Reply to What Jewish holiday is it today? WHat were people carrying on the way to temple?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why can’t you google it, instead of demanding Jewish people do labor for you on one of their high holidays?[/quote]

Yikes!  There is nothing wrong with asking a friendly question about a group comprising less than 2% of the American population.  Google is great, but learning from other humans is much more powerful.  Also, learning from an insider gives you different information than learning the formal answer to your question from various (sometimes conflicting) websites.  Finally asking an anonymous question on a forum that people can choose to ignore cannot be construed in any way as forcing another person to do emotional or intellectual labor for you.  Not everyone wants to educate other people about their ethnic / religious / political / whatever group but some people are happy to do so.  Those of us in that &quot;happy to educate&quot; category don't need anyone to speak for us.  There are things that you can only learn from another person - this may not be one of them - but it's still an innocent and reasonable question.

The best way to build a multicultural society is to reduce fear and misinformation and to encourage respectful communication, dialogue and education (from those *willing and interested* in that job).  Harshing on people for asking open and honest questions isn't particularly helpful to that project.  As a Jew, I care about whether people will stand up against things like misinformation, QAnon, Nazis, violent white supremacists.  I don't care about things like whether people I do not know and will never see again mistakenly say &quot;Merry Xmas&quot; in a country where &gt;98% of people celebrate Xmas or whether they ask me questions like this.  After all, I can probably provide a more interesting, contextual, funny, and enlightening response than Google.

To answer, it's the holiday of Sukkot (booths, tabernacles) and the plants in the bag are a palm branch (lulav), 3 myrtle branches (hadas), and 2 willows (aravot).  There's also a box with an etrog (citrus fruit).  During Sukkot services, these items are held together and shaken in 6 directions during certain prayers.

If it seems just a little bit pagan to for a religion that officially rejects paganism to be shaking items from the natural world in six directions during a harvest festival - I have no comment. :-) [/quote]

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