The Feast of Tabernacles is kind of an odd celebration. My daughter had an idea for teaching her kids about Sukkot or the Feast of Tabernacles — she helped them make miniature “temporary shelters.” Take a nature walk with your kids and collect various items for your mini sukkot. (Acorn caps, berries, palm, bark, nuts, seeds, pebbles, rocks….)
The Hebrew word sukkōt is the plural of sukkah, “booth” or “tabernacle“, which is a walled structure covered withs’chach (plant material such as overgrowth or palm leaves). A sukkah is the name of the temporary dwelling in which farmers would live during harvesting, a fact connecting to the agricultural significance of the holiday stressed by the Book of Exodus. As stated in Leviticus, it is also intended as a reminiscence of the type of fragile dwellings in which the Israelites dwelt during their 40 years of travel in the desert after the Exodus from slavery in Egypt. Throughout the holiday, meals are eaten inside the sukkah and many people sleep there as well. (wikipedia)
The Feast of Booths
…39‘On exactly the fifteenth day of the seventh month, when you have gathered in the crops of the land, you shall celebrate the feast of the LORD for seven days, with a rest on the first day and a rest on the eighth day.40‘Now on the first day you shall take for yourselves the foliage of beautiful trees, palm branches and boughs of leafy trees and willows of the brook, and you shall rejoice before the LORD your God for seven days. 41You shall thus celebrate it as a feast to the LORD for seven days in the year. It shall be a perpetual statute throughout your generations; you shall celebrate it in the seventh month.… (Leviticus 23: 39-41)
More Reading about Sukkot
