This past week we’ve rung in Sukkot with a series of celebrations:
Our intergenerational Sukkah building, which you can glimpse on this time lapse video on Wednesday, September 27
Our musical TGIShabbat/TGISukkot on Friday, September 29
A Shabbat/Sukkot morning Torah discussion with Kiddush lunch in the Sukkah on Saturday, September 30
A celebratory Salsa & Sips in the Sukkah with over 50 guests, last night, October 2
During our Torah discussion, which we hold each Saturday morning at approximately 10:30 am, we wrestled with the significance of the Sukkah, some 3000 years (give or take a few hundred years) after its inception—what meaning can we make, to this day, of constructing a rickety shack in our backyard, and eating our meals in it for a week, with weather that sometimes cooperates and sometimes doesn’t, when we’ve got the comforts of a sturdy home right next to it?
SHS members offered a range of answers but one theme included the sacredness of recognizing the way in which the fragile Sukkah symbolizes the fragility of life—under this reading the Sukkah is a physical embodiment of the unetaneh tokef prayer we recite during the Days of Awe, where we recite that, “On Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, how many will be born and how many will pass on… who will live and who will die” while also declaring that teshuah (repentance/return), tefilah (prayer/reflection), and tzedakah (charity/acts of justice) transform our experience of the course of our lives.
So, too, while a sukkah, like life, can be fragile, it can also be filled with love—packed with family and friends, decorated with the adornments of our creative contributions, through whatever medium or walk of life.
The Israelites journey through the wilderness. The had a beginning point (Mitzrayim; Egypt; the narrow place), and a destination (Canaan; the promised land; a place of expansion and possibility). Sukkot is the holiday that celebrates the journey, recognizing that life as we know it is a journey, impermanent, yet finding the sacredness in it.
