Sukkot: A Reflection on Our Transience and Impermanence
With the High Holidays behind us, we are going to return to our minhag (custom) of sending out weekly summaries of our Shabbat morning Torah conversations. As a reminder, each week during our Shabbat morning service, we engage with a text from our weekly Torah portion and ask, how does this text apply to our lives? In what ways does this scripture that has served as the common fabric of our people shed light on questions we as human beings have been struggling with for generations? We invite you to join us each week at this link. The service as a whole runs from 10-11:30 am; the Torah discussion, give or take a few minutes, runs from about 10:45-11:15 am.
This past week, we investigated not so much a text as a structure: the sukkah. From a word which means covering, it’s a structure that variously served, depending on whom you ask, as the temporary huts in which we shaded ourselves from the sun during our wilderness journey from Egypt to the Promised Land, while out in our fields during harvest season, or on the outskirts of Jerusalem as the whole population crowded together during the pilgrimage season.
Regardless of their initial use, the common theme from these examples is their temporary nature. As Rabbi Richard Hirsh writes:
“Among the key spiritual themes embedded in Sukkot are those of transience and impermanence… A sukkah must be stable enough to convey a sense of stability and of being sheltered, yet fragile enough that it not be construed as ‘permanent.’ The balance between fragility and stability has its spiritual correlation in the awareness that life takes place between the boundaries of birth and death, and is by definition transient. Whatever we seek to make of life, whatever contributions we create, however we try to ensure that our efforts are durable, to one degree or another each person remains aware that they are constantly in process and moving through time.”
As we come out of the heaviness of the Ya’mim Nora’im (the Days of Awe) we enter the days of Sukkot and the fall with a sense of lightness—more at peace with who we are and our place in the universe. Our tenancy on this earth may be impermanent, just like the Sukkah, and yet we are also a part of something Eternal; our lives part of the Infinite.
