This old phone no longer charges.
The solution's simple,
a silvered circle. Current
soaks in, awakening from below.

I think about that in the sukkah,
layers stripped away by holiday
after holiday. Low battery so familiar
I forget I was ever otherwise.

The answer is to sit and wait.
Don't close up. Trust
that sustenance exists.
God, remind me how to shine.

I went outside to bentsch lulav -- to take up the Four Species of date palm, willow, myrtle, and etrog, bring them together, make a blessing, and shake them in all six directions. I waited until the temperature rose to 40F (4.4 C) and the white rime of frost had melted. Even so, a plastic flowerpot that had filled with rain had frozen over. I could see my breath. I came back inside pretty quick.

Sometimes I'm mildly envious of people who live in Mediterranean climes at this time of year. I see photos of sukkot in California: open, airy spaces decked with tapestries and pillows because rain is unlikely. It was like that in Texas where I grew up, too. Here in New England, especially when the holidays are late on the secular calendar, Sukkot is cold. We wrap up in lots of blankets. 

Torah doesn't explain the taking up of the Four Species. Maybe in antiquity they just made sense. A lot of people see them as fertility ritual (the etrog could be analogous to the womb; bringing it together with the phallic lulav carries some pretty clear symbolism.) We know that lulav and etrog were taken up and waved in the Temple daily at Sukkot during the centuries when the Temple stood in Jerusalem. 

Midrash teaches (Lev. Rabbah) that of the four species, one tastes good (dates / palm), one smells sweet (myrtle), one is neither sweet-scented nor sweet-tasting (willow), and one is both tasty and delicious (etrog). These in turn represent people who study Torah but don't do good works, people who do good works but don't study Torah, people who do neither, and people who do both. (Be an etrog.)

Sometimes they're understood to represent four parts of the body with which we might serve the One (eyes, lips, spine, and heart), or the four letters in the Holy Name. And they can also evoke four ecosystems in the land of Israel. The lulav / palm hints at the lowlands; the aravot / willows suggest the rivers; hadassim / myrtle, the mountains; and the etrog, the irrigated areas where people farm.

I wonder how many people just stopped reading because I mentioned the land of Israel. I just wrote several impassioned paragraphs about that, and then deleted them. I shouldn't need to present my progressive bona fides in order to meditate aloud on these sweet ancient earth-based rituals of sukkah, lulav, and etrog, and why they connect my spirit with the place where this tradition began. 

All over the world, Jews don't pray for rain during the Land's dry season. (Ending in a few days.) Our daily prayers remind us when the Land relies on dew, and when the rains might come. Local climate notwithstanding, my lulav hyperlinks me with there. "[A]s wines on far continents prickle / to bubbles when their native vines bloom," as Marge Piercy wrote in her poem about Tu BiShvat. 

I love this 2000-year-old connection with the earth and weather, the plants and seasons, in the place where Judaism began. The older I get, the more meaning I find in remembering that the place where Judaism began shaped it, and therefore shaped the spiritual practices we've been carrying with us for centuries. Sitting in my sukkah I'm part of a chain of tradition bridging both time and space.

This doesn't obviate the fact that Palestinians are spiritually and physically rooted in that place too. (And now I've ticked off a whole different group of readers!) I reject the right-wing fantasy of "Greater Israel." I don't know how the two peoples will ultimately coexist, but along with every Israeli I know, I believe that they must. I yearn for dignity, self-determination, safety, and peace for all.

How will they get there? I have no idea. I suspect the folks at Standing Together have plenty of thoughts. The realm of what I can impact feels very small. At least in my own spaces, like this one, I can push back against those who would use this practice to deny another people self-determination, and against those who would deny the geographic roots of this practice and my religious tradition. 

Engaging in imaginary arguments with people to my right and with people to my left does no one any good. I scratch the etrog lightly with my thumbnail and breathe deep, grounding myself in spiritual practice and in things I can touch and sense. The clack of palm fronds. The spice of myrtle leaves. The knowledge that all over the world we are taking up our lulavim and praying for better days.

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.

I've been working on these two Sukkot poems in tandem. Sukkot for me evokes both fragility (the sukkah begins falling apart as soon as it's created; every life is a sukkah, fragile and fleeting; God knows I've sat with sorrow in the sukkah at times) and joy (Torah tells us to rejoice in our festivals; this is zman simchateinu, the season of our rejoicing; on Shemini Atzeret, the 8th day, God calls us to linger a little longer in joy.) These poems are somewhat in the mode of Texts to the Holy, though I leave it to you to decide who is speaking, and to whom. They appear above with accompanying images (and alt-text for screenreaders). Below are the two poems as plain text.

