During the nights of Sukkot, the Second Temple in Jerusalem lit up like nothing the world had ever seen. In the Court of the Women stood four giant golden lamp-stands, each crowned with four golden bowls. Four ladders reached up to the bowls, and four young priests climbed them with cruses of oil — each cruse holding one hundred and twenty log of oil. The wicks were woven from the worn-out drawers and girdles of the priests themselves.
When the lamps blazed, the Talmud (Sukkah 53a) tells us, there was not a single courtyard in all of Jerusalem that did not glow with the light of the Simchat Beit HaShoevah — the Rejoicing of the House of the Water Drawing. Holy men and men of dignity danced before the crowds with flaming torches in their hands, rehearsing songs and shouting praises. The Levites with harps, lyres, cymbals, trumpets, and instruments without number stood on the fifteen steps leading from the Court of Israel to the Court of the Women. They played. They sang.
At the top of the steps, two priests stood at the upper gate with silver trumpets. As soon as the rooster crowed, they blew one long blast, one broken blast, and one long blast — the signal for the water drawing to begin. Then the whole procession moved east, trumpets sounding every few steps. When they reached the East Gate, they turned their faces west toward the Temple and declared: "Our fathers, who once stood in this place, turned their backs to the Temple and their faces to the east, to worship the rising sun. But we — our eyes are toward God!"
Rabbi Yehudah says they repeated the words, echoing: "We are for God, and unto God are our eyes directed." The scene, preserved in the 1901 anthology Hebraic Literature, captures something Judaism has spent two thousand years trying to remember: joy is a form of worship, and light is a form of prayer. The ancestors had turned their backs to the Presence to chase a star. The Rabbis turned their faces back.