Gathering the Light: Chag Ha’Asif (Sukkot)
Every Jewish holiday bears more than one name, each revealing another dimension of its meaning. Passover is also Chag HaMatzot, the Festival of Unleavened Bread, and Zman Cheruteinu, the Season of Our Freedom. So too, Sukkot has many names: Chag HaSukkot, the Festival of Booths; Zman Simchateinu, the Season of Our Joy; and, perhaps less familiarly, Chag Ha’Asif – the Festival of Gathering.
In the Torah, this name is agricultural. Sukkot marked the ingathering of the harvest, the moment when farmers gathered the fruits of their labor before the rainy season began. The pilgrimage festivals were rooted in the land’s rhythms: planting, ripening, reaping, and gathering. Judaism was never meant to be detached from the physical world. It is a tradition of bodies, seasons, food, weather, work, and gratitude.
But Jewish life has unfolded across centuries and continents, often far from the Land of Israel. And one of the gifts of Torah is that its meanings continue to deepen. “Asif” is not only the gathering of crops. It can also be the gathering of people, memories, courage, and blessing.
Jewish mysticism offers one more beautiful way to hear this word. The Zohar speaks of God as “sovev kol almin,” the One who surrounds all worlds: a divine presence beyond our ability to contain or define. It also speaks of God as “memale kol almin,” the One who fills all worlds: the sacred life-force flowing through every dimension of creation, including our own lives.
Sukkot invites us to gather in that divine energy.
We step into the sukkah, a fragile structure open to the sky. We take the lulav and etrog into our hands. We shake them in every direction, as if to say: the holiness we seek is not elsewhere. It surrounds us. It is before us and behind us, above us and below us. And, somehow, it can become more alive within us.
Bring the etrog close. Notice its fragrance. Let the ritual be physical, immediate, real. Sukkot is not an escape from the body; it is a celebration of embodied Jewish life. We eat, smell, sing, welcome guests, and inhabit a sacred space that reminds us how vulnerable and how held we are.
After the searching of Rosh Hashanah and the intensity of Yom Kippur, Sukkot asks us to gather what those days have awakened in us: more tenderness, more courage, more light. Not so that we might blind anyone else, but so that we might illuminate the world around us.
May this Chag Ha’Asif help us gather in the sparks of holiness already surrounding us – and then carry and share that light wherever we go.
