This week, we celebrate Sukkot and the fall harvest. We are reminded of the sukkot - the booths - that the Israelites dwelled in as they journeyed from Egypt to the land of Canaan. These sukkot symbolize both our vulnerability - being utterly exposed to the elements while living in a temporary structure with only three walls and barely a roof - as well as our faith - that God will protect us through this harrowing journey and that we will make it into the promised land. In addition, Sukkot follows on the heels of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, perhaps the two holiest holidays in the Jewish calendar. Rather than treating Sukkot as an afterthought, it can be seen as the culmination of these fall holidays.
Rosh Hashana is considered hayom harat olam, the birthday of the world. There is an order to the world and we have our place in that order. As we stand in front of God as Creator, we reckon with our smallness and our limitations as well as our vast potential as one of God’s creatures. Rosh Hashana is also yom hadin, the day of judgment on which we are on trial and God is our Judge. As our life hangs in the balance, we pray to be written into the Book of Life for the year to come. On Yom Kippur, this theme of living in the balance between life and death intensifies, as we deny ourselves food and drink and as some of us don a kittel, the same white robe that we are buried in. We spend the day reciting vidui, the confessional prayer, in which we enumerate the ways we have missed the mark this past year, and we beseech God to have compassion on us. On Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur we look directly at our fragility and mortality. We look death in the face.
We are then commanded to dwell in sukkot for seven days, beginning four days after Yom Kippur. Sukkot is referred to as z’man simchateinu, the time of our joy. We move out of the security and safety of our homes and into a fragile and slightly precarious structure. And we are meant to rejoice. What is this joy that we are to experience? Rabbi Alan Lew suggests that “perhaps this joy is precisely the joy of being stripped naked, the joy of being flush with life, the joy of having nothing between our skin and the wind and the starlight, nothing between us and the world. We have spent the past many weeks stripping ourselves naked – acknowledging our brokenness, allowing ourselves to see what we won’t usually look at, embracing the emptiness at the core of our experience, reducing our lives to a series of impulses that rise up and then fall away again… We have invited ourselves to entertain the possibility that we might die. On Rosh Hashana it is written, we acknowledge, who will live and who will die, and by Yom Kippur we have acknowledged that it may very well be us who does.”
As the climate crisis intensifies, and as the impacts on our communities increase and are felt across the globe, we can take note of that brokenness that Rabbi Lew describes. We can allow ourselves to reckon with our own fragility and mortality, feel the pain that comes with the overwhelming devastation that climate change causes, and face the fear of how great our losses will be in the years to come.
But we don’t stop there. When we accept the possibility of death head on and in community, we are more able to then turn and embrace life fully, to recommit ourselves to being fully alive and to pursue life in every arena that we can. To be alive is joyous; it is our birthright. We get to build deep relationships, to seek out connection, to take note of what we have and experience heartfelt gratitude, to marvel at the complex and beautiful world that God has created and our part in that world. This joy at being alive can help nurture and sustain us as we continue our work. And our work, in turn, can be joyous.
This Sukkot, may we hold close and dear the words we uttered on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur when we invoked God as melekh hafetz bahayim - God Who desires life, God Who wants us to choose life. May we choose life in the coming year.
By Rachel Landsberg, JCAN NYC member