Sukkot Adventures in Joy

Sukkot, coming on the heels of sombre Yom Kippur, is meant to be “the holiday of our joy.” It is characteristic of the Jewish calendar to balance seriousness with fun, intensity with levity. This year, in a new home in rural Ontario, my husband took full advantage.

“As soon as Yom Kippur is over, I’m going to start building our sukkah,” he announced during the High Holidays. I have to admit, I was not fully on board. Our recent move to a small town means we are likely the only Jews in the municipality; we drove two hours back to Toronto for Yom Kippur services and are currently sussing out more local options, all at least half an hour’s drive away, some involving a border crossing.

Furthermore, since we have gone rural we have been “passing” as non-Jews and do not know what the reaction will be when our true identities are revealed. At a neighbors’ party on our first weekend here, the host asked me what my ethnicity was. I kept it vague. “Eastern European,” I said in what I hoped was a nonchalant voice. “Yeah,” he replied. “I knew you weren’t just a regular white girl.”

Yet my husband was adamant: we would have a sukkah. We would eat our Shabbat meal in the open-roofed, temporary shelter. He drove to Home Hardware and the lumber yard to get supplies; he special ordered a lulav and etrog set from Israel.

A Boy Scout throughout his childhood and adolescence, Aaron had a model for our dwelling in mind, a structure he had built previously on camping trips to house the dining hall. He drilled wood shafts to connect at angles to form a skeleton, then lashed plastic tarps to the skeleton to make the walls in an open trapezoid formation. We set up our new-used deck table and chairs inside. Then for the best part: making the roof and decorating. We walked north to our main intersection, where a few cars pass every hour, and stopped at a stand of tall reeds blowing in the breeze. We cut down two armfuls with our kitchen scissors and marched them back to our place, where we arranged them over the top of our sukkah. Aaron had found some decorations online that mistakenly spelled “Sukkot” backwards; read right to left, the decorations declared, “Happy Tuchus!” He couldn’t resist, and we posted them all over our small hut. Sukkot, the holiday of our joy.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get to eat in the sukkah or welcome in the ushpizin, the Biblical ancestors who are said to visit in spirit during the festival. High winds blew the sukkah over the day after we erected it. Instead, we ate Shabbat dinner next to the crumbled structure, roof-reeds scattered at our feet, and later propped it up enough so that we could perform the mitzvah of shaking the lulav and the etrog. It was a beautiful, big-sky evening and we took joy from our efforts (and some delicious Ottolenghi dinner) despite the fact that it was imperfect. Finding delight in imperfect circumstances is also key to joyful living.

It is so hard, yet absolutely imperative, to experience and celebrate joy at this time in our history, and part of the celebration is being bravely visible. Our celebrations often involve public expressions of our Jewishness, and Sukkot is no exception; in this day and age, visibility can be scary, but it is necessary to overcoming our collective trauma and living as Proud Jews. Hiding, though a natural reaction to potential or perceived hostile circumstances, creates fear and shame like a noxious poison.

There are too many who would destroy us, and part of that attempted destruction is taking away our joy. Our tradition teaches that celebration is as important as contemplation; that we live on in part because of our deep capacity for joy. It’s built into the tradition; it’s built into Sukkot. It’s built into the very Jewish ability to hold grief and joy at the same time, to deny neither their due. Visibility, though frightening at times, is also part of the package.

And beginning anew is built into Simchat Torah, which follows Sukkot. We read the last verses of the Torah, and then with our next breath, we start over again. It is the same text but we are different from the past year’s experience. We will see the Torah differently this year than we have in any other year. Aviva Chernick, a Jewish meditation teacher and musician in Toronto, tells us the message of Simchat Torah is to let go and begin again. This lesson feels very personal to me at this time, having just let go of my life in Toronto to begin again in rural Niagara. If we are open to it, our Jewishness can deeply inform aspects of our lives that don’t seem particularly Jewish at first glance.

Although my husband and I may now have to travel a bit to attend a synagogue, we remain deeply rooted in our Jewish lives, and we bring that to our new home. We proudly built a sukkah in our backyard, and if our neighbors are again curious, we’ll explain it to them.

I’m so glad my husband convinced me to participate this year. He has reminded me of these lessons of Jewish practice, and brought me back to some of the fundamental joys of our tradition, which he chose to join less than two years ago. He is already making plans for next year’s sukkah.