The Fetishism of Sukkot
This year, the sukkot shines brighter than ever. They hardly resemble temporary huts from a distance anymore; they look like banquet halls adorned with lights, tapestries, and ornaments stacked with an almost cynical exuberance. What was meant to remind us of the transience of life has turned into a celebration of consumption. The industry is booming, offering kits, luxury materials, and sukkot that can cost thousands of shekels—all so that the fragility of life feels a little more palatable, a bit more Instagrammable. Because, after all, the temporary must look eternal, right?
A philosopher might call this fetishism. We’ve turned the sukkah, that simple and fragile symbol, into a commodity severed from its origins. It has become an object of ostentation, an attempt to beautify the precariousness of life as if we could cover with ornaments the truth that life keeps insisting on: we are as fragile as these huts of fabric and wood. But there’s something more perverse in all of this—while we decorate our sukkot for the eyes’ delight, there are still 101 hostages in Gaza, trapped in a reality no luxury decoration could ever soften.
Here, we’re busy wondering which lights best match the fabrics; there, just a few kilometers away, the lights are out. For the hostages, life’s fragility isn’t decorated and doesn’t come with festive lights. And when they return, if they return, what will they say when they see our sukkot transformed into ephemeral palaces? Will they ask where we were while they waited? Or, in the quiet of our adorned silence, will they sense that we were busy embellishing the temporary, distracted from their suffering?
It’s always the same: we try to forget. We try to decorate what should be simple as if ornaments could be a barrier against reality. But the wind, which slips through the thin walls of the sukkah, always brings with it what we’ve left outside. No matter how much we try to hide, the echo of truth always finds a way to knock at the door, asking for answers we’d instead not give. Where are you, people of Israel?