Fragile

I see how fragile everything is
around you, how tenuous
any peace. Reasons for sorrow
pile up like fallen leaves.
Feel my heart touching yours,
enfolding yours.
I'm here with you where you are
under this roof that lets in rain.

וְשָׂמַחְתָ / Rejoice

My door is open. Will you enter?
Taste the air, heady and fragrant --

limned with honeyed autumn light
and wet with morning dew.

Let me wrap around you
like a cloud, like an embrace.

Stay with me just like this.
Joy expands to fill everything.

The view from inside my sukkah.

Sitting in my sukkah this year, I've been thinking a lot about what endures. That might seem counterintuitive: after all, a sukkah is the opposite of that. It's temporary structure. Its roof is made from organic matter, casting some shade but also letting in the raindrops and the light of the full harvest moon. A sukkah begins falling apart almost as soon as it is built. And yet...

And yet the sukkah will be rebuilt, next year. And the year after. The practice is perennial. When I sit in my sukkah on my mirpesset, drinking coffee and lifting my etrog to my face to inhale its scent, I remember every year I have ever sat in a sukkah. I think of generations before me who built sukkot. I imagine the generations after me who will do the same.

I like to imagine our descendants figuring out how to observe Sukkot in the stars someday, in the science-fiction future where we emigrate to other planets. What would it be like to build a sukkah on the decks of a starship? To build a sukkah on another planet? How will our relationship to our ancient stories and practices shift in those imagined future generations?  

Closer to home, and far more sobering, is the question of how Judaism will adapt to our changing planet as the climate crisis intensifies. How will our practices shift as our planet warms? Sukkot reminds us of the impermanence of our structures, metaphysically and spiritually, but how could I say that to those who have lost their homes to wildfire and hurricane? 

One morning in the sukkah this year our conversation veered into American politics.  I used to believe that the structures of democracy would protect us from demagogues. I thought it was generally accepted that government's function is to serve everyone, to protect the vulnerable, to ensure and uphold human rights and dignity. That structure feels fragile now.

The American experiment is only a few centuries old -- an eyeblink in the span of human history. It may prove to be temporary. Some argue that it's already over, that our constitutional crisis is already here and democracy as we have known it is already falling to gerrymandering, insurrection, cult of personality, and the terrible persistence of the Big Lie.

I think of the later stories in Ursula K. Le Guin's Orsinian tales, where her fictional European country has become an Eastern Bloc nation. In those stories the government can't be trusted. Privations are the norm. And yet people continue to live and love, even when multiple families share a single apartment, even under surveillance. Isn't that what human beings do?

And that brings me back to the sukkah. Jews have built sukkot in all kinds of circumstances, in all kinds of places, under all kinds of regimes. (We celebrated Sukkot during World War I. We celebrated Sukkot in the Warsaw Ghetto...) Each individual sukkah is temporary and fragile, but the practice endures. The mitzvot, both spiritual and ethical, endure. And so do we.

Last year my Yom Kippur sermon was about our obligation to take care of each other. Whether or not the world is falling down around our ears, our task is to protect the vulnerable, to give aid to those in need, to help each other hope, to build a better world. To feed the hungry. To find housing for the homeless. To raise the next generation to be ethical and kind...

Love endures. Hope endures, even though we have to help each other cultivate it. Our obligations to each other endure -- some even say, from one lifetime to the next. Our spiritual practices endure, no matter what the future holds. And right now, the leaves on the roof of my sukkah are rustling, and I know that Sukkot will come again: the cycles of time endure. 

From A Hallel for Sukkot, written in 2016 but still resonating for me.  (I hope you'll click through and read the whole thing.)

Chag sameach, friends.

When I remember Yom Kippur in my childhood, I remember stiffly-ironed fancy autumn clothes, usually far too hot for south Texas in September. I remember running around the Conservative shul of my early childhood with friends, wearing dresses and tights and black patent Mary Janes, and (re)discovering that the water fountains were turned off because the grown-ups were fasting.

I remember my mother in the car, using a spritz of Binaca to sweeten her breath before going into shul. She was fasting, of course; all the adults fasted, and my Russian grandfather broke his fast with a shot of vodka. But minty breath spray didn't count as breaking the fast, for her. It was just part of ordinary hygiene. She'd offer it to me, too. I remember the scent, the taste of Binaca on my tongue.

