The last day of Sukkot, also known as Hoshana Rabba (הוֹשַׁעְנָא רַבָּא — “the great hoshana or supplication”), is celebrated today (Friday). It is the climax of our prayers of gratitude and praise for the bounty of our lives that makes up the core of the Sukkot liturgy.
At sundown this evening, we begin both our celebration of Shabbat as well as Sh’mini Atzeret — a Biblical holiday that seems to have functioned in some ways as an additional, eighth day of Sukkot. The pilgrims who had journeyed to Jerusalem for the festival weren’t quite ready to go home, weren’t quite prepared to say “goodbye” to the celebration and so they “tarried” for an extra day.
Later generations added the additional holiday of Simchat Torah to this cycle. In some ways it has become the most joyous part of the entire celebration because its focus is on our repository of wisdom: our Torah. On Simchat Torah we complete our reading of the Five Books of Moses and then, in classic Jewish tradition, we immediately begin anew right back at the start of Genesis with the story of creation.
In this is a great lesson: our learning never stops. We are never finished with the study of Torah. We are never done growing.
This is my forty-third year as your Cantor. I am still learning from our tradition, from my colleagues, and from you—my congregation. I am still growing, still developing, still becoming. May it always be so and we all go, in Torah, from strength to strength.
— Cantor Nathan Lam