The Feasts and the Fasts: Jewish Holidays from a Messianic Believer's Perspective

October is chock-full of Jewish holidays, including high holy days and a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. But as a Gentile believer, I’d never thought super deeply about these holidays until this year. I’m far from an expert, but here are a few things I’ve learned about each of the fall holidays (which occur on different dates each year since they are tracked by a lunisolar [moon and sun] calendar, not the Gregorian calendar!)

First up this year (year 5785) is Rosh Hashanah. Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year, also known as the Festival of Trumpets (Leviticus 23:23-25). This is meant to be an annual festival to honor God's creation of the universe and to renew relationship with him through the sounding of the shofar (ram's horn). It starts the high holy days/Days of Awe. According to the Talmud, this is also when the Book of Life and Book of Death are opened and people’s destinies are inscribed for the year to come. But this judgement is not final until after Yom Kippur.

Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement. The holiest day in Judaism, this is a solemn day where forgiveness is asked of one another and sacrifices are presented to the Lord as atonement for the sins of the year (Leviticus 23:26-32). It’s also when one’s fate for the next year is sealed, so there is a lot of fear and pressure surrounding this day. It’s also a solemn fast and there is absolutely no driving allowed – but you might see people walking or kids rollerblading down the highway!

Sukkot, or the Feast of Booths/Tabernacles, comes next (Leviticus 23:33-43). This week-long holiday commemorates when the Israelites lived in temporary shelters after being freed from slavery to the Egyptians. Leviticus dictates that the first and last days of this festival are holy days where one should do no work, so the first and last days of Sukkot are days off work.

Finally, the last day of Sukkot also marks Simchat Torah. Every year, every synagogue goes through the whole Torah (the first 5 books of the Old Testament). This day marks the end of that annual cycle.

I've only been here for about three months and I've learned so much already that I had no idea about before. It's incredible, but it's also shocking how two belief systems can take the same texts as holy but interpret them so differently. Judaism has the Talmud, essentially a written record of how rabbi have interpreted the Torah over the course of centuries. It holds nearly the same weight as the Torah does to devout Jews and it deeply impacts their interpretation of the Torah/Tanakh. Christianity has the New Testament, which greatly impacts how we look back on the Old Testament. These different sources lend vastly different perspectives on the source material and lead to really different views on these events. For example, Yom Kippur is an incredibly serious, solemn, and honestly fear-inducing holiday for many people here. Where for Believers, it's definitely still solemn, but there is so much hope and joy because Jesus's sacrifice on the cross means that we no longer have to repeat this ritual of sacrifices and pray for them to cover us for a year. Instead, our sins are permanently forgiven, covered, and removed from us because Jesus became the ultimate sacrificial lamb, then conquered sin and death by his resurrection. This is the hope of the Gospel – the removal of guilt, the covering of shame, the power to defeat the grave and grant eternal life. It’s fascinating to learn more about these various holiday and to see different perspectives on them, but if we forget that the lifeblood of these holidays is to point towards the future Messianic King Jesus, then we’ve missed the whole point. May God grant us eyes to see what he has for us in these holy days.