Can the Church Teach the World about Sukkot?

As we celebrate Sukkot, it is a good time to consider the relationship between two of its major themes, almost always viewed in isolation. The themes I have in mind are the Jew’s relationship to property and the Jewish people’s obligation to serve humanity at large.

It could well be that these two themes have nothing to do with one another and are simply embedded in the same holiday. If nothing else, however, their fortuitous synchronicity encourages us to note that various historical factors have recently aligned them much more closely, so much so that their practical combination may deserve becoming the holiday’s primary focus.

The two main historical factors I have in mind each relate to one of these themes. The first is property’s heightened importance and centrality in late modernity and the increasingly visible threat this poses to mankind’s moral and spiritual health and, consequently, to its very well-being. The second is the Catholic Church’s rapprochement with the Jewish people in the last half-century.

Before explaining how these factors relate to Sukkot, let us first very briefly review the two themes mentioned at the outset:

• Leaving one’s home to live in a temporary and vulnerable dwelling is part of a cluster of commandments, the sabbatical year being the most obvious, which emphasizes the tentative nature of property. These commandments help us understand that God is the true owner of all that we have and that we may only use it in accordance with His will. Another instructive example in this cluster is the concept of relinquishing lost property by giving up on it (iyush). Even if the item is found a minute after I give up on it, it is no longer legally mine. R. Y. Y. Weinberg (LiFerakim, Ki Tetzeh) points out that this is in contrast to the Western legal tradition (presumably rooted in the pre-Christian Roman law), which sees property rights as absolute and consequently unaffected by any assumptions that I will not find it again.
• Many of the sacrifices offered over the seven days of Sukkot are offered to extend God’s blessing to the other nations of the world. While other elements of the holiday also speak to its universal significance, the sacrifices are the most tangible expression of the Jewish people’s concern for humanity at large and the Jews’ need to actively promote its betterment.

I.

The first theme becomes particularly important because of the oversized power that has accrued to property-based free-market economic forces. In and of themselves, property rights and free markets can be and often have been, a source of great good in the world. Yet they have always been accompanied by the concern that, unchecked by a concern for the sanctity of human life, morality and basic equity, they can too easily lead to vice, corruption and possibly even the demise of civilization itself. The failure of most modern states to control drug abuse, abuse of social media (and now AI) and even the unacceptably high fatality rate from traffic (and other) accidents is primarily due to such states’ inability and often unwillingness to subordinate market forces to ethical and spiritual values.

The primacy of values, which prevents us from getting overly caught up in the material gratification that comes with property, is an important part of what Sukkot is all about. Indeed, an ideal Jewish state would take these lessons to heart and apply them to some of the problems just mentioned. One of the major complications that confront Jews (as well as the State of Israel) when they want to focus more clearly on Judaism’s economic teachings, however, is that Jews, like everyone else, are part of a global economy that mitigates against it. Keeping the sabbatical year provides a good illustration: If Israeli orange growers do not supply exporters for a year, these growers will likely also lose the contract the following year as well. The fact that there is a workaround in the heter mekhirah only makes it possible for us to keep the letter of the law, while actually moving us further away from its central teaching that there are values more important than economics. But perhaps, as we will discuss further on, that is where Sukkot’s second theme can play a role.

Curiously or perhaps not, given the fact that Christianity comes out of Judaism, the Jewish remedy to the situation is also found in very robust form in the Catholic Church. (As you can imagine, it is not often that I study Catholic doctrine. I only truly became aware of this due to my participation in a rabbinic symposium on culture, religion and the marketplace sponsored by Tikvah, in which my colleagues and I were asked to look more carefully at the following text:) In the Centesimus Annus encyclical of Pope John Paul II from 1991, he forthrightly addresses the ills created by the global economic order in terms that remind me very strongly of R. S. R. Hirsch and of R. Jonathan Sacks.

In a major position statement, the Pope repeatedly stresses the need for economic forces to be kept in check. He cites and expands upon the position of the Second Vatican Council that “In making use of the exterior things we lawfully possess, we ought to regard them not just as our own but also as common, in the sense that they can profit not only the owners but others too.”

He continues: A given culture reveals its overall understanding of life through the choices it makes in production and consumption. It is here that the phenomenon of consumerism arises. In singling out new needs and new means to meet them, one must be guided by a comprehensive picture of man which respects all the dimensions of his being and which subordinates his material and instinctive dimensions to his interior and spiritual ones. If, on the contrary, a direct appeal is made to his instincts — while ignoring in various ways the reality of the person as intelligent and free — then consumer attitudes and lifestyles can be created which are objectively improper and often damaging to his physical and spiritual health… It is not wrong to want to live better; what is wrong is a style of life which is presumed to be better when it is directed towards “having” rather than “being,” and which wants to have more, not in order to be more, but in order to spend life in enjoyment as an end in itself.

