Not so far as I can tell.
what is a sukkah you ask?
Well its another very visible part of the holidays here in Israel , this is the good fun part after all the confessing of sins and repentance comes the celebration or sukkot festival. This is a command in the Bible found in Leviticus chapter 23 verses 39-44. to loosely paraphrase........ God commands that after our harvest we are to have a festival that starts with a day of rest and ends with a day of rest . We are to build little houses or tents and bring in choice fruit, palm fronds, thick branches and river willows to celebrate before our God......... How cool is that! It says there that The little tent houses are a reminder to the children of Israel of the time that God made them live in tents(sukkahs) after he brought them out of Egypt. we know that all these appointed times are about events that happened in the past but also have a present and future tense to them as well. Some would say that sukkot represents a future time when Messiah comes to live with us. There is this interesting future prophecy found in Zechariah 14:16 where it says "all the nations ...will go up every year to worship the king Adonai Tzva'ot and to keep the festival of Sukkot" . here is an interesting clip I found about the nations doing this now.
Zoe and I were on the bus with the mission to find the so called sukkah kits, when a nice Jewish man asked us if we were Canadian ..eh... and why we were here . We got to share a little about our journey so far and why we are wanting to learn and do these commandments for the appointed times. We had a lovely discussion about our discovery of the Sabbath and our Hewbrew roots we have through Yeshua . We were very aware that was a special conversation because he helped us with a reminder of the 4 species. ?????? What was that?????ok so lets go back to Leviticus 23: where it mentions the fruit, palm fronds, thick branches and river willows that's what it is. duh. we forgot all about it! well we are learning. Thankfully, he gave us some advice where to find this and what was too much to pay. yay! At the markets we found all this in little kits ready to go no problem but NO sukkahs kits .
Very frustrating , no other special sukkah materials anywhere except what we thought was a willow or reed mat they use for a roof or wall?
I have to admit I was getting a little discouraged , it was getting late I was hungry and tired, everywhere we asked some one sent us some where else. This market is so crazy too, I'm not used to all the people and stuff, I can barely handle going to cosco in Winnipeg, so I felt a little out of my league here. We even found a little spot to sit down then googled how to rent a sukkah in Jerusalem but that didn't work out very well either. It's amazing how a little snack , some juice . a rest and a little prayer can set you back on track. From our seat I spotted another shop I thought one last try, cause it looked like a hardware shop. Now those of you who know me well know I love hardware shops, my creative juices start to flow with all the bits of building materials and the possibility of a project. Admittedly This was no Home depot but Zoe and I decided to use what we could find in there to make due and we will build our sukkah from scratch.
Tomorrow we will build the sukkah , I know it will look a little strange compared to all the lovely Israeli ones we see every where but that's ok. We got the essential parts right and I feel God is teaching us so much in the doing of it all.
HOW HAPPY ARE THOSE WHO OBSERVE HIS INSTRUCTION,
WHO SEEK HIM WHOLEHEARTLY!
THEY DO NOTHING WRONG
BUT LIVE BY HIS WAYS.
YOU LAID DOWN YOUR PRECEPTS
FOR US TO OBSERVE WITH CARE.
MAY MY WAYS BE STEADY
IN OBSERVING YOUR LAWS.
THEN I WILL NOT BE PUT TO SHAME,
SINCE I WILL HAVE FIXED MY SIGHT ON ALL YOUR MITZVOT,
I THANK YOU WITH A SINCERE HEART
AS I LEARN YOUR RIGHTEOUS RULINGS.
I WILL OBSERVE YOUR LAWS;
DON'T COMPLETELY ABANDON ME!
psalms 119
UNTILL NEXT TIME
SHALOM
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