I have long loved the Catholic method of dividing time; there are seasons: the Lenten season, the Advent season, and there is ordinary time. I think that our time, Jewish time, offers similar binaries. There is sacred time—Shabbat, our holidays and our festivals. And there is chol—the everyday, what the Catholic liturgical cycle calls: ordinary time. This binary makes sense; we literally make havdallah, a separation, between the two. It’s easy to live in these two, easy to live in sacred and not, or everyday and not. But Sukkot challenges us, physically and spiritually, to live for a bit betwixt and between—in time that is neither entirely holy nor entirely every day.
Chol HaMoed—literally means the everyday of the festival, the everyday of the sacred time. It refers to the days of our longer festivals—Passover and Sukkot—that fall between the bookends of the holiday. They are the days that are, indeed, betwixt and between. The rabbis wonder what one can and cannot do on chol hamoed, on these intermediate days. Using the framework of Shabbat and festivals, they are ultimately asking this question of: Are these days sanctified, or not? Given that it is our ancient sages, there is quite a discussion about this—but here’s my favorite answer. Rabbi Abba bar Mamel, who seems to be a bit of a cantankerous sort, says: “If I had a group of Sages to join me, I would annul Chol Hamoed… Why was Chol Hamoed given in the first place—was it not so that people would be able to eat and drink and toil in learning? Instead, they eat and drink and party!” Doesn’t sound half bad to me, but he is—of course—making a deeper point. It’s not about the time itself, he says, but what we make of it. We can degrade our sacred time, or we can uplift the ordinary. But the important thing is that WE do it. God can call the day holy, but only we can make it so. And in this time—the time that is neither sacred or everyday—we need to decide what to make of it.
— Rabbi Sari Laufer