We build
October 14, 2024
Sukkot is approaching, the festival where we build little "booths" and dwell in them for a week, representing the harvest houses of our ancestors or the tents of our ancestral wilderness journey. According to the path we call halakha (with which different Jews have a wide variety of different relationships; that's a conversation for another day) a sukkah must be impermanent. A perennial gazebo won't cut it. It has to be something we build and then take down. "Impermanence embodied," Buddhist-inflected Jews like me say. A reminder that there is profound beauty in what doesn't last.
The roof must be made of something that grew in the ground: palm fronds, bamboo, cornstalks, fir branches, whatever grows and can be sustainably harvested wherever we are. This is one of Sukkot's connections to earth-based practice; in our ancestral story we come from earth and to earth we return. There has to be enough roof there that it registers as a roof, but not so much that it blocks our capacity to see the full moon (Sukkot begins at full moon) and the stars. A leafy roof. "A leaky roof," R. Arthur Waskow once wrote -- a typo that can teach us a deeper truth about bittersweet openness.
Here in Massachusetts autumn has arrived. Yom Kippur was unseasonably beautiful, dappled with golden light through autumn trees. Now we've got cold rains. It will be a chilly week for eating and praying outdoors. I predict that at least once we'll wind up citing the teaching that when the sukkah is unpleasantly cold and wet, it's ok to forego the mitzvah and return inside. This morning I went to the hardware store and bought a 50-lb bag of play sand to place atop one of the bottom struts of my sukkah kit, because last night the winds that accompanied the rain blew it halfway across my deck.
Sukkot lands differently this year than ever before. Last Sukkot feels like a time of innocence. Before the Hamas attacks. Before the ensuing war. You don't need me to tell you; you know what the last year has been. Some of our feelings of permanence were shattered on Shemini Atzeret / Simchat Torah last year. Granted, Oct. 7 didn't come out of nowhere. The horrors of that day are rooted in the complex welter of choices made by people in power across the Arab world and Israel over the last 75 years. Before Oct. 7, I was able to set that aside, living as if it mostly didn't impact me. But it does.
Before Oct. 7, I never imagined that in my own era I would see the world seemingly rejoice at the slaughter of Jews, though probably I should have. I never imagined that the ensuing war in Gaza would result in the loss of so many lives, though probably I should have. I never imagined any of how this last year would feel, for me or for those whom I serve. The activated trauma. The horrors of war seen from afar. The more intimate wounds of friendships and relationships coming apart at the seams. The hardening of positions. The blame. The feelings of unsafety. The grief -- God, so much grief.
Who am I to teach about impermanence -- the disability wisdom I gave over on Yom Kippur morning; how a sukkah is like a sand mandala is like parenting; the beauty of living and loving in our fragile bodies and homes and lives -- when there's a literal war going on? When many people I know and love, and countless people I will never know, are displaced or homeless or sheltering from rocket fire or unable to shelter from rocket fire? When Jews and Israelis are under siege, when tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed, with hostages are still in captivity, as this awful war expands?
And that's not even getting into the climate crisis and the two hurricanes that struck Florida in rapid succession. Those who live in places that flooded, who are without power, who have lost something or anything or everything -- y'all don't need me to tell you what you're going through. And those who don't live in those places have all seen the footage, and I suspect that none of us feel as safe as we did before. Honestly, who am I to teach about impermanence in a time like this? The world is teaching us plenty. And amidst this, we're supposed to resist hiding under our blankets, and instead build sukkot?!
Yes. Amidst this, we build sukkot. We hammer together our metal kits with mallets, or we pound nails into wood. We make walls out of tarps or tapestries or, in my case, the kind of material that waterproof camping tents are made of. We make roofs out of something organic, branches or bamboo mats or armfuls of cornstalks. Maybe we adorn them with fairy lights and pumpkins, or with the Seven Species that grow in the Land of Promise, or with handmade decorations and garlands. And in them starting Wednesday we will bless wine and bread, we will eat and drink, we will be thankful.
I know I can't imagine what it's like to be in flood-stricken Appalachia or Florida or in the wartorn Mideast. And I know I can't regain the innocence of last Sukkot, before I was constantly and consciously aware of so many excruciating things. All I can do is bring all of this awareness with me into the sukkah, and trust that its flimsy, barely-there walls will be strong enough to hold this vast tangle of emotions. (They always are.) So I build. Because building is fundamentally our job as Jews. We build on ancient foundations; we build toward a world of justice; we build and resist despair.
We build because being part of a thousands-of-years-old tradition is itself a form of resilience. We build because we are links in a chain of tradition. A sukkah is like a human life: here and then gone. But its brevity doesn't make it less meaningful; on the contrary! And Jewish tradition and practice don't die when we do, because we teach them to our generations, as our forebears taught them to us. We are impermanent, but the tradition outlives us, and this is precisely how. We build and we beautify. And then we sit in our sukkahs, and even in this broken world we uplift sparks of joy.
Inspired, in part, by this post from Sarah Tuttle-Singer.