Sukkot in Vermont

My family was never very up on Jewish customs. We celebrated only Rosh Hashanah with a special meal the night before and on Yom Kippur we fasted - well as best we could. My dad usually just slept the whole day and got up when the fast was over and had dinner! He actually worked very hard all the time and this was a good holiday for him. He had not got along too well with his own father as he told it and seemed to hold it against Judaism for that and for a difficult life altogether. He never had his Bar Mitzvah and seemed to resent that too. Nevertheless, we had a very happy homelife, but we grew up in a vacuum of Jewish tradition. This changed when my mom died and my father followed her a few years later. It was sad in our house where it had been happy and I didn't want to stay there with my brother. Israel was in the news as they defeated the Arabs that surrounded them. It was David and Goliath and the world celebrated their victory with them. I felt proud for them and I decided to take a break from the sadness at home and visit Israel with my brother for a  while. It turned out to be four years! Meanwhile, I had married an Israeli girl and my son was born. He now has three children who were also born there in Israel. As a result, I have a very different view of what Judaism is and what the holidays mean.

I can relate to the Sinai desert now, having lived very close to it. I can understand what it was to wander forty years there before finding  the much better living conditions further north. People take water and vegetation for granted when it is all around them as it is in most of the temperate areas of our world. When you live on the desert, you see things differently. You thank heaven for a few drops of water and for any kind of food. The roots of the Jewish people are way back there in the desert of Sinai. A new slant on a  "wandering people"  eh?  Perhaps restarting then on this this "learn as you go" version of an ancient yet totally new and unique religiion, keeping its records and carefully marking oases and divine pheneomena so that their grandchildren and their grandchildren might have it a bit easier!
Well, I didn't build a special structure, I used a shed I had put up for sheltering tools and machinery against the winter snows. I did, though, say my candle prayer for the holiday, which was a first for me and I ate a donut instead of dipping "challah" in honey, but it worked for me. Reaching back thousands of years, with the help of memories of a Bedouin tent we'd sat in many years ago, I could just about see the early Israelites celebrating their good fortune in the midst of all that sand for enough water and perhaps some fruit and a small shelter to protect them against the cold of the desert night.
"The palm tree will provide for you!"