“The special power of the festival of Sukkot to nullify idolatry from the world.” In a shiur that unfolded the whole sweep of Jewish history — from Abraham down to Ezra the Scribe — Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto, shlit’a, revealed why the booths of Sukkot carry a strength found in no other day, and how the joy of the sukkah is the sign that G-d forgave our people for the sin of the golden calf.
Thank G-d, let us open a great principle in the Torah, one that lifts the soul and helps us understand the essence of Sukkot. To grasp what the festival gives us, the Rabbi said, we must first walk through the story of the people of Israel — because Sukkot is not merely a remembrance of tents in the desert. It is the seal of an atonement, and the weapon with which idolatry itself was once removed from the world.
From the Fathers to the Egyptian Exile
The Rabbi began at the beginning. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — the holy fathers. Jacob went down with twelve signs, the twelve tribes. The brothers struggled among themselves and descended into Egypt, where Joseph rose to become second in the land and sustained the family. Then our father Jacob passed away, and the twelve children with him, and the children of Israel entered into slavery in the land of Egypt.
For two hundred and ten years the children of Israel were enslaved in Egypt. After two hundred and ten years, the Holy One, blessed be He, brought them out — with the ten plagues, the splitting of the Red Sea, and the festival of Passover. Then forty years in the desert, and after forty years they entered the land of Israel. For seven years Joshua son of Nun conquered the land, and for seven years he divided it — fourteen years in all.
The Judges, the Prophets, and the House of David
After Joshua there were the Judges, who judged the people of Israel. After the Judges there were the Prophets. Then Samuel the Prophet appointed Saul as king — and when Saul sinned, David became king. David slowly established himself and took hold of his kingdom. He captured Jerusalem and sanctified it as the capital city of the people of Israel.
The Rabbi paused here on a remarkable point. In all of the Written Torah — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy — the name Jerusalem is not written. It was King David who took Jerusalem, made it the capital of Israel, and began the first excavations to prepare the ground for the Holy Temple. On the other hand, he gathered the money with which his son Solomon would build it. David passed away, and Solomon became king at the age of eight, and he built the Holy Temple.
The First Holy Temple stood for five hundred and twenty years. But the children of Israel sinned. They transgressed, they did what was evil in the eyes of the L-rd, and they practiced avodah zarah — idolatry. The Prophet Jeremiah came and said: G-d will destroy this house. No one believed him. How could it be, the people thought, that the Holy Temple could be destroyed? There was no such reality as a destroyed Holy Temple. And in the end, the Holy Temple was destroyed, and the children of Israel went into exile for seventy years.
The Return of Ezra the Scribe
For seventy years we were in Iraq, in Babylon, and then in Persia — the whole story of Ahasuerus and Esther. After the days of Ahasuerus and Esther, the people began to ascend to the land of Israel. Ezra the Scribe came up, the man who arranged the Torah scroll and fixed the weekly portions for the people of Israel — one of the greatest figures in the history of Israel. With him was Nehemiah, who was more of a military man, appointed by the king of Persia, the one who carried out Ezra’s word; for those who would not do things the pleasant way, Nehemiah would do them the hard way.
But, the Rabbi noted, those who ascended were not the elite of the nation. As the Gemara teaches in tractate Sanhedrin, ten lineages ascended from Babylon, and among them were illegitimate ones. The great and the important stayed behind in Babylon and Persia — they had homes, businesses, and holdings. And those who did go up were intermarried with non-Jewish women, desecrated the Shabbat, and were far from everything they should have been close to.
A Jew — his heart is Jewish. No matter how far a Jew may have drifted, in one moment his heart awakens and is drawn close to G-d, with a closeness second to none.
The Prophet tells what happened. One day, on Rosh Hashanah, when many had already begun to ascend to Jerusalem, Ezra the Scribe sat at one of the gates, in one of the courtyards of Jerusalem, and began to read from the Torah. “In the beginning G-d created the heavens and the earth…” The people were so disconnected that they did not know what he was reading; they did not understand it. Slowly, from morning until midday, he read the Torah to them. It was the first day of Rosh Hashanah, and the people began to weep — weeping and weeping, without end.
Ezra said to them: Excuse me — today is Rosh Hashanah, and it is forbidden to cry. Go to your homes; eat and drink, eat rich foods and drink sweet drinks, eat, drink and be happy, for it is Rosh Hashanah. And they all went home, ate and drank, and rejoiced.
“They Had Not Done So Since the Days of Joshua”
The next day the leaders — the heads of the families — came to Ezra the Scribe and asked him to continue teaching them Torah. And as they read, reading and reading, they suddenly discovered that there is a festival called Sukkot, and the Holy Torah commands it. At that moment they stopped and said: this year, we will celebrate the festival of Sukkot. They had not observed Sukkot for many years.
And the Prophet says in Nehemiah: “And the children of Israel made booths that year, for they had not done so since the days of Joshua the son of Nun.” The Rabbi pointed to a subtle detail: the verse is written Yeshua son of Nun, without the letter heh — as though something were missing. And the commentators were astonished. Did King David not observe Sukkot? Did King Solomon not observe Sukkot? All the holy ones of Israel — Samuel the Prophet, all the great figures — surely they observed Sukkot. What is the verse coming to teach, that from the days of Joshua until Ezra, for almost a thousand years, Israel did not make Sukkot?
