What exactly is a sukkah? What is it supposed to represent?
The question is essential to the mitzvah itself. The Torah
says: “Live in sukkotfor seven days… so your descendants
will know that I had the Israelites live in sukkot when I
brought them out of Egypt” (Lev. 23: 42-43). In other words, knowing –
reflecting, understanding, being aware – is an integral part of the mitzvah.
For that reason, says Rabbah in the Talmud (Sukkah 2a), a sukkahthat
is taller than twenty cubits (about 30 feet) is invalid because when the sechach,
the “roof,” is that far above your head, you are unaware of it. So what is
a sukkah?
On this, two Mishnaic sages disagreed. Rabbi Eliezer held that the sukkahrepresents
the clouds of glory that surrounded the Israelites during the wilderness years,
protecting them from heat during the day, cold during the night, and bathing
them with the radiance of the Divine presence. Rashi in his commentary takes it
as the literal sense of the verse.
On the other hand, Rabbi Akiva says sukkot mammash, meaning a sukkah is
a sukkah, no more and no less: a hut, a booth, a temporary
dwelling. It has no symbolism. It is what it is (Sukkah 11b).
If we follow Rabbi Eliezer then it is obvious why we celebrate by making
a sukkah. It is there to remind us of a miracle. All three
pilgrimage festivals are about miracles. Pesach is about the miracle of the
Exodus when God brought us out of Egypt with signs and wonders. Shavuot is,
according to the oral Torah, about the miracle of the revelation at Mount Sinai
when, for the only time in history, God appeared to an entire nation. Sukkot is
about God’s tender care of his people, mitigating the hardships of the journey
across the desert by surrounding them with His protective cloud as a parent
wraps a young child in a blanket. Long afterward, the sight of the blanket
evokes memories of the warmth of parental love.
Rabbi Akiva’s view, though, is deeply problematic. If a sukkah is
merely a hut, what was the miracle? There is nothing unusual about living in a
hut if you are living a nomadic existence in the desert. It’s what the Bedouin
did until recently. Some still do. Why should there be a festival dedicated to
something ordinary, commonplace and non-miraculous?
Rashbam says the sukkah was there to remind the Israelites of
their past so that, at the very moment they were feeling the greatest
satisfaction at living in Israel – at the time of the ingathering of the
produce of the Land – they should remember their lowly origins. They were once
a group of refugees without a home, never knowing when they would have to move
on.
Sukkot, according to Rashbam, exists to remind us of our humble origins so that
we never fall into the complacency of taking freedom, the Land of Israel and
the blessings it yields, for granted,
thinking that it happened in the normal course of history.
However, there is another way of understanding Rabbi Akiva, and it lies in one
of the most important lines in the prophetic literature. Jeremiah says, in
words we recited on Rosh Hashanah, “‘I remember the loving-kindness of your
youth, how as a bride you loved me and followed me through the wilderness,
through a land not sown” (Jeremiah. 2:2). This is one of the very rare lines in
Tanach that speaks in praise not of God but of the people Israel.
“How odd of God / to choose the Jews,” goes the famous rhyme, to which the
answer is: “Not quite so odd: the Jews chose God.” They may have been, at
times, fractious, rebellious, ungrateful and wayward. But they had the courage
to travel, to move, to leave security behind, and follow God’s call, as did
Abraham and Sarah at the dawn of our history.
If the sukkah represents God’s clouds of glory, where was “the
loving-kindness of your youth”? There is no sacrifice involved if God is visibly
protecting you in every way and at all times. But if we follow Rabbi Akiva and
see the sukkah as what it is, the temporary home of a
temporarily homeless people, then it makes sense to say that Israel showed the
courage of a bride willing to follow her husband on a risk-laden journey to a
place she has never seen before – a love that shows itself in the fact that she
is willing to live in a hut trusting her husband’s promise that one day they
will have a permanent home.
If so, then a wonderful symmetry discloses itself in the three pilgrimage
festivals. Pesach represents the love of God for His people. Sukkot represents
the love of the people for God. Shavuot represents the mutuality of love
expressed in the covenant at Sinai in which God pledged Himself to the people,
and the people to God.*
Sukkot, on this reading, becomes a metaphor for the Jewish condition not only
during the forty years in the desert but also the almost 2,000 years spent in
exile and dispersion. For centuries Jews lived, not knowing whether the place
in which they lived would prove to be a mere temporary dwelling. Sukkot is the
festival of insecurity.
What is truly remarkable is that it is called, by tradition, zeman
simchatenu, “our time of joy.” That to me is the wonder at the heart of the
Jewish experience: that Jews throughout the ages were able to experience risk
and uncertainty at every level of their existence and yet – while they
sat betzila de-mehemnuta, “under the shadow of faith” (Zohar, Emor,
103a) – they were able to rejoice. That is spiritual courage of a high order. I
have often argued that faith is not certainty: faith is the courage to live
with uncertainty. That is what Sukkot represents if what we celebrate is sukkot
mammash, not the clouds of glory but the vulnerability of actual huts, open
to the wind, the rain and the cold.
I find that faith today in the people and the State of Israel. It is
astonishing to me how Israelis have
been able to live with an almost constant threat of war and terror since the
State was born, and not give way to fear. I sense even in the most secular
Israelis a profound faith, not perhaps “religious” in the conventional sense,
but faith nonetheless: in life, and the future, and hope. Israelis seem to me
perfectly to exemplify what tradition says was God’s reply to Moses when he
doubted the people’s capacity to believe: “They are believers, the children of
believers” (Shabbat 97a). Today’s Israel is a living embodiment of what it is
to exist in a state of insecurity and still rejoice.
And that is Sukkot’s message to the world. Sukkot is the only festival about
which Tanach says that it will one day be celebrated by the whole world
(Zechariah 14: 16-19). The twenty-first century is teaching us what this might
mean. For most of history, most people have experienced a universe that did not
change fundamentally in their lifetimes. But there have been rare great ages of
transition: the birth of agriculture, the first cities, the dawn of
civilisation, the invention of printing, and the industrial revolution. These
were destabilising times, and they brought disruption in their wake. The age of
transition we have experienced in our lifetime, born primarily out of the
invention of the computer and instantaneous global communication, will one day be
seen as the greatest and most rapid era of change since Homo sapiens first set
foot on earth.
Since September 11, 2001, we have experienced the convulsions. As I write these
words, some nations continue to tear themselves apart, and no nation is free of
the threat of terror. Antisemitism has returned, not just to Europe, but
around the world. There are parts of the Middle East and beyond that recall
Hobbes’ famous description of the “state of nature,” a “war of every man
against every man” in which there is “continual fear and danger of violent
death; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” (Hobbes,
The Leviathan, chapter XIII). Insecurity begets fear, fear begets hate, hate
begets violence, and violence eventually turns against its perpetrators.
The twenty-first century will one day be seen by historians as the Age of
Insecurity. We, as Jews, are the world’s experts in insecurity, having lived
with it for millennia. And the supreme response to insecurity is Sukkot, when
we leave behind the safety of our houses and sit in sukkot mammash,
in huts exposed to the elements. To be able to do so and still say, this
is zeman simchatenu, our festival of joy, is the supreme
achievement of faith, the ultimate antidote to fear.
Faith is the ability to rejoice in the midst of instability and change,
travelling through the wilderness of time toward an unknown destination. Faith
is not fear. Faith is not hate. Faith is not violence. These are vital truths,
never more needed than now.
Chag sameach to you all,