On erev Rosh Hashanah this year I was thinking of mom. I went over to the oval mirrored tray ringed with a gilded frame where I keep the cosmetics I never use. One of the items on that tray is a bottle of Bal à Versailles, my mother's perfume. I dabbed it on my pulse points at wrists and neck. Suddenly I was a child again, perched in my mother's dressing room watching her put on makeup before going out. 

Scent telescopes time. I let my thumbnail lightly indent this year's etrog, and breathe deep. It's every etrog I've ever held in my hand, the spicy scent linking the sukkah I'll use tonight with every other sukkah I've ever had. I didn't grow up with a sukkah. I love the fact that my kid is growing up with one. His memories will include this little house bedecked with autumn garlands, fragrant with citrus scent.

Last year's harvest; this year's beginning.

This year I take comfort in every tradition I can manage. Anything I've done in years past that I might do in years to come -- those things become a lifeline. A reminder that there was life before this difficult, terrible, anxiety-drenched year of global pandemic and national political uncertainty, and there will be life after this year, too. The holidays come and go every year. The autumn leaves blaze bright every year, and fall, and then grow anew. These rhythms remind me that the world will not end.

One of my annual traditions comes at the end of Sukkot: preserving the etrogim from Sukkot to taste at Tu BiShvat, the new year of the trees which falls here in deep midwinter. The etrog is called pri etz hadar, "the fruit of a splendid tree" (or a goodly tree). And Pri Etz Hadar is the name of an early mystical Tu BiShvat text and seder. Bringing the taste and scent of the etrog to Tu BiShvat is a way to link this fall with the coming winter -- and to evoke the new growth that hasn't yet come, but will.

As always, I've peeled five etrogim and put them under vodka in my tall glass infuser in the back of a cupboard. Within a few days I'll forget that they're there. All year long they will steep, slowly transferring their color, flavor, and fragrance. By this time next year, the vodka will be bright as sunlight and fragrant like an etrog scratched with a thumbnail to release its scent. I'll decant the contents, add simple syrup, and bottle the end result... so I can refill my infuser and begin the whole process again.

I'm not sure how I'll share this fragrant elixir with my community at Tu BiShvat this year. I can't imagine a reality in which we'd feel safe gathering indoors for a Tu BiShvat seder at the end of January. The pandemic won't be over by then. I suspect we'll all be sheltering-in-place at home by deep wintertime. Maybe I'll see if folks want to gather outdoors in the snow, among the dormant trees, and toast to their continued health and longevity (and our own!) at a safe social distance in the brisk fresh air. 

"Mom, did you know that there are monks who spend months making really intricate sand mandalas and then when they're finished, they blow the sand away, because nothing lasts forever?"

My son says this to me on the first morning of Sukkot. I can't make this up. My d'varling for that morning, which I've just printed out, begins "Sukkot; festival of impermanence..." And here he is, telling me earnestly about sand mandalas.

"I did know that," I say. "Hey, can you think of any spiritual practices we have as Jews that are kind of similar to that?"

His eyes are a study in uncertainty.

"Where we make something beautiful and then let it come apart?"

"Wait a second," he says, and I can see the lightbulb going on. We've just spent four days building our sukkah, procuring fairy lights to illuminate it, and adorning it with all of his favorite sparkly decorations. (He even made a video about it.)

"I'll give you a hint. We build a little house and cover it with decorations. And over the course of the week the cornstalks dry out and the decorations fall down and at the end of the week we take it all down."

"Because nothing lasts forever?"

I nod.

"I wish our sukkah could last forever," he says, wistfully.

"If it did, we'd probably stop noticing how beautiful it is," I point out.

Two days later, we're in the car on the way to the elementary school for the first time in twenty-seven weeks. He is in an afternoon fifth grade cohort that will go to school four afternoons a week while infection rates remain low.

I drop him off curbside. He is wearing the mask he picked for the first day of hybrid school, carrying his school-issued Chromebook and a water bottle that will stay at school and some extra hand sanitizer for good measure. 

As I watch him walk away, my heart seizes. Infection numbers here are low right now. I trust that our local elementary school is taking wise precautions. I know that he is going to be fine. But it still feels wrenching to let him out of my sight. 

I return home, open up Zoom, and spend my Monday rabbinic office hour in our sukkah. A few of the decorations have fallen down. The cornstalks on the roof are beginning to dry out. The "it's not easy being green" etrog poster is now on the floor.

I sit inside our little homemade sand mandala of tinsel and schach. I remind myself that this pang isn't new. It just feels sharper right now because the pandemic has so unaccustomed me to letting him go. 

