Sukkot, Voting, and the Call to Build a Better World Together
We are amidst the joyous season of Sukkot — Sukkot is Zman Simhatenu (literally: the time of our joy), the season which immediately follows the Yamim Nora’im, the Days of Awe, or, alternatively, the Days of Intensity.
Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are days that are felt intensely: we gather, we pray, we repent, nourishing our souls for the year to come. That level of intensity is important… but ultimately not sustainable for a year-round approach to life. Perhaps that’s why they give way almost immediately to Zman Simhatenu — the season of our joy.
After the Yamim Nora’im, we exhale — feeling the lightness and openness of the sukkah, like a weight has been lifted. We feel like we can continue the journey of our year less burdened by what came before, allowing ourselves time to celebrate, with friends, family, and loved ones, before returning from the holiday season to the normal rhythm of our years. It’s a well-deserved spiritual change of pace.
Sukkot represents joy, but it also represents wandering, transience, migration, journeying. The sukkah is meant to symbolize the fragile, transportable booths which housed the Israelites as they journeyed from oppression to redemption, from Egypt to the Promised Land, through the wilderness.
There may be no religious symbol more emblematic of much of lived Jewish history than the sukkah, a structure which symbolizes our experience of collective vulnerability in lands not ours; which symbolizes our experience of exile, dispersed, seeking refuge as we journeyed through time.
It’s why I’m thinking about the sukkah at a moment of profound importance for the Jewish people, and for the world, in this election season in the United States of America.
I love Election Day. I feel moved to say a blessing when I fill out my ballot. A vote, as several public figures have recently stated, feels like a prayer — that through our collective voice we can bring about a more just world.
Sometimes I wish that, as a Rabbi, I could keep my focus solely on traditional purviews of religion — helping people study Torah, connecting to God through prayer and acts of lovingkindness, and educating the next generation of the Jewish people.
But the tide of Jewish history suggests that Judaism is not lived apart from the world; it is very much in the world. The political choices of the world around us deeply influence the experience of Jewish life, and the experience of peoples who, like the Jewish people, have been marginalized, demonized, and scapegoated throughout history.
I am witnessing, with deep shame for our country, some of that marginalization, demonization, and scapegoating in this election season by some of the candidates, particularly around one group which should be held with deep empathy by the Jewish people: immigrants.
It is my view that no people should better empathize with immigrants than the Jewish people. As the sukkah suggests, we have been immigrants for much of our storied history — in Eastern and Western Europe, North Africa and the broader Middle East, and, of course, here in the United States. Many of our direct ancestors immigrated to this country, and some of us did ourselves. Historically persecuted and oppressed, the Jewish people have yearned for governments that would protect us from mob attacks, not foment mobs against us through rhetoric that would seek to scapegoat us and blame us for much of society’s ills, from crime to economic problems. This playbook, currently deployed against immigrants, has been deployed in the past to devastating effects against the Jewish people. I believe that our consciences, and our knowledge of history, should steer us away from rhetoric like this. One can believe in the need to have an orderly immigration system without resorting to scare tactics and the othering of immigrants to make the case for it.
Similar historical alarm bells go off for me when I see candidates express sympathy for autocracy — expressing sympathy with autocrats and “strongmen” in other countries; making talk of deploying the military against our own people; sowing doubt about the integrity of our elections, which all neutral observers have held to be quite secure; and, through action and inaction, facilitating mob attacks on the very seat of our government. It is in these sorts of atmospheres that antisemitic rhetoric and violence have historically thrived. We saw a not dissimilar sentiment being stoked in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017, when demonstrators chanted “Jews will not replace us.”
Everyone has the choice to cast, or not, their own vote for whomever they wish for the various offices that represent us in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the single most critical state electorally in this election. From where I sit, I am looking at Jewish history and see the way in which some of the rhetoric in this election season lays the groundwork for anti-immigrant sentiment, scapegoating, and demonization that have historically been terrible for the Jewish people and for similarly-situated groups, whom the Jewish people have historically felt duty bound to protect.
I pray the result of this election season will be one in which the most vulnerable among us, who have often included Jews and other marginalized groups, feel protected and safe.
The sukkah has traditionally been understood in two perhaps counterintuitive lights. On the one hand, a sukkah is fragile, vulnerable, exposed to the elements, reminding us of the contingent nature of our existence, further reminding us to cherish the sacredness of our lives, and of the need to offer shelter to those who are vulnerable.
Paradoxically, the sukkah is also synonymous with shelter and protection. We pray to experience God’s sukkat shalom, a sukkah, a protective shelter, of peace and safety. While a sukkah can evoke a sense of vulnerability, it can also evoke a sense of protection and safety.
We pray that all peoples experience that sukkat shalom, and we pray for the wisdom, discernment, and strength to help bring it about.
