Sukkot 5784
I’m about to share a very controversial opinion with you, but I feel that at this point, having been at PSJC for about two months, hopefully you all can handle it. I am not a fan of autumn. I try to lean into it, with big chunky sweaters, candles and, who knows, maybe I’ll even try a pumpkin spice latte. But, the literal and figurative winds of change that are palpable this time of year always throw me off kilter, or at least threaten to. It is fitting, at least in the northern hemisphere, that our big holidays that focus on mortality, reflection, and the transient nature of all things happen at this time, when the fragility of life is mirrored to us in the shaking of leaves, the cutting off and harvesting of long awaited fruits, and the waning daylight.
In his famous book on the High Holidays, This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared, Rabbi Alan Lew writes about the arc of the High Holiday season not beginning with Rosh Hashanah, or even Rosh Chodesh Elul, but with Tisha b’Av. He writes,
“This dance that begins on Tisha b'Av and ends on Sukkot, that begins with the mournful collapse of a house and ends with the joyful collapse of a house, this intentional spasm that awakens us and carries us through death and back to life again– stands for the journey the soul is always on.”
Where Tisha b’Av is about mourning a house that we didn’t expect to be destroyed, Sukkot is about celebrating in a house that is designed to be destroyed. A representation of the beautiful but temporary houses that are our body and our world, their temporal nature increasing their beauty and meaning.
I’ll never forget a time I felt somewhat joyfully in a dance between life and death. About 6 years ago, before the current war, I was in Ukraine with 5 other women, visiting the graves of famous holy Rabbis–the Baal Shem Tov, Rebbe Nachman, the Berdichever Rebbe, among others. Because of language barriers and navigation, it’s customary for people on this kind of pilgrimage to hire a driver to take them to the different graves. Our driver, a middle aged man who had been doing this kind of work for many years, picked us up from the airport in a van and off we went. The moment we took off, I could tell that the driving customs were…different…than I was used to. I urgently reached for my seatbelt. “Tsk tsk,” he said to me, his eyes looking at me in the rearview mirror. I quickly realized that he was not wearing a seatbelt, that recklessness was perhaps part of the driving culture there. That it was taboo to buckle up. I obviously wore my seatbelt, but the driving–with the wild speeding, driving on the wrong side of the highway to pass cars, moving back into the correct lane as an approaching car or truck was way too close for comfort–was a constant reminder of the fragility of our lives, and how little control we really have. I was grateful for the daily stops to pray at holy sites, and connect with the souls of teachers I feel like I know, to help me connect with the beyond between every frightening van ride.
Even when we are not in a van speeding down Ukrainian highways in a snowstorm, this fragility and lack of control is reality. Even when it isn’t in our face, like it was at the beginning of COVID, or when we are experiencing a health crisis, under the surface the truth remains, that our grasp on this world is an illusion. Our home, like the Sukkah, is hole-y, it is fragile, and it is so, so beautiful. Rabbi Lew shares an image of the joy of this time,
“The stars are shining on the top of my head, the wind is in my hair; a few drops of rain are falling into my soup, but the soup is still warm. I am sitting in a sukkah, a booth with branches draped over the top, which I have erected in my backyard. A deep joy is seeping out from the core of my being and filling my body and soul. It began as a kind of lightness. I felt it as soon as the shofar was sounded to signal the end of Yom Kippur. There were three stars in the sky then. I felt all the weight, all the heaviness of the day -- all the death and the judgment and the yearning, all the soulful thrashing and beating of breasts -- falling away all at once, suddenly gone. I felt light and clean.”
May Sukkot and autumn help us to dance and rejoice in liminality, may we allow ourselves to notice and appreciate our lack of control, knowing that it’s what makes us human and makes us alive. Chag Sameach and Shabbat Shalom.
