Also known as the Feast of Tabernacles or the Feast of Booths, Sukkot recalls the years the Jews spent in the desert on their way to the Promised Land.
It marks the end of the harvest season and lasts for seven days, beginning five days after Yom Kippur.
The word "sukkot" meets hut, or booths, and families celebrate the festival by building a fragile hut or open-air structure to spend the festivity in.
The festival is set down in a passage in Leviticus, where God tells Moses "You shall live in booths seven days; all citizens in Israel shall live in booths, in order that future generations may know that I made the Israelite people live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt."
The interior of the hut is customarily decorated with the branches of the etrog (a citron fruit), a palm branch, a myrtle branch, and a willow branch, —plants referred to in the Torah as marking the festival—which are also waved about and shaken during the festivity.
This year, it begins at nightfall on September 23, taking place 11 days earlier than in 2017. It begins on the 15th day of Tishrei, the seventh month in the Jewish calendar.
It is one of the three pilgrimage festivals in the Jewish calendar, when Jews would visit the Temple in Jerusalem.
Dr Jonathan Sacks, the U.K.'s former Chief Rabbi, has described the festival's purpose "to remind ourselves of nature's powers of survival during the coming dark days of winter.
"And we sit in a sukkah, the tabernacle itself, which is just a shed, a shack, open to the sky, with just a covering of leaves for a roof. It's our annual reminder of how vulnerable life is, how exposed to the elements.
"And yet we call Sukkot our festival of joy, because sitting there in the cold and the wind, we remember that above us and around us are the sheltering arms of the divine presence.
If I were to summarise the message of Sukkot I'd say it's a tutorial in how to live with insecurity and still celebrate life."
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