Sukkot Closeness

Sefat Emet – Reabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger, translated by Rabbi Arthur Green

“Take unto yourselves the fruit of the goodly tree.” (Lev. 23:40)

Scripture also says: “Tell me the ways to live, to be sated with joy in Your presence.” (Psalms 16:11). Lulav is numerically equal to hayyim (life), Israel desire the true life of their inner selves. This is what it means to be “sated with joy” – the more deeply you take life into your heart, the more you are sated. This happens through the lulav and the species that accompany it. Israel actually point to God, taking in the light of the Sukkah, which is given to them as a gift. When the King invites guests, he gives them what their heart desires. “Whoever invites someone does so with the intent that they eat and drink.”

That is why God says to us: “Take unto yourselves,” meaning that we should choose life for ourselves…Awareness for the whole year comes about on Sukkot, the last of the three “legs” on which the year stands. The mitzvah of Sukkah stands on its own, but the lulav/species represent the awareness that Israel receive and take into the depths of their hearts…5:181

Sefer Hatoda'ah (The Book of Consciousness) by Rabbi Eliyahu Ki Tov

We are not making them [the sukkot] in memory of the first set of clouds of glory that surrounded them when the y first left Egypt, since these clouds of glory left them afterwards with the sin of the golden calf. Rather, we make them in memory of the clouds of glory that returned for them afterwards and never left them for all forty years...

When Israel sinned with the calf, the clouds of glory left them...When Moses came down for the third time he also brought the commandment of building the tabernacle, as a sign that God had forgiven them...

[After Moses descends on Yom Kippur, the people of Israel begin to bring all of their gifts towards the tabernacle.]

Comes the fifteenth day of Tishrei....What do they see?...They see the clouds of glory that returned after leaving them from the sin of the calf until then. From then on, the people of Israel dwell in the shade of the clouds of glory that enveloped them like a Sukkah...

Rabbi Alan Lew, z''l, from This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared

...We sit flush with the world, in a ‘house’ that calls attention to the fact that it gives us no shelter. It is not really a house. It is the interrupted idea of a house, a parody of a house…So it is that the sukkah, with its broken lines, its open roof, its walls that don’t quite surround us, calls the idea of the house to mind more forcefully than a house itself might do.

And it exposes the idea of a house as an illusion. The idea of a house is that it gives us security, shelter, haven from the storm. But no house can really offer us this. No building of wood and stone can ever afford us protection from the disorder that is always lurking all around us. No shell we put between us an the world can ever really keep us secure from it. And we know this. We never really believed this illusion. That’s why we never felt truly secure in it [...]

In the sukkah, a house that is open to the world, a house that freely acknowledges that it cannot be the basis of our security, we let go of this need. The illusion of protection falls away, and suddenly we are flush with our life, feeling our life, following our life, doing its dance, one step after another.

Rabbi Alan Lew, z''l, from This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared

This is a commandment we fulfill not with a gesture or a word, but with our entire body. We sit in the sukkah with our entire body. Only our entire body is capable of knowing what it felt like to leave the burden of Egyptian oppression behind, to let go of it. Egypt in Hebrew is Mitzraim. The root of this word is tzar, a narrowness. Egypt was the narrow place. Only the entire body can know what it felt like to be pushed from a place of dire constriction and into a wilderness, a spacious, open world. Only the body can know what it felt like to be born. Only the body can know the fullness of joy, and this is a commandment that can only be fulfilled with joy.

#Wetoo Dwell in Booths: Sukkot During the Kavanaugh Confirmation Hearings

By Maria Pulzetti | September 26, 2018

The sukkah protects the vulnerable … and it exposes the violators

On Sunday, preparing for the Jewish festival of Sukkot, my family harvested bamboo in the rain. Just days after the hours of prayer and reflection on Yom Kippur, we were giddy to be outside, with muddy feet, building a hut that barely fits in our postage-stamp Philadelphia backyard. To my surprise, it was beautiful: crowned in green, revealing the sky.

During Sukkot we take on the commandment to dwell outside, inviting guests to join us for meals in a partially open structure, a sukkah. Instead of a roof we lay branches atop our hut: enough to provide shade but not enough to block our view of the sky. The festival blurs the distinctions between public and private, between vulnerability and protection. Our rabbis teach that we leave the roof open to symbolize the sheltering presence of the divine.

But as I built my family’s sukkah, I also spent the weekend following the relentless media coverage of whether Christine Blasey Ford would testify that Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her as a teenager, and a new assault allegation by Deborah Ramirez. The press reported that law professors at my alma mater had groomed students for judicial clerkships with Judge Kavanaugh, telling women that he prefers clerks who look like models. I found all of these accounts unsurprising, yet deeply demoralizing. This is the pinnacle of my profession. This is the world in which we are raising our children.

Sitting in our sukkah, our shelter of peace, I struggle to reconcile these two competing narratives—the commandment to make ourselves vulnerable outside, and the reality of sexual assault and harassment. This Sukkot we cannot ignore that we do not all sit under the sky equally sheltered. As I hear the stories of people learning that their bodies are not protected, whether at work, at home, in public space, or as guests in private space, I reencounter my own stories.

I refuse to conclude that Sukkot excludes my experience and the experiences of many other people. Indeed, feminists have long understood the power of creating a temporary space to gather outside in community, whether small or large: Take Back the Night rallies; clinic escorts; the Women’s March.

Sukkot gives Jewish feminists the opportunity to go outside and claim a temporary sacred space in plain sight, under the sky. Gathered together, sheltered and exposed, we will hear the truth in this week’s Torah reading: there is “a time for tearing down and a time for building up; a time for weeping and a time for laughing; a time for wailing and a time for dancing; . . . a time for embracing and a time for shunning embraces; . . . a time for silence and a time for speaking” (Eccl. 3: 3–7). As we observe in the confirmation hearings, our stories are systematically silenced in public space. That silence causes pain and circumscribes our lives. The structure of the sukkah, both open and protected, permits us to find the time for speaking.

The sukkah protects the vulnerable by sometimes allowing their vulnerabilities to be seen and spoken, and it exposes the violators by allowing their violations to be seen and heard. When rain falls through the branches and when mosquitoes invite themselves to dinner, we learn on the most basic level that our human-made structures are not impervious to the forces of the world. When we can bring our whole selves into the sukkah, we open ourselves to the all-seeing, sheltering presence of the Source of All.

This week, as every week, we will go about the world in bodies scarred, shaped and strengthened by our encounters with misogyny and violence. As we celebrate Sukkot in the shadow of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, may we find protection in the intimate recognition of our own vulnerability and that of others. May we claim our space, and may we know when is the time for tearing down, and when is the time for building up.

Maria Pulzetti is a legal aid lawyer in Philadelphia.

https://www.ritualwell.org/blog/wetoo-dwell-booths