Yom Kippur has ended, with our intense, deep, intimate day of searching ourselves and being close with God. Ideally, we end this day of atonement feeling loved, secure and at peace. We return home and everything feels right with the world.
But in Israel, and in Jewish communities around the world, that very night, you will hear a strange sound that night. It is the sound of construction. Because just as we return home feeling secure and peaceful, we have another commandment – to go out and live somewhere else, somewhere insecure. The holiday of Sukkot begins just days after Yom Kippur and Jews are out, building temporary homes to live in for seven days.
Sukkot is a biblical harvest festival, first mentioned in the book of Exodus as “the festival of Ingathering at the end of the year, when you gather in the results of your work from the field.” It is one of the three pilgrimage festivals, when every adult male was commanded to go up to Jerusalem and appear before God.
The Bible, in chapter 23 of the book of Leviticus, instructs us to do three unique things on this festival.
The first is to take four specific tree products: branches of palm, boughs of leafy trees, willow and the fruit of a certain kind of tree. Rabbinic interpretation will help Jews to understand exactly what these are, and today we gather together these four species and wave them during this festival.
But I would like to focus on the second and third unique commandments of sukkot.
The second unique commandment is to dwell in sukkot.
And the third, a unique command because it is given twice – we are commanded in a special way to be joyful during this festival.
These two commandments seem to be at odds.
As anyone who has lived for a few days in a sukkah, it’s not much. It’s fragile, easily collapsible, open to the elements, to insects, to stray cats, to neighbours. It doesn’t have a proper roof, it offers no real shelter or security. I’ve seen sukkot fall down and blow away in the wind many times. It’s significant that sukkot falls right about the time of the first real chance of rain in Israel. Suddenly the weather is a little uncertain for the first time in five or six months, and we’re commanded to go live outside and ooh, let’s rejoice!
It seems appropriate that we read the scroll of Ecclesiastes (Kohelet) on Sukkot. Kohelet is perhaps the least likely book of the Bible to make you want to break out in rejoicing, right? It’s all about the temporary, transient, frankly flimsy nature of human existence.
So with all this fragility, all this vulnerability, where does our rejoicing come from? And not that we are commanded just rejoicing, but the Bible tells us that we will in fact be wholly joyful on this festival (Deuteronomy 16:15). Really?
I think there’s a hint to be found in the question we often forget to ask – why sukkot? What are these booths? Leviticus 23 basically tells us that we are to live in sukkot so that we remember that God made the children of Israel live in sukkot when he brought them out of Egypt. That’s not a huge help. Because at no other point do we hear anything about the children of Israel dwelling in sukkot. Tents, plenty. We still don’t really know what these desert sukkot are.
The rabbis love questions like these, and in fact there’s a wonderful argument between two rabbis in the Mishna about precisely this. One (Rabbi Akiva) is very down to earth. It’s just a flimsy hut. It doesn’t mean much. The other, (Rabbi Eliezer) goes way off in the other direction, and says that the sukkot in which the children of Israel dwelled in the desert were in fact the Clouds of Glory which enveloped them and protected them.
We find ourselves with two opinions and no conclusions. But perhaps they are both true at the same time.
Our sukkot symbolize both the flimsiness and temporariness of our own lives and at the same time, also the loving protection with which God holds us. It is recognition of this balance that allows us to truly rejoice – despite our fragility, our vulnerability, the temporariness of it all, we know that while we are “just huts” we are at the same time “far more than just huts”. In knowing this, we can rejoice.
About the author
Dr. Faydra Shapiro is a specialist in contemporary Jewish-Christian relations and is the Director of the Israel Center for Jewish-Christian Relations. She received the National Jewish Book Award for her firs publication (2006). Her most recent book, together with Gavin d'Costa is Contemporary Catholic Approaches to the People, Land and State of Israel. Dr. Shapiro is also a Senior Fellow at the Philos Project https://philosproject.org and a Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Religions at Tel Hai College in Israel https://english.telhai.ac.il.