In Judaism there are three pilgrimage feastivals: Passover, Feast of Weeks and Feast of Tabernacles. These three holidays have many common features. The first resemblance is the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Jews pilgrimages to the temple have already taken place in biblical times, in order to endow for the dead and the living. Till this day Jerusalem remains an important pilgrimage centre, not only for Jews, but as well as for Christians and Muslims. Jerusalem is a renowned sacred place, also known as the Holy City. The second similarity between the three holidays is the relation to agriculture, due to the fact that they all originate from crop cultivation. Passover overlaps with harvesting barley, Feast of Weeks overlaps with harvesting wheat, meanwhile the Feast of Tabernacles represents the time of storing crop yield. Consequently, these holidays are also called the harvest festivals. The third common feature of the three festivals is a biblical justification. With the events, described in the Bible, the harvest holidays gained a new meaning. For Jews Passover presents the remembrance of the most important event in their history: the exit out of Egypt, when Moses took Israelis from the house of bondage. Feast of Weeks celebrates the receipt of Torah on the Mount Sinai. On the Feast of Tabernacles Jews remember the God’s protection, which the Israelis received after the exodus, during the pilgrimage through the desert. With these biblical events, the three festivals complete and upgrade each other.
In the past the three Jewish pilgrimage festivals had the same end point of pilgrimage, the temple in Jerusalem, where the endowed for the dead and the living. The temple, which has been built and demolished twice, presents the House of the Lord for the Jews. The Jews believed that the antecedent of the temple, the tent of meeting, was filled with sacred presence. Today, the only remain of the temple is the Western Wall or the Wailing Wall. The Western wall is the most religious site in the world for the Jewish people. They still believe in god’s presence, even though the temple is not there anymore. After the demolishment of the temple in the year 70 CE, a Rabbinic Judaism, which emphasizes Rabin’s role, synagogues and mishnah, was developed. These aspects formed as a result of an absence of the temple.
I have presented the three Jewish festivals, each one of them separately; their history and meaning, their customs and celebrating manners and their justification in the Bible. I have also presented pilgrimage in accordance with the theme of this Thesis. I have dedicated a part of the Thesis to the Jerusalem temple and presented its meaning, biblical history and its remains – the Wailing Wall.
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