Sukkot Part 1

Being in Jerusalem for Sukkot was something that I wanted to experience since our first trip to Israel in 2022. One evening when we were leaving the old city towards the end of our trip, I noticed that they were setting up booths. When I asked Ronnie, our tour guide, I was told that they were beginning to get ready for Sukkot. He said Sukkot was The Feast of Tabernacle and some people would eat and even sleep in these throughout the eight-day festival. This intrigued me, I remember reading in Leviticus that God told the people of Israel to celebrate the appointed festivals. I knew that they still observed Passover, but I didn’t realize that Jews around the world still held all the appointed times that are spoken of in the Bible. It made me think of all the places in scripture that stated “and it is there to this day” I was blessed to see several of these places spoken of on that first trip. But God stirred something bigger in my heart, a desire to know more. That led me to dig deeper into my studies when we returned home. God began to open the scriptures to me in a whole new light. I began studying the feast. That’s when I found Rabbi Jason Sobel, a messianic Rabbi who has written several great books and Bible studies. His teaching showed me that Jesus can be seen throughout the entire Bible. I learned more about the appointed times and realized then that if Jesus is Jewish, and his disciples are Jewish, then shouldn’t we be studying scripture with that in mind. Reading scripture through Jewish eyes has been mind-blowing. As Rabbi Soble says, “it is like reading the Bible in HD”, and it is.  

After October the seventh Michael and I planned a trip back to Israel to do whatever we could to help. We found a solidarity and volunteer trip with Authentic Israel and made plans to return at the end of May. I remember praying, asking God to reveal to me how to show love to his people, and to help me understand what it was like for my Jewish brothers and sisters. And just like that, God placed us in an amazing group of twenty-eight people, five Christians and twenty-three Jews. Little did I know this trip would change our lives!