Sukkot: festival of impermanence, festival of joy even in vulnerability. We build sukkot to remember our ancestors' harvest traditions; to remember the flimsy sukkot in which we dwelled after leaving Egypt; to remember the cloud of glory that protected us in our wilderness wanderings. Sukkot asks us: can we feel protected by God's presence even now, even in a flimsy little house that lets in the rain and the wind?

That's always the question at Sukkot. What does it mean to feel safe and protected? What does it mean to build structures -- whether physical or spiritual -- knowing that nothing we build lasts forever?

On the physical front, this year there may be a paradoxical sense of safety in the sukkah because a sukkah is as well-ventilated as any space can be. It has to be, in order to be kosher. A sukkah can't be airtight with a solid roof. The roof needs to let moonlight and raindrops through. In these covid-19 times, this flimsy sketch of a room in the fresh air of the great outdoors is the safest place to breathe.

In part through the very fact of what a sukkah is, Sukkot asks us to grapple with impermanence. As soon as we put on the (purposely insufficient) roof, the roof starts to come apart -- the cornstalks dry up, the palm fronds or branches wither. "Emptiness upon emptiness," as we read this morning in Kohelet. Nothing that we can build lasts forever.

And Sukkot asks us to find joy in the midst of impermanence. One of this holiday's names is Zman Simchateinu, the Time of Our Rejoicing. How can we rejoice in a little temporary house where rain gets through the roof? We might as well ask: how can we rejoice in fragile human bodies that we know will someday die? And my answer is: how can we not?

Early in the pandemic, my friend Cate Denial reminded me that life doesn't go on "pause" while we're sheltering-in-place. This is the life we have. Right now it may be more constrained than we want it to be, for pandemic reasons -- but it is still life, and we need to live it, not sleepwalk through our days waiting for the pandemic to be over.

I think of that teaching often, and it feels deeply relevant to Sukkot. This little temporary house is a metaphor for human life. It's fragile. It's vulnerable. It's not forever. But as Cate taught me, this is the life we have -- and the time to cultivate joy is not in some unimaginable future when everything broken is repaired, but here and now.

Sukkot reminds me to grab joy with both hands, wherever I can find it. In my morning cup of coffee; in the scent of the etrog, sharp and stirring; in the light of the full moon. In the voices and faces of friends, even when the only safe way to see them is on Zoom. In the melodies of our prayers. In the rhythm of weekday and Shabbes.

These are quotidian joys, but they are real, and they can be sustaining. To be sure, the existence of these joys doesn't negate the difficult realities of this moment. One million dead to covid-19 around the world so far. Credible threats of election violence and voter intimidation. Fears that our democracy might be as fragile as this flimsy sukkah.

So during chag we cultivate joy, and we let that joy fuel us and strengthen us to do the rebuilding work that our world so desperately needs. Maybe this year that rebuilding work means textbanking or phonebanking to help eligible voters register to vote, or volunteering as a poll worker. Those actions help to build our democracy.

Or maybe you feel called toward something more tangible... like chopping onions for the Berkshire Food Project's grab-and-go meals, because need has tripled since the pandemic began. Helping to cook the meals that feed our hungry neighbors is a mitzvah that comes right out of Torah -- and it's an action that helps to build our community.

Sukkot invites us to cultivate joy that will sustain us in this work and more. Sukkot teaches us to seek joy in the full moon even though we're also vulnerable to the falling rain. Sukkot teaches us to seek joy even as we recognize the world's brokenness and work to fix it. Sukkot invites us to remember that this is the life we have, and our job is to live it.

This is my d'varling for Shabbat Sukkot (cross-posted to my From the Rabbi blog.) Image: the CBI sukkah this year.

Before Tisha b'Av, I gathered a group of liturgists to collaborate on a project that became Megillat Covid, Lamentations for this time of covid-19.

In recent weeks we've gathered again -- in slightly different configuration -- to build something new for this pandemic season: a set of prayer-poems for Sukkot and Simchat Torah, which we've titled Ushpizin. That's the Aramaic word for guests, usually used to refer to the practice of inviting ancestral / supernal guests like Abraham and Sarah into our Sukkah... though this year, what does it mean to invite Biblical guests when many of us don't feel safe inviting in-person guests? That's the question that gave rise to the project.

The prayers / poems that we wrote arose out of that question and more. What does it mean to find safety in a sketch of a dwelling in this pandemic year? With what, or whom, are we "sitting" when we sit in our sukkot this year? What about those of us who can't build this year at all? And what can our Simchat Torah be if we are sheltering-in-place, or if our shul buildings are closed, or if we are not gathering in person with others? 

