the souls of the departed).

We no longer take the Four Kinds, and we no longer mention Sukkot in the day's prayers; in the Diaspora, however, we do still eat in the sukkah (but without reciting the blessing on the sukkah).

The highlight of the second day....well those can be found by clicking here.

My virtual time machine

You’ve gotta love technology. I say this without irony.

I’d been thinking about what to write for my first blog entry, but earlier this week scrapped all my ideas after hearing an audio recording of my grandparents’ Seder, circa 1966.

Until recently, I didn’t know the recording even existed. A cousin who lives in El Paso, Texas had taped it on a reel-to-reel machine. Not long ago, he had the recording transferred to a CD, and another cousin gave me a copy this past weekend.

Now, thanks to iTunes and my Apple laptop computer, I can hear my grandfather’s voice, the way it sounded when I was nine years old, at the tap of my trackpad.

Kiddush over the first cup of wine, interrupted by a young child’s babbling and the resulting giggles from the older children, is one of my favourite parts. Evidently Grandpa Reuben found it amusing too. He paused and sighed at the interruption, but couldn’t suppress a chuckle before picking up where he left off.

Forty-four years later, I’m transported by technology back to the ’60s and, when I think about it, even further back in time.

In 1904, my grandfather arrived in Canada, alone, a handsome 20-year-old with a distinctive way of speaking – his accent, inflection, and presumably the tunes he would use at our Seder, shaped by his childhood in a town near Zhitomir.

Now, 126 years after his birth, an increasing number of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren stay connected on Facebook. We still have the Seder together, initiated the last few years by a group e-mail.

And today, writing this blog for the first time, it occurs to me that Shehecheyanu – the blessing for a new or special occasion, which follows that first Kiddush on my new CD – might not be inappropriate.

Technology, IMHO, has much to offer.