The Purpose of Jewish Feasts

A feast celebrates the positive character of existence. In the face of evil and pain, feasts proclaim the goodness of creation and the freedom to enjoy the world because God made it. A feast is a statement that the world is a good place because human beings can enjoy it and because God made it. Unwittingly, and prior to any reflection on the point, the celebrants of a feast relate their activity to independent but interrelated poles: human beings, the world, and God-human beings as subjects who are good, the world as an object that is good, and the divinity as the foundation of the two goodnesses. A feast brings out the fact that the world is good and human beings can dwell in it as their native place because it is willed by and founded on the sacred. Here is the heart and secret of every feast; in the celebration of a feast we reappropriate, beyond and despite appearance, the positive character of existence as a space filled with fruition and making. Feasts As Rejection of the Neg…