Sukkot and the Fragility of Life
Without consciously being aware of taking life for granted, we often act as if everything is always going to be like it is at the present moment. Next year will bring the same family members and friends, the same supermarket, same check-out line. Same celebrations with the same people. Same route to work; same treadmill, literal and metaphorical. No one will get sick or move away. Or die. As fantastical and absurd as this all sounds in retrospect, we do seem to live that way. Think of how surprised we get over the inevitable.
Did we think the sun would not go down at the end of the day? Is that a cause for shock and bewilderment? And yet, that is our attitude to our lives. How did it all move forward so quickly? Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [pronounced Me-High, Cheek-Sent-Me-High], in his wonderful book, simply entitled Flow, says it this way: ”Like waiters in a restaurant starting to place breakfast settings on the surrounding tables while one is still having dinner, the message is: `Your time is up, it's time to move on. When this happens, few people are ready.'"
Life invariably shows us how fragile we really are and Sukkot is about literally shifting perspectives and encountering that fragility. For the seven days of the holiday, Jews move outside into a temporary hut like structure with a porous roof that allows us to see the sky. As makeshift as it feels, during that week, we eat in this hut, we read there, commune with friends. Some people even sleep there.
The historical precedent for Jews throughout the ages sitting in a Sukkah for seven days a year is the experience of the Israelites, whom upon leaving Egypt, wandered in the desert for forty years, and their lodging was perpetually confined to these temporary nomadic structures. And as Sukkot is also an agricultural holiday, celebrating the ingathering of the harvest, the sukkah represents as well the shelters that farmers would sleep in during harvest season rather than travel back to their permanent domain.
The thematics of Sukkot are thus a bit paradoxical. On the one hand there is the festival associated with blessing and abundance, as the harvest was gathered in and the Jews rejoiced in their bounty. Yet Sukkot also directly addresses the transitory core of existence, characterized by leaving one’s solid and secure main residence to live outside in a flimsy and provisional dwelling. That leaves us with a couple of key questions. If Sukkot represents a kind of existential insecurity, then why does Jewish tradition call it Zman Simchatenu, the time of our happiness? And is it possible that the idea of the harvest, of agricultural plenty, and the reverse concept of fragility, are somehow interconnected?
To properly answer these questions, we first need to understand that sitting in a Sukkah is emblematic of an idea that is central to many other Jewish sacred moments, which is that we do not use these holidays to remember history, but to re-enact it. Judaism is not a museum; we do not place mitzvot under glass. Just as on Passover, the Seder moves us through a series of carefully planned rituals and narrative ideas in to facilitate us to personally make the trek from slavery to freedom; or on Rosh Hashana where we blow the shofar, and eat apples with honey, to actualize our deepest hopes and dreams for sweetness and renewal; or on Chanuka, where we illuminate the world outside and our inner world as well, by lighting a menorah – on Sukkot we enact the precariousness of life by moving outside to a temporary home that is an ever shifting mix of sun and shadow, and barely provides cover from the elements. The real “covering” here, as it were, is symbolized by the divine protection afforded by the Sukkah, both in the farmer’s fields and in our own lives.
Sukkot asks us to consider the real meaning of security and whether in fact we have made our refuge in this world in things that are ephemeral. How could this be connected to happiness? Perhaps because when we are able to internalize the fleeting parade called life, we are more able to appreciate the blessing of the now, of the current moment, as well as better align our priorities with what is meaningful and more enduring.
Sukkot disrupts routine and upends security in the name of establishing a firmer foundation for happiness. It sounds like a contradiction, but the knowledge of how small we truly are in the scheme of things, and how much our preoccupations really do not matter in the long run, can free up our psychic energies to pursue the best life possible. The Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, puts it this way, in what could almost be seen as a Sukkah manifesto:
“It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not. We need to learn to appreciate the value of impermanence. If we are in good health and are aware of impermanence, we will take good care of ourselves.
When we know that the person we love is impermanent, we will cherish our beloved all the more. Impermanence teaches us to respect and value every moment and all the precious things around us and inside of us.”
On Sukkot, we seek out meaning in the midst of impermanence, and dance happily across the tightrope of living.