For Megillat Covid, we each wrote a piece and then I collected them. This time our creative process was different. Four of us collectively wrote nine pieces, and then we met to workshop them and revise them together, in hopes of creating not just nine individual prayers but a whole that would be more than the sum of its parts. And then we wrote the tenth prayer-poem together as a collaboration... and Steve Silbert offered a couple of sketchnotes, too.

You can click through to Builders Blog to read excerpts from our ten poems and to download the whole collection as a PDF, and I hope you will -- I'm really proud of this collection, and humbled and honored to have convened the group that brought it to life.

In one of his teachings on Sukkot, the Hasidic master known as the Sfat Emet writes:

This is wholeness: a person with a broken heart... and in every place that God dwells, there is wholeness. God makes every incompleteness whole.

This is wholeness: a person with a broken heart. At first glance it's almost a koan. Broken equals whole? How does that work, exactly? I spent some time with this koan this week, and here's how I've come to understand it this year.

A person whose heart isn't broken, at least some of the time, isn't paying attention. A person whose heart isn't sometimes cracked-open by the exquisite and sometimes devastating fragility of this world isn't paying attention.

A person whose heart is so impermeable -- whether to our dangerously warming planet, or to the inevitable griefs and losses that come with loving human beings who disappoint us, and who will die -- that's not wholeness. That's bypassing.

Some of you told me that after Yom Kippur you felt like your skin was too thin and your hearts were so open that re-entry into the "regular world" was almost more than you could bear. Sukkot says: keep your heart open a little longer.

Sukkot is an opportunity to keep our hearts open wide. We build and decorate these fragile little houses. Their roofs have to be made out of plants that are harvested from the earth, and open enough to let in the stars and the rain.

A sukkah is almost a sketch of a house, a parody of a house. A hint of a house. You can see the outlines of a house, but it's flimsy and the roof leaks and as soon as it's built, it starts succumbing to the rain and the wind and the weather.

Our bodies are like sukkot. Our lives are like sukkot. The whole planet is like a sukkah. It's heartbreaking, when we let ourselves stop and feel it. But here's the thing: when we let ourselves stop and feel it, that's when we let God in.

If that word doesn't work for you, try another one. When we let ourselves feel, we let compassion in. When we let ourselves feel, we let wholeness in. When we let ourselves feel, we let hope in. We let in grace, and kindness, and truth.

In the Torah reading assigned to today, the Shabbat that falls during Sukkot, we read about Moshe asking to see God's face. God says, no one can look upon me and live, but I'll shelter you in this cleft of rock and you can see my afterimage.

And then God passes by, proclaiming who God is: the source of mercy and compassion, kindness and truth. When we let ourselves feel, we feel what hurts -- and we also feel what uplifts. What endures beyond every broken place.

Sukkot is called zman simchateinu, "the time of our rejoicing." In my understanding, rejoicing doesn't mean pretending away what hurts. It means authenticity. It means opening our hearts to everything: the bitter and the sweet.

This Shabbat during Sukkot, may we be able to open our hearts -- and when we do, may we be blessed with comfort and uplift and hope to balm every broken place, and may that strengthen us to bring hope and justice into our fragile world.

The teaching cited in this post is teaching א as collected in The Language of Truth -- on page קד in the Hebrew and 357 in the English. This is the d'varling I wrote to offer at my shul on Shabbat morning (cross-posted to my From the Rabbi blog.)

What qualities do you want to bring into your sukkah this year?

Here's a download that features a classical set of Jewish values: lovingkindness, boundaries, balance, perseverance, humility, rootedness, nobility. (You might recognize those seven qualities as the "seven lower sefirot," the qualities that we share with our Creator that we cultivate each year during the Counting of the Omer.)

Print this on cardstock -- hang the whole poster -- cut it into cards and hang them around your sukkah -- cut it into cards and have them on your table to spark discussion... the schach's the limit! Include these seven qualities among the ushpizin (holy guests) you invite into your sukkah this year.

Bayit is sharing this file as part of #MenschUp, a project aimed at promoting healthy (non-toxic) masculinity. As we build our sukkot, let's build with Jewish values in mind. Download the file here on google drive:

Sukkot Downloads [Google drive]

There's also a "Love Shack" downloadable flyer as well, and we'll be adding more downloadable Sukkot resources to that google drive folder, so check back often! 

Also, check out Steve Silbert's Visual Torah artwork on RedBubble, including a poster for Sukkot (arising out of the book of Kohelet / Ecclesiastes) and a poster for Simchat Torah.

May our building be for the sake of heaven, and may the blessings of Sukkot flow into and through us all!

Cross-posted from Bayit's Builders Blog. To stay up-to-date on happenings at Bayit, join our mailing list -- we won't spam you, I promise!

