Wild Mass Guessing
I’m reposting some of my work that was previously posted in other forums in order to gather it all in one place. This essay was originally posted on my “The Second Son” blogspot blog, October 12, 2009.
This post continues the comic book theme of the last couple of posts. I’ve returned to the comic book metaphor a bunch of times over the years.
The title is taken from here, and describes what happens when fans of a fictional work try to “fill in the logic holes and rationalize the weird.”
This was the phrase that sprang to mind recently when I read a short d’var Torah on Succos. The article started by asking, “Why do we sit in succos,” and, “Why is Succos in the fall?” To which the obvious answer is, ‘because it’s a harvest festival, and people camped out in huts in their fields while they were bringing in the harvest.’ [Succos was originally a summer fruit-harvest festival without a fixed date. It was held whenever the harvest was finished. That succos are modeled on huts farmers would use during the harvest is one of several possible explanations. I’ve since seen it suggested that the huts originated as temporary housing built outside of Yerushalayim by pilgrims visiting the Bais HaMikdash during Succos, and in time the huts came to be associated with the holiday and given significance. Or it may be a remnant of an older holiday, when people erected huts that served as temporary mini-temples on the flat roofs of their houses to honor the gods and thank them for the harvest. Like the theories that the huts were temporary housing for farmers or for pilgrims, this explains why you’re supposed to sleep in the succah. People slept on their roofs during the summer because it was cooler than inside their houses, and they continued to sleep on the roof inside the mini-temple hut during the holiday.] Of course, this isn’t at all spiritual, merely practical. The holiday, canonized in the chumash, has to have connections both to the miraculous past of the Bnei Yisroel and to glorifying God’s name. So various views were quoted, including a discussion of whether succos are a representation of the ananei hakavod or are a remembrance of actual huts which Klal Yisroel lived in while in the midbar; and whether succos is in the fall because that is when the Bnei Yisroel camped or because by living outside when it is getting cold we are showing that it’s because God commanded it and not because it’s fun to camp out.
If one accepts that Succos evolved from a harvest festival, the discussions among the meforshim seem kind of silly. They are an attempt to make Succos fit into a spiritual framework that probably wasn’t in place when the holiday first started, and into which it was never really molded. (Unlike, say, All Hollows Eve, which was a deliberate attempt by the Church to turn a pagan harvest festival involving spirits into a Christian holiday involving the dead.) These rabbonim, fans of the spiritual framework of Rabbinic Judaism, are engaging in wild mass guessing to fill in the holes.
For a long time, my initial reaction to any unfamiliar religious concept or practice I come across (and any I’m used to that I really start thinking about) is, “How did that get started?” Unfortunately, the traditional answers are often like the above d’var orah’s discussion of Succos: Wild Mass Guessing by various people attempting to construct something that makes sense out of various disparate parts, full of retcons and discontinuities, often bending over backwards to explain something that makes perfect sense when approached without preconceptions into which it needs to be made to fit. When it comes to how well these apologetics work, Your Mileage May Vary.
As the Wild Mass Guessing page says,
“Warning: Prolonged exposure to these pages will result in them making sense.”