Are We Ready to Sit in One Sukkah?
“All Israel are fit to sit in one sukkah.”
— Sukkah 27b
Rav Kook, the former Chief Rabbi of what was then British Mandate Palestine, wrote a fascinating essay called HaSukkah HaAchat, or The One Sukkah. In it, he considers the teaching that all Israel are fit to sit in a single sukkah. If we are fit to do so, why is it not so?
Rav Kook describes two ways in which we perceive life: the force of imagination and the clarity of the intellect. Imagination constructs a picture of the world through the limits of our own thoughts, feelings and desires. The intellect, by contrast, strives “to reach the truth and to know things as they are.”
Perhaps this Sukkot we should ask whether the picture each of us holds of other people—and of our place among them—is the whole truth. Rav Kook explains that the people of Israel are not a collection of unrelated individuals. We belong to one another.
That does not mean we must think alike. The question is whether our differences exist within a deeper consciousness of connection, or become walls that make us experience one another as strangers. Rav Kook describes the result of separation with painful precision: the “darkness of divisions and hatreds, the quarrels of factions and personal conflicts” that destroy what is good among us, “in spirit and in matter.”
Sukkot offers another possibility. The Sfat Emet, Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter of Ger, writes: “Sukkot is called the Festival of Ingathering [Chag HaAsif], in which the Children of Israel unite to become one.” Chag HaAsif refers to gathering in the produce of the field, but the Sfat Emet also reads it as a gathering of people.
The same idea appears in the Midrash concerning the four species. It compares the etrog, lulav, hadas and aravah to different kinds of Jews: those who possess Torah and good deeds, those who possess one but not the other, and those whom it describes as possessing neither. What does G-d do with such a people? The Midrash says: “Let them all be bound together into one bundle.”
We do not fulfil the mitzvah by choosing only the etrog. We take the different species together. The unity of Israel does not begin once we have decided who is worthy of inclusion. It begins with the recognition that all of us belong to the bundle.
Then comes the sukkah. After Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, after judgment, introspection and repentance, we leave the apparent security of our individual houses and enter a temporary structure beneath a common covering.
The 20th-century Kabbalist and Orthodox rabbi Baal HaSulam writes: “The Sukkah of Peace [Sukkat Shalom] is Bina. It is called this because it shelters its children … and protects them from the external forces.” The sukkah can thus be understood as more than a structure in which we sit. It is an image of a shelter spacious enough to hold us together without requiring us to become the same.
But how do we reach it? Rav Kook asks us to question the imagination that tells us we stand alone and can build our future independently of one another. We may disagree profoundly about the answers, but we can begin by asking: Who are we as a people? Why have we endured so much? Is something required of us, and if so, what?
No one can simply hand us the final answers. We must want to search for the truth—and be willing to consider that our private picture may be incomplete. Maybe if we listened to each other, were more accepting of others and remembered that someone with whom I profoundly disagree is still part of my people, we would understand that our futures are intertwined. If we searched for the point at which we can remain connected above all else, perhaps we would become worthy of sitting in one sukkah.
Rav Kook writes that through this process we can rise toward “the preciousness of complete unity,” capable of embracing all the scattered parts of Israel. In a time when disagreements so easily harden into factions, that is more than a beautiful idea for Sukkot. It is a must.
If we can seek a truth beyond our own limited view and recognise the bond between us, we may come closer to realising what our sages taught: “All Israel are fit to sit in one sukkah.”
