Rabbi Nathan's blog

Friends, as you read this column we will be heading into the Jewish month of Tishrei and bringing in the new year. While Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur were holidays that were centered around Temple ritual in Biblical Israel, the holiday of Sukkoth was truly a holiday of celebration. As Rabbi Arthur Waskow notes in his description of the Second Temple Sukkoth celebration in Seasons of Our Joy, “in the days of the Second Temple, Sukkot was a time of intense, ecstatic celebration. Dancing, torches, juggling, flutes, the burning of the priests’ old underclothes—all contribute to the ecstasy.” Sukkoth was the ancient equivalent of a rave festival celebrating the fertility of the earth.

While normally such a festival would be a welcome release from the more serious and reflective engagement of prayer and fasting on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, this year, in the midst of our commemorating the massacre of October 7 and the ensuing war, I know that my celebratory mood is already going to be somewhat diminished.

But I’m grateful that embedded within Sukkoth we not only inherit symbols of joy and abandon but at the same time imbue the holiday with a sense of fragility. The sukkah itself is meant to be an impermanent structure, never designed to withstand a rain. We are meant to be reminded, that like the rickety Sukkah, our lives too may be buffeted by elements
we can’t control.

And, on Sukkoth we also read and study Ecclesiastes, a text that reminds us of the fragility of our lives that will pass and the apparent futility of thinking we can direct our outcomes.

Like the teaching we read on the high holidays of the instruction to carry a slip of paper in one pocket that reads, “for me the world was created,” and a slip in the other pocket that reads “I am but dust and ashes,” it feels like this year I’m being called more than ever to hold on to these two aspects of Sukkoth: In one pocket I have a message that reads “now is the moment to celebrate the blessing of joyful community and the fertility of the earth,” and in another pocket a note that reads “don’t forget that your life and the lives of those around you are fragile, and that all celebration is diminished as we acknowledge the trauma of October 7 and its aftermath.”

Perhaps, my reflection should end here. But there is one more element to Sukkoth that is important to mention.

When the Israelites were in the desert the Torah and ancient rabbis imagined that the sukkoth that the Israelites dwelled in were surrounded by the protecting hand of the annanei hakavod, the clouds of glory. There are even midrashim that imagine that these clouds of glory served a protective purpose, shielding the Israelites from the harsh elements, and also a functional purpose in that they would magically scrub clean the Israelites garments from accumulated dirt. (I wish I had a “cloud of glory” clothes cleaner following me around!)

These clouds in general are seen as a physical manifestation of the divine presence. Just as the cloud of the Divine filled the sanctuary, so too would they hover around the Israelite encampment. Perhaps that is why we pray every week to ask God to spread over us a sukkat shalom, a sukkah of God’s peace and protection. In this reading the clouds of glory can be seen as a harbinger of a better future where we are held and cared for as human beings, shielded from the harshness of our world.

So in addition to holding onto the creative tension between celebration and loss that the sukkah symbolizes in my two pockets, I also will choose to include a third dimension of Sukkah ‐ hope for a better future ‐ that I may choose to suspend near my heart to remind me to never lose faith and hope in the possibility for change.

So, as we move into Tishrei and into the holiday of Sukkoth, I pray that we not only experience moments of joy and fragility, but also moments of hope in the transformation of the world becoming one sukkah, enveloped within the divine clouds of glory.