I got a new sukkah this year.

A simple white metal frame.

Three canvas walls with windows in them. 

Cornstalks overhead, twined with autumnal garlands.

In the mornings, when it is not raining, I sit here

and watch the morning light move across the valley.

Sometimes I sing the psalms of Hallel.

Sometimes I sip coffee. 

During the afternoon I listen to the wind rustle the cornstalks

and the tinsel garlands overhead.

Every now and then I listen to a small plane overhead,

or a flock of geese.

As afternoon gives way to evening, 

the sky goes through its rapid costume change.

If I'm paying attention at the right moment

I can see it happen.

Once evening falls

the sukkah gleams

on my mirpesset,

a little house filled with light.

If I could, I would invite you into my mirpesset sukkah when morning light paints the valley golden, or when twilight pinks the horizon, or when the moon is visible over the mountains to the east.

It's hard for photographs to capture the feeling of being in the sukkah: the rustling of the schach and decorations overhead, the scent of the cornstalks and the etrog, the way the structure sketches a room around you, at once indoors and outdoors. 

But I can show you glimpses, photos taken from the place where I usually sit. I can show you slices of the light and the changing sky over the hills and houses. There are many bigger and fancier sukkot than ours, but none with a prettier view.

This year (so far) we've been blessed with warmth and fair weather over the first few days of the holiday. We've dipped in and out of the sukkah: eating there, reading there, hanging out with friends there, just relaxing there.

There's a poignancy to the sukkah: it's so beautiful, and so temporary. A reminder to enjoy every moment we can, before the sukkah comes down, before the decorations are packed away for another year, before the snows fall.

Related: Letter from the sukkah (2014), A sukkah of sticks and string (2016)

Through the morning clouds
a patch of blue sky beckons
over distant hills.

In the evening
the hillside darkens, purple,
framed by strings of light.

The Sukkot full moon
paints the clouds luminescent,
almost within reach.

Early morning haze
nestles in the near valley.
Sunlight grins, dives in.

The title of this post comes from the evening blessing praising God Who brings on the evening.

(Here's a post containing that prayer, as well as some contemporary renderings thereof, and some poems that work with the same themes: Looking at the prayer for evening in a new light.)

Photos taken from my wee sukkah.

113.

We who serve offer praise.
We who serve by building flimsy houses
out of sticks and string.

We who serve by whisking together honey and coffee,
chesed and gevurah,
to make offerings we bring in cupped hands.

By seeking to sweeten what's bitter.
By speaking our truths, naming what is.
We who serve by hoping for better --

by taking up hammer and nails to build
the redeemed world we didn't inherit:
offer praise.

114.

When we pushed through the narrow place
when we left what had become constriction

we came into our own, we became our own.
Only then could we give ourselves to you.

When we left the household that didn't nurture 
when we left old stories that no longer sustained 

the ground shifted beneath our feet
the hills leapt like baby goats

the river we thought flowed always toward the sea
turned tidal and became sharp with salt.

Mountains, did you savor letting loose?
River, did you rejoice in changing your course?

We too have been transformed
by the presence of the one whose name is change.

115.

Friends, be profligate with blessings!
Spend them freely,
prime the pump for more.

Children, bless us with wonder
at the calliope song of geese overhead.
Elders, bless us with permission.

The skies belong to God
always perfect
and always changing.

The earth is ours to tend.
We can offer praises right here, right now.
What are we waiting for?

116.

Because you hear me, I am never alone.
I lift the cup of my changes:
your presence sweetens what was bitter.
This sukkah is temporary
but the promises I make to you endure.
Wherever I go, you are with me.
Every place becomes Jerusalem.

117.

Everyone, say thank you.
That we are alive at all
is cause to rejoice.

118.

There are more galaxies than I can imagine.
We are made from the same stuff as the stars.

What burns in me: a spark
from the fire that sustains all creation.

And when I say I love you, I mean
you expand my heart to encompass the universe.

Open the door of my heart:
I have feathered my nest with gratitude.

This is the door to who we really are.
Will you walk through?

Today is the only day there is.
Be glad with me.

Here is a pdf file of the psalms of Hallel: in Hebrew, translated into English, and accompanied by commentary. This poem series is rooted in the psalms of Hallel, which we recite daily during Sukkot (and at other times, too -- though these poems draw imagery from Sukkot, rather than from the other seasons when Hallel is recited.) For those who are interested in the poems' references and citations, some notes follow. 

By the by, if you like this kind of thing, you might also like my Six psalms for Hallel written during Pesach several years ago, now published in Open My Lips (Ben Yehuda Press, 2016.)

