Posted on November 19, 2025 by Rabbi Noah Diamondstein
Dear Temple Beth-El,
Tonight and tomorrow in Israel another holiday of thanks-giving will be celebrated: Sigd, a special holiday of the Ethiopian Jewish community, known as Beta Israel, which confirms and celebrates the renewal of the covenant between God and the People of Israel. As R. Dr. Dalia Marx writes in her book From Time to Time: Journeys in the Jewish Calendar:
Before their aliyah (immigration to Israel), the members of the Beta Israel community lived… in hundreds of small villages scattered across a broad territory in the north and northwest of Ethiopia. They zealously preserved their pre-Rabbinic Jewish traditions and developed unique customs, since Rabbinic literature and law had never reached their community. Sigd was an opportunity for these small, widely dispersed communities to gather and celebrate together… The Sigd holiday expressed the Beta Israel community’s longing for Jerusalem and redemption. After Operation Moses and the first wave of aliyah by Ethiopian Jews in the 1980s, they began to observe Sigd in Israel and included in the celebration a pilgrimage to Jerusalem…
When I took part in the Sigd celebration, I asked one of the leaders of the Ethiopian community why the choice was made to hold the central celebration at the promenade overlooking the Old City rather than by the Western Wall. His answer was, “We have come to Jerusalem, but we are still not fully there, so we chose a place from which to look out on the site where the Temple stood. Our redemption is not yet complete.” This is, perhaps, the story of Zionism as a whole–a culture that was founded on yearning for an unattained land that achieved its dream; that fulfillment, conversely, led many powerful historical symbols and ceremonies to lose their power and has forced us to give them new meaning or to adopt new symbols. (Marx, pp. 63-65)
The Ethiopian community’s celebration of Sigd in modern Israel–a country they love dearly that has established Sigd as a national festival AND in which they face constant racism and disenfranchisement–is reminiscent of our celebration of Thanksgiving today. We give thanks for our blessings by way of a myth about shared abundance in a modern United States in which food insecurity has been actively worsened by our own government. Holidays are not merely performative or ceremonial–they are meant to remind us and reteach us our values. We are meant to be fueled by our observances toward the enactment of those values in real life, away from our festive tables.
Like the United States, the Jews are a multi-cultural People, made up of diverse populations from many places around the world each bringing their own customs, flavors, and mindsets. Sigd reminds us of this. At its best, Thanksgiving’s mythology (as opposed to the history that we now know debunks much of it) is a reminder about the roots of American life being in outreach across cultural barriers, and the sharing of blessings and meals around our collective family table. At a time where America looks less like that myth perhaps than ever, it is a good story to tell–one that points to the promise of friendship and shared success that can be born from good will and openness to others.
I hope you can take a moment to learn more about Sigd today or tomorrow as it is being observed, reveling in the diverse beauty of Jewish tradition. I hope, too, that will turn your family Thanksgiving celebrations into an opportunity to give tzedakah. Our community’s generosity has inspired me in recent weeks–let’s not lose that momentum! As you give thanks for our own blessings, make a decision as a family or friend group about a population deserving of your generosity, and make a donation.
May these holidays bring us closer to redemption by inspiring us to take that next step together.
L’shalom,
Rabbi Noah Diamondstein
