The mitzvah of having a sukkah is mentioned twice in Torah:
40. And you shall take on the first day the boughs of goodly trees, branches of palm trees, and the boughs of thick trees, and willows of the brook; and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God seven days. 41. And you shall keep it a feast to the Lord seven days in the year. It shall be a statute forever in your generations; you shall celebrate it in the seventh month. 42. You shall dwell in booths seven days; all who are Israelites born shall dwell in booths; 43. That your generations may know that I made the people of Israel to dwell in booths, when I brought them out of the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God. [Lev 23]
13. You shall observe the Feast of Booths seven days, after you have gathered in your grain and your wine; 14. And you shall rejoice in your feast, you, and your son, and your daughter, and your manservant, and your maidservant, and the Levite, the stranger, and the orphan, and the widow, who are inside your gates. 15. Seven days shall you keep a solemn feast to the Lord your God in the place which the Lord shall choose; because the Lord your God shall bless you in all your produce, and in all the works of your hands, therefore you shall surely rejoice. [Deut 16]In both of these passages, it is clear this is a festival for rejoicing. It is also clear we are to live in the booths. Leviticus tells us to make sure to do this every year in every generation. Like Passover, it is reminder of the Exodus from Egypt. While Leviticus tells us it is for Israelites, Deuteronomy makes clear this is isn’t personal holiday, but one that is inclusive of the entire congregation, servants and the underprivileged as well as family. Zechariah includes others as well. In messianic times, everyone on the planet will celebrate in the Sukkah. [Zech 14:16] Yet even Israel did not follow this mitzvah for much of its early history. In Nehemiah we read the fourth passage about Sukkot, the first one after returning from exile:
16. So the people went out, and brought them, and made themselves booths, every one upon the roof of his house, and in their courts, and in the courts of the house of God, and in the open space of the Water Gate, and in the open space of the Gate of Ephraim. 17. And all the congregation of those who had returned from captivity made booths, and dwelt in the booths; for since the days of Joshua, son of Nun, to that day the people of Israel had not done so. And there was a very great rejoicing. [Neh. 8]The people rejoiced because it was Sukkot, but also they rejoiced in restoring a tradition from the time of Joshua. The beginning of the second temple period saw the revival of the Sukkah, even though Torah mandates observance from generation to generation. This provides us with a startling implication: After Joshua, there was never a sukkah when the Mishkan and the first temple stood in Israel.
In those first sukkahs of the second temple period, the Aaron Hodesh, the Holy Ark was not in the holy of holies as it was in the first temple or the Mishkan. The object where the presence of God was found hovering was no longer part of the temple. The best facilitator of the divine-human relationship was gone. So it is an odd, even ironic proposition to state that the fine craftsmanship of gold and acacia wood that was the Ark is to be replaced with a rickety, leaky shack that is a sukkah. From the destruction of the temple, the Aaron Hodesh was taken away and replaced with the sukkah.
Abraham Joshua Heschel in his book The Sabbath describes architecture of time in Judaism instead of space. Sukkot for example is a commemoration of a time when we lived in booths in the wilderness. The Sabbath is a commemoration of the completion of creation, one completely dependent on a time period of seven days and independent of space. Other religions in contrast have architecture of space. The place where something happened is more important than the time it happened. Encompassing Space and Time is relationship. There is foremost our relationship to God. Shabbat is a commemoration of our relationship to Creation and its creator. To rest on Shabbat we take the time to pause and look at creation. But often we observe Shabbat in a synagogue or in our houses, blocked off from much of the original creation by walls, doors, heating and air conditioning. Yet on Sukkot we take that step further, we spend time in creation in a hut so rickety we might as well have nothing. Its decorations are often not man-made but grown. It is to have, for seven days a year a certain experience, one Kohelet writes:
4. For to him who is joined to all the living there is hope; for a living dog is better than a dead lion. 5. For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know nothing, nor do they have a reward any more; for the memory of them is forgotten. [Ecclesiastes 9]To join to all life is to observe and experience all life. In this time of year we might feel the warmth of the sun on a dry day or the stinging cold wind and rain. It is to see the beautiful full moon on some years, and nothing but clouds on others. Every meal in the sukkah, everything changes. As Kohelet describes, the world is in constant flux, always changing and thus it is vanity to do anything. At the end of Sukkot we will begin Genesis again, and its repeated phrase “and it was evening and it was morning” If a year was compared to a day, then we are in the evening of the year. This is the time before the death of sleep we call winter as geese fly overhead, escaping to warmer climates. To be outside and experience this reminds us of Death and joins us to the living.
As much as the Days of Awe are often masses of people grouped together involved in a very personal event of getting written into the book of life, Sukkot flips this around. The sukkah itself is small but an incredibly social place. Only a few can fit there. In my family we never had our own sukkah. Today I have no where to put one of my own. My dad on many occasions built the synagogue ones, and the experience of building in a back parking lot some rickety construction of chicken wire and pipe, often under the gray overcast skies and snow flurries of Rochester NY, still make my hands chill but my heart warm. From some of my earliest memories to the present I have often been the visitor in another’s sukkah. As the mitzvah requires, it is a week of rejoicing, because one is not only in relationship with Nature, but with people. Sukkahs tend to be as unique as their owners the decorations of the sukkah as personal as the ornaments on a Christmas tree. For most who build sukkahs, what they put in their sukkah is just as important to them as those who decorate Christmas trees. Jumping from sukkah to sukkah tell us a lot about people and our relationships with them, both those who own that sukkah and those who are just visiting.
Sukkot is a holiday of relationship. Kohelet tells us of desiring many things, but all are vain and empty. They are like chasing after the wind. All we can do is enjoy the relationships we have in our lives, however momentary. To make them permanent is chasing after wind. But it is important to appreciate them while they are here. I disagree with Kohelet. There is something new under the sun – the memories of our relationships and our interactions with others. However small, they spread out like the ripples of a fallen leaf on a pond. Yes, some memories will disappear with our deaths, but others will remain, spread throughout the consciousness of those we leave behind.
Like a secular Christmas, Sukkot is about visiting and eating with friends and decorating some ritual object. The sukkah itself, however has a deeper spiritual meaning, a conduit for divine connection, through the experiencing of the world as it goes through it yearly death throes heading into winter. It finds divine connection in our relationship to other people we eat with during Sukkot in our booths with roofs so open we can appreciate the moon and stars. We read the book of Kohelet, which explains how temporary and fleeting our existence is, a lot like a sukkah. To celebrate Sukkot, maybe it is Kohelet who best describes how to celebrate.
Go your way, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has already accepted your works. [Ecclesiastes 9:7]
No comments:
Post a Comment