A word of Torah:
A central ritual of the holiday of Sukkot is the commandment to build and eat in a booth (sukkah). The rules about what constitutes a sukkah point us to reflect on the issues of home and shelter. The most important feature of a sukkah is its roof. It is traditionally made up of leafy branches cut from trees. It lacks the most essential feature of roofs—it offers no protection from the elements. It is forbidden to have a roof for your sukkah that prevents rain falling into your soup. The sukkah is to have a feel of impermanence.
We look to home as a place where we are safe and warm, and where we can relax. For many it is a place of intimacy with our partners and/or family. It can be a refuge from the fast-paced world of work. Perhaps, like those who built the Tower of Babel, we imagine nothing can overcome us in our castle. Yet, we would be wrong. Misconceptions and miscommunication can pierce the strongest castle walls. While the point of Sukkot isn’t to be worried about our safety, it teaches us that nothing is permanent and that vulnerability and shelter co-exist. Security comes from building relationships of trust and caring that serve like the sukkah as partial shelters from the daily winds of life.
Walls do offer protection, but we must be careful not to turn our homes into a Fortress of Solitude, Superman’s retreat from the world. Aptly named because Superman was a unique being in the world, his superpowers meant he was different from everyone else. Even his superpowers could not change that. Sukkot reminds us that strength and security come from an awareness of vulnerability, not from imagined invulnerability.
Like the sukkah, our homes need to be porous enough to let the outside world in. We need to create a sense of security that we can carry with us when we travel the streets of our life’s journey. Security comes from trust, not from isolation. Living with the tension between walls and openness helps prepare us for those moments in our lives when the carefully constructed walls of our lives do collapse. Then we will need to find the inner strength to rebuild rather than just sit among the ruins of our sense of invulnerability. With its themes of harvest and its anxiety about the future, Sukkot is a model for the tension with which we live.
At this moment of harvest, we have come to the end of the year. We have gathered not just the outcomes of last year but our recent efforts to do teshuva/change. Soon the earth will lie slumbering under its coat (kittel) of white for the winter. We don’t know what the new year will bring to our story, but we do know that spring will come and new plants will grow and new experiences will occur shaped in part by our efforts.
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