Five hundred and twenty years the House stood, seventy years it lay in ruins, centuries of Prophets — and no Sukkot for a thousand years? How can such a thing be imagined? And yet it is written in the Prophets. Then they made Sukkot — a great Sukkot — and there had not been a Sukkot like it since the days of Joshua son of Nun.
The Gemara in tractate Sukkah asks the question directly: Did David not make Sukkot? Did Solomon not make Sukkot? Did Saul not make Sukkot? And the Gemara answers: for during the festival of Sukkot they took the evil inclination for idolatry and killed it.
The Killing of the Evil Inclination for Idolatry
The Rabbi explained. There was a period in the world when people bowed down to idols. One person believed in the sun: he would wake in the morning, bow to the sun, pray to the sun. Another worshipped a cow — that was his god. Another sanctified a tree. And some would sanctify a human being and say of him, “this is a god.” Everyone believed in something else; everyone was enslaved to some form of idolatry. That was the great, overwhelming evil inclination of the age — to worship other powers instead of the Holy One, blessed be He.
And so the Gemara relates that Ezra the Scribe and his court engaged in fasts, afflictions, holy acts and great mystical labors, and they killed the evil inclination for idolatry. They offered powerful prayers — and out of the Holy of Holies, from the holiest place, there emerged something like a small cub, like a lion’s whelp. They seized it: that was the evil inclination for idolatry. They shut it in a container of iron and put it to death — and that is where idolatry ended in the world. From that time on, people no longer bowed to the sun, nor the moon, nor the stars, nor anything.
And when the Sages saw that they had succeeded, they wished to abolish the evil inclination for forbidden relations as well. The Gemara says they caught it and shut it away in iron too — and for three days, not even a single egg was laid in all the land of Israel. The rooster no longer sought the hen; no creature sought another. The Sages stood up and said: the world cannot exist this way. So they blinded it — and released it. And because they took out its eyes, a person has no natural desire for his daughter or his mother; such a thing is a sign of illness. Then they knew they had gone too far.
Why Joshua Son of Nun Is Held Responsible
On this principle, the Rabbi returned to what happened in the days of Ezra. Why is Joshua son of Nun held responsible for not having killed the evil inclination for idolatry? Looking through all of history, what caused the people of Israel their troubles? Two principal things: idolatry, and baseless hatred. When Joshua entered the land of Israel, he should have uprooted the evil inclination for idolatry. It was that inclination that led to the sin of the golden calf; it was that inclination that brought upon us all those difficult days. The fact that he did not abolish it is registered against him.
But when Ezra the Scribe came, he had the power of Sukkot with which to abolish that idolatry. And what is the special power of Sukkot?
The Sukkah: The Sign That Idolatry Was Forgiven
It is known that when the Holy One, blessed be He, gave the Torah to the children of Israel at Mount Sinai, it was on the sixth of Sivan — seven weeks after we left Egypt. The Holy One, blessed be He, gave us the Torah. And after G-d gave us the Torah, the next day Moses our teacher ascended to heaven to bring down the Tablets of the Covenant, and he remained there forty days and forty nights. On the fortieth day — the seventeenth of Tammuz — Moses came down. And what did the children of Israel do? They made the calf, bowed to it, and said: “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.”
The Gemara says this was a despicable thing — like a wedding canopy under which the groom turns away and the bride betrays him the instant his back is turned. G-d gave you the Torah forty days ago, and forty days later you say of a calf, “these are your gods, O Israel”? The Holy One, blessed be He, was angry with Israel and wished to destroy them, and Moses stood and prayed for forgiveness again and again.
On the first of Elul, G-d told Moses to ascend and bring down the second Tablets. Moses went up for forty days, and he came down on Yom Kippur — and since then, Yom Kippur has been the day of forgiveness for the people of Israel: “For on this day He shall atone for you, to cleanse you from all your sins; before the L-rd you shall be cleansed.”
So Yom Kippur is the day of forgiveness that wiped away the sin of idolatry. And what happened after Yom Kippur? Two days later, the people of Israel donated money to build the Mishkan, the Tabernacle — and two days after that came the festival of Sukkot. The Holy One, blessed be He, had already given the people of Israel Sukkot; He had given them the joy of the sukkah, and the children of Israel built a sukkah.
Therefore, the Rabbi taught, the sukkah is the symbol that G-d forgave us for idolatry — the symbol that He forgave us for the sin that the children of Israel committed with the golden calf.
The Joy of the Sukkah and the Power of the Festival
This, then, is the great power within the festival of Sukkot. It is why Ezra the Scribe was able, precisely in those days, to destroy and remove the power of idolatry from the world. When the children of Israel sat in their sukkot that year and rejoiced, they were not merely remembering the wilderness — they were celebrating the atonement that follows Yom Kippur, and drawing down a strength that had not been seen since the days of Joshua son of Nun.
And so, as we sit in the sukkah this year, we are invited to enter that same joy: the joy of a people forgiven, purified, and drawn close — and to draw from the festival its special power to uproot every false worship from our own hearts, and to sanctify the One who brought us out of Egypt and gave us His Torah.
May the Holy One, blessed be He, grant us the joy of the sukkah, the joy of forgiveness, and the closeness of a heart that returns — in the merit of Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto, shlit’a, and of all Israel who sit beneath the shade of His faithfulness.
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