Finally, the Pope teaches that “a great deal of educational and cultural work (emphasis in the original) is urgently needed, including the education of consumers in the responsible use of their power of choice, the formation of a strong sense of responsibility among producers and among people in the mass media in particular, as well as the necessary intervention by public authorities.” Although his primary audience was the leadership of the Church, the educational and cultural work he speaks about is something that many rabbis also address (and that many more should) not because of the Pope, but because it is what Judaism teaches as well.

II.

Sukkot’s push for Jews to be involved in the betterment of mankind is another idea that we fail to take seriously enough. Being stuck in the ghetto in an often hostile environment has made the Jewish people largely forget about this ideal. But it is there, and it is in a long process of being rediscovered alongside the gentile world’s progressively becoming more open to the Jewish people and its beliefs. In general, there has arguably never been a time when the Jews have been better positioned to have a major impact on the rest of the world as we are now. There has likewise never been a time when the Catholic Church has been so favorably disposed towards Judaism and the Jews.

Given the Church’s historical record of persecution and anti-semitism, it is hard for many, perhaps most, Jews to respond to the Church’s relatively new attitude.^[1] While there may be some halakhic limitations as to how much of a partnership we can create with the Church, our impact on the world will be greatly enhanced by revisiting our relationship more seriously. Times change, and success is often marked by adaptation to such changes.^[2]

Obviously, I am not speaking about taking the road of Reform and compromising ideals in order to do so. But it is time for us to realize that bitterness and holding on to old wounds is not a mitzvah. We have to address the Catholic Church ‘beasher hu sham’ (where it is now).

Whereas Rambam speaks about the positive role that Christianity plays in familiarizing mankind “[even] in the remotest islands” with the Bible and its precepts (MT, Melakhim 11:4),^[3] it is not a far stretch to extend that to its role in familiarizing mankind with some of Judaism’s central ideas as well. While those ideas are also rooted in the Bible, it is the Rabbis who subsequently flushed them out and gave them their full form. But because Christianity split off from Judaism towards the beginning of the Rabbinic period, it has suffered from an incomplete understanding of its parent tradition. To the extent that many leaders of the Church are open to it, it is an opportune time for rabbinic leaders to facilitate their exposure to some of our teachings.

But forging new alliances is timely not only because we have a new opportunity. As a result of the existential threats that have come out of a debilitating secularism, there is an urgent need for various religious traditions to pool our resources together. Hence if Judaism can help its derivatives by giving them more access to the root traditions from which they will gain, the Church can help us by giving over the power of those teachings to the vast audience that it commands throughout the world.

Indeed, central to Rambam’s insight is the very large audience that the Church has and that Judaism does not have. If Sukkot reminds us of our obligation to the betterment of mankind and to help them reach the ideal state that we prayed about on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur when all created beings will worship God, and hence heed His will about how to relate to property, we must think anew about how to work with others who have finally come around to wanting to work with us.

I am not writing with a concrete blueprint on how to do this. For one, it would be premature. Instead, I am calling to remove the attitudinal impediments that make it premature. In commenting on the reconciliation between Ya’akov and Esav (Bereishit 33:4), Netziv writes that both of them crying, “comes to teach… that when the descendants of Esav arouse themselves with a pure spirit to recognize the descendants of Yisrael, then we too arouse ourselves to recognize Esav, since he is our brother.” My sense is that while the first has happened, the descendants of Yisrael are, by and large, lagging behind.

While such a delay is understandable, especially this year, in which we are tempted to feel that we have no true friends, Torah scholars are meant to analyze each situation on its own merits and to keep their sights on the primary goal, which is always to bring ourselves closer to God. The twin themes of Sukkot described above are direct channels to bring about the messianic period, presumably providing a quantum leap in our relationship with God. There may be no better time to actualize them than now.

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^[1] However, it should be noted that this is changing in many circles, even in the Orthodox rabbinate. One important indication of this change can be seen in “Between Jerusalem and Rome: Reflections on 50 Years of Nostra Aetatem,” a statement of reconciliation towards the Catholic church issued by the Rabbinical Council of America, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and the Conference of European Rabbis on Aug. 31, 2017.

^[2] In this regard, the position of many contemporary rabbbis who feel compelled to follow the rather conservative guidelines R. Yosef Dov Soloveitchik put out on interfaith dialog in his famous 1964 essay, Confrontation, is not helpful. At that time, the Church was in the middle of formulating its new Nostra Aetatem policy and it is not clear whether R. Soloveitchik would maintain the same position today (which, in any event, may have been more nuanced if one looks to some of his other writings and activities). Although our generation lacks the level of leadership that he embodied, we have no choice but to do the best we can in the spirit of Yiftach bedoro keShmuel bedoro.

^[3] Of course, that is not to imply that Rambam was a fan of Christianity or that we would necessarily agree with our project. What it does show is his ability to point us to the larger historical picture, which he ascribes to the “thoughts of God,” in which Christianity plays a positive role as well as a negative one. (It should perhaps be noted that Rambam also includes Islam in this role of publicizing the Torah’s precepts. His description of that role, however, makes it sound as if Islam’s role is more tangential, given the much more prominent place of the Bible in Christianity.)