Sukkot: Transience and Transcendence

The Jewish tradition is largely about joy. At first, that doesn’t sound right. Have we not had a tragic history? Do we not still suffer? Was not this past year alone excruciating? There is a distinctive Jewish concept of celebration. Let me contrast it to some other ideas.

One idea of celebration is the abandonment of structure and strictures. We speak of partying with “wild abandon”. We can, in a moment of exultation, throw away society’s rules, our own inhibitions, and in that way achieve joy. But Judaism has an idea of ordered and sanctified celebration. We are ordered to celebrate on days like Sukkot. And we celebrate according to an order: the prayers, the rituals like the lulav and etrog, the melodies. It might not be obvious that structure and order might be part of the highest joy. For some, it may not be. But for some of us, when a child is married at a Jewish wedding, under a chuppah, embracing our history as we look forward, the template adds to our understanding and exultation.

Another idea of celebration might be individual. “I won the Gold medal, I won the Oscar, I got the promotion”. But Judaism takes the view that a joy that is not shared is not a joy. On holidays like Pesach, like Sukkot, we are invited to be not only with family, not only with our congregants, but to invite in those who are alone and friendless. Maimonides says that when you eat and drink, you must also provide food and drink to the poor and the despondent. Otherwise, you are not celebrating the joy of Sukkot (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Yom Tov 6:18).

An idea of celebration might be about a single transcendent moment of time. Of escaping from the bounds of the past and future. Of living in a moment of isolated but surpassing perfection. In the Jewish tradition, a celebration is about uniting our past, present, and future in the arc of history, under the watch of the Eternal one. We remember. We remember the time in the wilderness, living in temporary shelters. In the Ushpizin ceremony, we invite in our treasured leaders from the past, such as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph, and David. We look ahead to a future when all the struggles and torments of history are resolved. In Zechariah, a haftarah for Sukkot, the prophet presents a vision: of a future Sukkot when all nations are united in recognition of one God (Zechariah 14:16-19, JPS).

Sukkot, we are told, is a remembrance of when the Israelites sheltered in huts in the Wilderness (Leviticus 23:42-43, JPS). The Tradition says that the recollection is of a time of not only sheltering in physical structures, but sheltering in the cloud of the Eternal one’s glory that protected the Israelites in their time of transition (Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 11b). We can think of Sukkot as a resonance of the earliest and happiest human time: our sojourn in Gan Eden. There, everything was provided for us—everything we needed to eat from nature, just as God provided manna in the Wilderness (Exodus 16, JPS). We were close to God’s immediate presence. It was unmediated by law or ritual or the reading of an account from the past. After Eden, we would live in a world of higher knowledge but heavier responsibilities. Just after leaving the Wilderness, we would be responsible for preserving the covenant, working the land, and defending it with our own hands.

One of the most dissonant and magnificent books in the bible is Kohelet. In some communities, it is read around Sukkot time. Kohelet, the author, is tormented by the transience of life. Everything is ephemeral. Nothing we do lasts. In the end, the book of Kohelet urges us not to be borne down by too much thinking and reflection, and to embrace the present. But the ending of Kohelet mentions something else: that ultimately, there is an Eternal being who sees our passing human moments (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14, JPS).

The most famous part of Kohelet that everyone knows. It became the lyrics for a number one hit by the Byrds. “For everything, there is a season.” There is a time to mourn; but there is a time to celebrate (Ecclesiastes 3:1, JPS).

A few years ago, I published a piece here at the Times of Israel called a modern Jewish credo. It proposed ten points almost all Jews could agree upon. One of them was this: We value life. We remember our persecutions, but we survive and hope because we not only have so much to mourn, but so much to celebrate: in the gift of our individual lives, in the continuity of our own community, in the potential of humankind, in the mystery and wonder of this universe. I believe that one of the reasons we are still here, despite the tragedy, is because we celebrate. Indeed, we are commanded to celebrate.

At Sukkot, it is a commandment to celebrate (Leviticus 23:40, JPS; Deuteronomy 16:14-15, JPS). Even in such moments, we remember the pain of the past. As at a wedding, we break a glass—some say to remember the destruction of the temples (Talmud Bavli, Berakhot 30b-31a). Even as we celebrate, we are tempered by remembrance.

And we are minded to not only remember a sacred time of the past, but look forward to culmination of our history as a people and of all humankind.

In our Tradition, the mandated supplement to the Torah reading at Sukkot, the haftarah, is the book of Zechariah.

The name of the prophet means refers to remembrance. But Zechariah also looks ahead, beyond our mourning, beyond the troubles of our time, to a future of unity, peace and serenity. At Sukkot, the festival of celebrating a time of transience and uncertainty, we read the messianic vision of Zechariah. In that time to come, in the vision of the prophet, all nations will be reconciled. All will accept the sovereignty of the Creator. And the holy day they will convene to celebrate will be…Sukkot (Zechariah 14, JPS). All of our passing moments of anxiety and uncertainty and wandering are wrapped up. They will acquire resolution and meaning. It will be a time that recalls the serenity of Eden but that is enlightened by everything we have suffered, enjoyed and learned in all the moments, all the years, all the generations since then and to come.