Notes: 

We who serve offer praise. See psalm 113, "Sing praises, you servants of Adonai!" [B]uilding flimsy houses... See A sukkah of sticks and string. [W]hisking together honey and coffee. Many recipes for honeycake, a seasonal treat, involve both honey and coffee. [C]hesed and gevurah. Chesed (lovingkindness) and gevurah (boundaried-strength) are two of the seven divine qualities to which the seven days of Sukkot can be mapped. 

When we pushed through the narrow place. See psalm 114, "When Israel went forth from Mitzrayim..." Mitzrayim, "Egypt," can be translated as "the narrow place." Only then could we give ourselves to you. See Psalm 114, "Judah became God's..." [T] he ground shifted beneath our feet. "The Jordan retreated. Mountains leapt like rams..."  [T]he river we thought flowed always toward the sea. Some rivers are tidal. (The Hudson is one of them.) The one whose name is change. God describes God's-self to Moshe as "I Am Becoming What I Am Becoming."

Friends, be profligate with blessings! See psalm 115, though I chose to invert the giving of blessing: in this poem we are the ones who are offering blessing to God, instead of the other way around. The reference to youths and elders also hearkens back to this psalm.  The skies belong to God. "The heavens are the heavens of Adonai..." We can offer praises right here, right now. "The dead cannot offer praises..."

Because you hear me, I am never alone. See psalm 116: "I love knowing that Adonai listens to my cry..." I lift the cup of my changes. "I raise the cup of my deliverance..." That verse is part of the traditional liturgy for havdalah. The promises I make to you... "I will honor my vows to Adonai..." Every place becomes Jerusalem. "...in the midst of Jerusalem."

Everyone, say thank you. See psalm 117: "Praise Adonai, all nations..."

There are more galaxies than I can imagine. Psalm 118 begins with the assertion that God's love endures forever. L'olam means both space and time, suggesting the infinity of the heavens. Open the door of my heart. "Open for me the door of righteousness." This is the door to who we really are. "This is the door of Adonai..." Today is the only day there is. "This is the day that Adonai has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it."

Mirpesset (balcony) sukkah, 5777.

One of the things I knew I would miss about my old house was the sukkah I used to have there. My ex-husband built me a beautiful sukkah -- actually he built several of them, over the years, and he deserves kavod (honor) for that. But at the condo where I now live, we're not allowed to put up structures on the lawns. My son can play soccer with a portable goal, but when he's done we need to bring the goal back to our garage. No swingset, no permanent play structures... and no sukkah, either.

When I moved, I resigned myself to using the synagogue sukkah all week. My shul builds a beautiful sukkah each year, and I live nearby now. It is an entirely reasonable solution. Still, as Sukkot approached, I found myself deeply wistful for the experience of padding out to the sukkah in my pyjamas in the morning to bentsch lulav before breakfast, and the experience of tiptoeing out to the sukkah to gaze at the moon after my son is asleep. I'd gotten spoiled. I liked living with a sukkah in my own backyard.

Then it occurred to me that I could try to build something on my wee mirpesset, a.k.a. the small balcony outside my living room. People build sukkot on balconies in big cities, don't they? I spent a while searching to see what others had done. I looked into fancy tubular sukkah kits of the right dimensions to be built on a small balcony like mine. They tend to be quite pretty, but also quite expensive. I couldn't justify the expense -- not now. Maybe by next year, but it wouldn't be responsible to spend that now.

And then one day I was driving past a local hardware store when I saw tall thin garden stakes, and I remembered a long-ago building project that featured sticks and string. A sukkah made of garden stakes and string might not be stable enough to stand on its own, but because my mirpesset has a railing, I could rely on the existing structure to help hold my sukkah up. It would be a tiny sukkah, of course -- perhaps befitting the inhabitants of a small condo, a downsizing b'chol olamot / in all worlds.

A sukkah is always already a sketch of a house. It's a minimalist line drawing, not an oil painting; its components suggest "dwelling," but it isn't permanent and isn't stable -- indeed, it can't be. A sukkah needs to have a leafy roof through which the stars can be seen, and a certain flimsiness seems appropriate to this harvest festival of impermanence. A sukkah is like the autumn leaves: as soon as it's built in all its splendor it's vulnerable to coming apart at the seams. So, too, are we, of course. 

I don't know whether our mirpesset sukkah will last all week -- whether the roof will hold up the cornstalks, whether wind and rain will tear it apart, whether our decorations will blow away and dance across the lawn. But we have already rejoiced in our sweet, sparkly temporary little house. I feel incredibly blessed to have a place of our own where I can build even a tiny sukkah, and to have a kid who takes pleasure in tinsel and autumn leaves, and to have a holiday that drags me outdoors at this season.

