In the heart of Parashat Emor, nestled among the laws of the priesthood, God commands something remarkable. He gives us time itself — not merely seasons, but Moadei Adonai, appointed meetings, sacred convocations. מִקְרָאֵי קֹדֶשׁ — holy callings. The word “Moed” shares its root with “ed,” a witness. Each festival is not simply a date on the calendar. It is a moment in which Israel is summoned to witness something together.
Passover. Shavuot. Sukkot. Three pilgrimage festivals. Three times each year, every Jew in the land was commanded to leave home — to go up to Jerusalem, to be seen, to gather together as a family, indeed as the entire extended Jewish family. The Torah does not merely suggest this. It commands it: yeira’eh — you shall appear. Why? Why does God care so much about us leaving our homes?
Well, before we answer that, let’s take a small trip to Plato’s Cave, his most famous allegory about the search for enlightenment.
Here is the allegory: Imagine prisoners, chained since birth in an underground cave. They face a wall. Behind them burns a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners, figures pass — casting shadows on the wall before them. The prisoners have never seen anything else. To them, the shadows are reality. The shadows are the world.
Then one prisoner is freed. He turns, he sees the fire — it blinds him. He is dragged upward, out of the cave, into sunlight. At first it is agonizing. But slowly he sees. He sees trees, water, sky, and finally — the sun itself. He comes to understand that everything he believed was a shadow of a shadow. He has found the truth.
Let me offer an interpretation of Plato: For Plato, leaving the cave was the philosopher’s lonely ascent — away from the crowd, away from the ordinary world, into the blinding light of pure reason. The cave was the community. Truth was solitude.
Plato was a genius. But Plato was not Jewish because his vision is a lonely one. The philosopher climbs alone. He returns reluctantly. And when he returns to tell his fellow prisoners what he has seen, they do not believe him. In Plato’s world, enlightenment separates. The one who sees truth is set apart from those who do not. The crowd is the problem. The cave — the community — is what you must escape. As Jews each of us left Egypt and each of us stood at Sinai. But we stood with the whole of the people. Jews don’t look very kindly upon people who shlepp into the desert, desert their family and try to find enlightenment among the sand and scorpions.
So let’s try to find a story of a Jewish cave. Of course, we found one which may have been written to contrast Plato’s cave. Here is that story:
There is a story in the Talmud about Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, one of the greatest sages of the second century. He was condemned to death by the Roman authorities. Fleeing for his life, he and his son Elazar hid in a cave for twelve years. There, sustained miraculously, they studied Torah all the time. They reached extraordinary heights. They became so spiritually refined, so ablaze with holiness, that when they finally emerged — wherever they turned their gaze, whatever they looked at, it burst into flames.
A heavenly voice then rang out: חִיזְרוּ לִמְעָרַתְכֶם!
— “Return to your cave!” Why did God tell them to return? Maybe it was because they became too intense for the new world. They lived in a world of fire and the real world simply can’t. They needed, in a modern colloquialism, to cool off. So they returned for another year, and in that year, they learned something. They learned to contain their fire — not to extinguish it, but to bring it into the world in a form the world could bear.
For Plato, the cave was imprisonment and the community is the obstacle to learning the truth.
For Shimon bar Yochai, the cave is only temporary. He escapes only to survive. Ultimately, the goal is to leave the cave and rejoin his people. Community is the destination.
What a difference. Plato’s enlightened philosopher dreads returning to the cave — to the people, to ordinary life. Shimon bar Yochai is sent back to the world. The Talmud does not celebrate his isolation. It treats it as a necessary but incomplete phase. The goal was never the cave. The goal was always the marketplace, the field, the community — the world sanctified by a life of Torah.
Ok, so now back to my original question: Why does the Torah command to appear three times a year? In that, we find the Jewish answer to the caves.
You see, each of the three pilgrimage festivals is, in its own way, a commandment to leave your cave — to step out of your comfort, your privacy, your routine — and to encounter the world and your people together.
Passover is memory made communal. We could remember the Exodus alone, in our hearts. But the Torah insists: gather your family, open your door to the stranger, retell the story in community. The Seder table is the antidote to solitary memory. It is liberation re-enacted — not studied in a cave, but lived around a table, with children asking questions and the youngest voice carrying the ancient song.
Shavuot, the giving of Torah, is revelation made communal. The Midrash teaches that the Israelites stood k’ish echad b’lev echad — as one person with one heart — at Sinai. Torah was not delivered to individuals in caves. It thundered to a nation, assembled. Every year on Shavuot, we are asked to remember that we received truth not alone, not in isolation, but standing together at the foot of the mountain.
Sukkot is perhaps the most dramatic of all. We are commanded to leave our homes — our permanent, solid, comfortable houses — and dwell in fragile booths. The walls are impermanent. The roof lets in the stars. We sit exposed to the world. Sukkot is the festival that physically enacts the Jewish rejection of the cave. Come outside. Be vulnerable. Be together. Invite guests — the mitzvah of ushpizin. Together we rejoice. The sukkah is the ultimate anti-cave: open, communal, deliberately impermanent.
Plato’s prisoner climbs out of the cave alone, into pure philosophical light, and ultimately has nowhere to return. Shimon bar Yochai enters his cave under duress — and is repeatedly commanded to come back out, back to human beings, back to the world. And the Jewish people, three times a year, are commanded to get up from their comfortable homes and walk — together — toward Jerusalem.
This is the Jewish vision of spiritual life. We do not achieve holiness by separating ourselves from the world. We sanctify the world by entering it fully, by bringing our learning, our fire, our memory — and sharing it. The festivals are not escapes from ordinary life. They are the recurring reminder that ordinary life, lived in community, is the point.
Shabbat Shalom.
