Jewish Holidays: A Beginner's Tour of the Jewish Year

Maybe a coworker is out for two days in the fall with no explanation beyond "the holidays." Maybe your child's class calendar lists names you half-recognize — Sukkot, Shavuot, Tu BiShvat — and you would like to know what your neighbors are actually celebrating.

It helps to learn it the way it is actually lived: not as a list, but as a turning year with a rhythm — a weekly rest at its center, great pilgrim festivals in their seasons, solemn fasts and joyful minor holidays in between.

Start with Shabbat: the weekly holiday

Every tour should start with the holiday that comes every week. Shabbat, the Sabbath, runs from sunset Friday to nightfall Saturday, and commemorates both God's rest after creation and the Exodus from Egypt. Observant Jews refrain from work in its many forms — driving, writing, using electricity and phones, handling money — and the day fills instead with prayer, unhurried meals, singing, study, and family.

Shabbat is no warm-up act: it is the most frequently kept holy time in Judaism and the template for all the rest. The Friday table — candles lit before sunset, wine blessed, braided challah under its cloth — is the image of Jewish celebration at its most characteristic.

Autumn: the High Holidays and Sukkot

The festival year begins in the autumn month of Tishrei, with the season Jews simply call the High Holidays. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, opens ten days of reflection marked by the sounding of the shofar, a ram's horn, and festive meals with apples dipped in honey for a sweet year. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, closes the ten days: a fast of about twenty-five hours and a full day of prayer devoted to repentance, forgiveness, and beginning again. Together the two are the most widely observed days of the Jewish year.

Five days after Yom Kippur comes Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles or Booths, one of the three pilgrimage festivals of ancient Israel. For a week, meals are eaten in a sukkah, a temporary hut with a roof of branches open enough to see the stars, recalling the shelters of the Israelites in the wilderness. A bundle of four species — palm branch, myrtle, willow, and the citron fruit — is waved in prayer each day. Sukkot ends with Simchat Torah, "Rejoicing in the Torah," when the annual cycle of Torah reading is finished and immediately begun again, and congregations dance with the scrolls.

Winter: Hanukkah and Tu BiShvat

Hanukkah is, strictly speaking, a minor festival: not a biblical pilgrimage holiday, work is permitted on it, and it lasts eight days in late November or December. It is also, thanks to its timing near Christmas, by far the most visible Jewish holiday in North America — a beloved, home-centered celebration of the rededication of the Temple in Jerusalem in the second century BCE, and of the oil for its lamp that tradition says burned eight days instead of one. Families light one more candle each night on the nine-branched hanukkiah, eat foods fried in oil such as latkes and jelly doughnuts, play dreidel, and exchange modest gifts.

Six weeks later comes Tu BiShvat, the fifteenth of Shevat, traditionally the new year for trees. Once a date for calculating tithes of fruit, it is now a day for planting trees, eating fruits of the land of Israel — figs, dates, pomegranates, olives, grapes — and reflecting on care for the natural world.

Late winter: Purim

Purim, in the month of Adar, is the year's carnival. It retells the book of Esther: how Queen Esther and her cousin Mordecai foiled Haman, the villain who plotted to destroy the Jews of Persia. The scroll of Esther, the megillah, is read aloud in synagogue, and every time Haman's name is spoken the congregation drowns it out with noisemakers and booing. The day is kept with costumes, gifts of food sent to friends, charity to the poor, a festive meal, and triangular filled cookies called hamantaschen.

Spring: Passover and Shavuot

Passover, Pesach in Hebrew, is the other great anchor of the year, kept for seven days in Israel and eight in most diaspora communities. It retells the Exodus: the slavery in Egypt, the plagues, and the departure so hurried that the bread had no time to rise. That last detail rules the holiday — for the whole festival, no leavened bread or related grains are eaten; the flat cracker-like bread on the table is matzah. The centerpiece is the seder, a carefully ordered meal at which the Exodus is retold from a book called the Haggadah, with four cups of wine, symbolic foods, and the youngest child asking the Four Questions.

Seven weeks after Passover comes Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, the second of the three pilgrimage festivals. It marks the end of the grain harvest and, in tradition, the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai — which is why many spend part of the night in study, and why the book of Ruth is read. Its signature food is cheesecake, along with other dairy dishes.

Summer: Tisha B'Av and the minor fasts

Tisha B'Av, the ninth of the month of Av, is a full fast day mourning the destruction of both the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, both traditionally dated to this day, along with other tragedies of Jewish history. The book of Lamentations is read by low light, sitting on the floor or on low stools. It closes a three-week period of increasing mourning that begins with a smaller fast, the Seventeenth of Tammuz.

Several minor fasts, each lasting from dawn to nightfall rather than a full twenty-five hours, are scattered through the year: the Fast of Gedaliah just after Rosh Hashanah, the Tenth of Tevet, the Fast of Esther before Purim, and the Seventeenth of Tammuz. Together they form a quiet thread of memory running underneath the festivals.

Why the holidays move: the Hebrew calendar

All of these dates are fixed — on the Hebrew calendar. That calendar is lunisolar: its months follow the moon, but leap years keep it aligned with the seasons by adding an entire extra month, a second Adar, seven times in every nineteen-year cycle. So Jewish holidays move within a window of about a month on the Gregorian calendar but never drift through the seasons. Passover is always in spring; Sukkot always follows the autumn harvest.

Hence the old joke that the Jewish holidays are "early" or "late" this year, never on time. The gentle truth is that they are never late at all: Rosh Hashanah is always the first of Tishrei. It is the Gregorian calendar that meets the holidays in a slightly different place each year. If you would like to see the year laid out whole, you can Explore Judaism in Faith Map, where the Judaism track works from the Hebrew calendar and reading and lessons are free.