3 Dimensions of Time Intersecting in Shemini Atzeret & the Poetry of Louise Gluck

Shemini Atzeret has the special distinction of being all of the following:  1) The only holiday that has no official traditional explanation.  (Atzeret means some form of gathering, but we are left to speculate whether it's a special harvest ingathering, or a human gathering at the end of Sukkot, or a kind of makeup "extra day" of Sukkot for those who arrived late, but all these are speculative:  no reason is given.)  2)  It's still one of the four High Holidays (the others being Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot) and is a real holiday unto itself, and 3) It concluded the High Holiday period.  One dwells in the sukkah but does not say a blessing for doing so.  Shemini Atzeret is very special and odd.

In this short podcast, I try to explain it as the confluence of different ways of experiencing time.  Biblical scholars for decades have reflected on how the book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) views time as circular while the Torah and Prophets view time as linear (leading to a Messianic horizon).  In this podcast, I show how Sukkot is the ultimate "linear" experience of time, like traveling forward, and that Shemini Atzeret, with its signature chanting of Kohelet/Ecclesiastes, is the ultimate experience of circular time, and eternal time.  We go from living in the present moment to a very special eternal moment as the "finishing strong" of the entire High Holiday period.  I use Louise Gluck's (whose name I mispronounce -- it should be pronounces as "glik") poem "The Denial of Death" to make my point.