Chag sameach -- a joyous festival to all.

Happy kid in the sukkah!

Sukkot is called זמן שמחתנו, zman simchateinu, which means "season of our rejoicing." But what does one do if one isn't able to rejoice at this season? If sorrow, or grief, are getting in the way of the ability to rejoice? What then? My answer is this: we bring whatever we are feeling, in its fullness, into the sukkah with us. Even if it isn't joy. Spiritual practice asks us to be present to what is, whatever it is.

There are five megillot (scrolls) in Jewish tradition which are associated with particular festivals. At Purim we read Esther. At Pesach, we read Song of Songs. At Shavuot, we read Ruth. At Tisha b'Av, we read Lamentations. And at Sukkot, we read Kohelet (in English, it's called Ecclesiastes.) Think "A time to be born, and a time to die..." In every life, there is a time for gladness, and a time for sorrow.

When I am wrestling with sorrow, there is comfort for me in the knowledge that everything comes and goes. "This too shall pass" -- even the deepest of grief. הֲבֵל הֲבָלִים הַכֹּל הָבֶל -- often rendered as "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity" -- can also be translated "Breath, breathing; everything is fleeting as a breath." Even our sorrows are not forever -- though they may feel that way when we are in them.

Sukkot is a festival of impermanence. For a week we do our best to dwell in our little harvest houses which must have roofs through which one can see the stars. We remind ourselves that the structures we build in our lives are not forever. The challenge is finding joy not despite the temporariness, but in it. Not despite life's sorrows, but even as we allow ourselves to wholly feel those sorrows.

Enter Rabbi Jay Michaelson's essay Entering the Gate of Sadness, published in Zeek in 2007. (Speaking of which, I'm looking really forward to reading his new book, The Gate of Tears: Sadness and the Spiritual Path, coming in a few days from Ben Yehuda Press.) Jay writes:

Sadness is not an expression of the heart to be discarded in favor of those which are better. To believe that everything happens as it must is not to be fatalistic and cowed; it is not to believe everything happens for the best; it is to understand that sadness is part of the unfolding of the God Process. Praise God with it. Even that which is not, apparently, for our best may be turned to an instrument of praise. Not by denying its painfulness, but by deeply seeing this soul, in this body, at this moment, as manifesting the unfolding of the One. The pain is real, and it is God.

For me the critical words there are "Not by denying its painfulness[.]" There is always a temptation to respond to sadness by shutting it down, or papering it over, or pretending it's not there. Maybe especially at times of year when we feel we're "supposed" to be happy -- at anniversaries or birthdays, at holidays. But spiritual practice calls us to resist the temptation to put a bandaid on what hurts.

The mitzvah of Sukkot is  לישב בסוכה / leishev ba-sukkah, to dwell -- literally, "to sit" -- in the sukkah. If your heart is breaking, then bring that into the sukkah and sit with it as best you can. Sitting in the sukkah can be a kind of embodied meditation, an opportunity to feel what comes and what goes. Torah tells us to rejoice in our festivals, but if you can't, that's okay. God is with you, wherever you are.

Maybe singing the praise-psalms of Hallel will "help," in the sense of lightening your heart, and maybe not. (You might find more resonance in מן המצר קראתי יה / min ha-meitzar karati Yah -- "From the narrow straits I called to You!" -- than in the more overtly joyful verses.) Either way, bring what is with you into the sukkah. Let yourself feel whatever you feel. And remember that this, too, shall pass.

Related: Joy, 2009.

We in North America are about to experience the fourth of four total lunar eclipses in a row which, incredibly, have coincided with Pesach and Sukkot. The full moon of this Sukkot will be eclipsed (on Sept. 28), as was the full moon of Pesach last spring -- and the full moon of the previous Sukkot and Pesach, as well. Over these two years, the full moon marking these festival times has been eclipsed at the moments of perhaps the greatest joy in the Jewish calendar – at Pesach, when we experience freedom from the Narrow Place, and at Sukkot, when we enter with thanksgiving into our fragile and impermanent harvest houses...

That's the beginning of an essay I wrote jointly with my dear friend and ALEPH co-chair Rabbi David Markus. (Slightly updated to reflect the fact that we're approaching the fourth eclipse rather than the first.) I shared it here a couple of years ago when we first wrote it, but it seems worth sharing again as we approach the final eclipse in the series: Four eclipses; four worlds; four holidays; four holy perspective shifts.