Should an American visiting Israel observe the Diasporas second festival day?
With the developments of modern transportation, the sight of tourists in Israel marking a second day of the festivals has become a common, sometimes comedic, phenomenon. Witness, for example, the post-Simhat Torah festivities (hakafot shniyot) in Jerusalem’s Liberty Bell Park, where foreigners dressed in suits dance with Torah scrolls while the natives play musical instruments and snap photographs. As we saw last week, the Talmud ordains that Diaspora Jews must “heed the customs of their ancestors” and observe a second day of the festival. Based on this denotation of the second day as a “custom” (Hilchot Yom Tov 6:14), many scholars asserted that holiday travelers should follow the established rules governing all visitors to places with differing practices. The Sages were wary of tourists quickly dropping their hometown customs, but also of their creating dissonance by introducing different practices into well-established communities. They asserted that a visitor must observe the strin
