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Covenant & Conversation Sukkot 5773 Volume XX Number 3 Toras Aish Thoughts From Across the Torah Spectrum underneath its canopy of leaves I often think of my CHIEF RABBI LORD JONATHAN SACKS ancestors and their wanderings across Europe in Covenant & Conversation search of safety, and I begin to understand how faith was their only home. It was fragile, chillingly exposed ukkot, or Tabernacles, is the most joyous of all the tothe storms of prejudice and hate. But it proved festivals. We call it the 'season of our rejoicing'. stronger than empires. Their faith survived. The Jewish SAnd like Pesach much of the celebration lies in the people has outlived all its persecutors. preparation. For a week, we leave the security of our At the end of his History of the Jews Paul houses and live in huts or booths to remind us of the Johnson wrote: The Jews were not just innovators. tabernacles in which the Israelites sheltered during the They were also exemplars and epitomisers of the forty years of wandering on their way to the promised human condition. They seemed to present all the land. For several days beforehand - beginning inescapable dilemmas of man in a heightened and immediately after the Day of Atonement - Jewish clari?ed form . The Jews were the emblem of families become teams of builders, putting up the fragile homeless and vulnerable humanity. But is not the whole structure, roo?ng it with leaves, and decorating it so that earth no more than a temporary transit camp? it becomes a temporary home where we eat and study Those words go to the heart of Sukkot. To and welcome guests. know that life is full of risk and yet to affirm it, to sense There is no more potent symbol of Jewish the full insecurity of the human situation and yet to history than the sukkah, the temporary dwelling. For rejoice: this, for me, is the essence of faith. Judaism is that, for the greater part of four thousand years, is no comforting illusion that all is well in this dark world. It where Jews lived. From the time of Abraham, we have is instead the courage to celebrate in the midst of travelled towards the land of Israel. But we have been uncertainty and to rejoice even in the transitory shelter destined to live there all too briefly. Instead our story of the tabernacle, the Jewish symbol of home. has been one of exiles and dispersions, as if wandering in the Wilderness was not the fate of Moses' generation alone but a recurring theme of Jewish life. In the Middle Ages alone, Jews were expelled from England in 1290, No other festival brings us so closely into from Vienna in 1421, Cologne in 1424, Bavaria in 1442, contact with nature as does Sukkot. It is not merely Milan in 1489 and most traumatically from Spain in living in the tabernacle that exposes us to the sun, the 1492. A century ago the wave of pogroms in Eastern wind and the rain. It is also the other ritual of Sukkot, Europe sent millions of Jews into ?ight to the West, and the 'four kinds'. The Torah commands us to 'take the these great migrations continue even today among the fruit of the goodly tree. (the etrog or citron), branches of Jews of the former Soviet Union. Jewish history reads palm trees (the Iulav), boughs of leafy trees (hadassim) like a vast continuation of the stages of the Israelites' and willows of the brook (aravot), and you shall rejoice journey in the thirty-second chapter of the book of before the Lord your G-d for seven days' (Leviticus Numbers: 'They travelled . and they encamped . 23:40). These fruits of nature form a central part of the They travelled . and they encamped.' The very name synagogue service. We hold and wave them during ivri, or Hebrew, means one who wanders from place to Hallel, the psalms of praise, and proceed around the place. More than most, Jews have known insecurity, synagogue holding them and chanting the special whether in the land of Israel or elsewhere. Too often prayers called Hoshanot, hosannas, with their refrain, home turned out to be no more than a temporary 'Help us, please, O Lord'. dwelling, a sukkah. Judaism has a complicated relationship with Yet with its genius for the unexpected, Judaism nature. While other ancient peoples identified gods with declared Sukkot to be not a time of sadness but the the forces of nature, the Hebrew Bible spoke of the one 'season of our rejoicing'. For the tabernacle in all its G-d who stood above nature, bringing it into being and vulnerability symbolises faith: the faith of a people who establishing its laws and boundaries. It was a huge set out long ago on a risk-laden journey across a desert revolution of thought. G-d was not in but above; not of space and time with no more protection than the immanent but transcendent. Ultimate reality was not to sheltering divine presence. Sitting in the sukkah be found in the contending elements of the natural 2 Toras Aish The Nile delta was naturally fertile. Israel was TORAS AISH IS A WEEKLY PARSHA not. In the book of Genesis we read repeatedly of how NEWSLETTER DISTRIBUTED VIA EMAIL the patriarchs had to leave because of famine and AND THE WEB AT WWW.AISHDAS.ORG/TA. drought. Even today, water is Israel's scarcest resource. FOR MORE INFO EMAIL [email protected] In a land of rivers, fertility comes from the ground. In a The material presented in this publication was collected from email subscriptions, computer archives and various websites. It is being land like Israel, fertility comes from the sky in the form presented with the permission of the respective authors. Toras of rain. Nothing in such a land is predictable, nothing Aish is an independent publication, and does not necessarily reflect can be taken for granted. Instead your eyes turn the views of any synagogue or organization. towards heaven. The promised land turned out to be, TO DEDICATE THIS NEWSLETTER PLEASE CALL not a place of natural security, but one whose (973) 277-9062 OR EMAIL [email protected] inhabitants would be constantly aware of their world. Instead it lay in something beyond, in the vulnerability to forces beyond their control. Daily survival Creator, Ruler and Judge of all things. One creation would demand a leap of trust. It still does. Climatically alone - humanity - was destined to experience the and militarily, Israel has always been peculiarly tension between the natural and supernatural. We were exposed: a dry land that depends on rain, a small and are, as the Bible puts it, a mixture of dust of the country surrounded by great empires; never a fortress, earth and the breath of G-d (Genesis 2:7). always a sukkah. If nature prevailed, Israel would not It took an outsider and one who was deeply survive. Perhaps that is why faith is engraved on our unsympathetic to Judaism to see what this entailed. souls. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote of Jews that 'they made of themselves an antithesis to natural conditions - they inverted religion, religious worship, morality, history, With a final and glorious touch of paradox, psychology, one after the other in an irreparable way custom ordained that in the middle of this 'season of our into the contradiction of their natural values.' He added: rejoicing' we should read Ecclesiastes, on the face of it 'For precisely this reason the Jews are the most fateful the most gloomy and unexpected book in the entire nation in world history.' He was correct, for Judaism Bible. Its author is the man who has had and done represents the polar opposite of what he believed in: everything. He has read books, studied the justice as against power, right instead of might, accumulated wisdom of mankind, built palaces and reverence rather than domination, compassion not planted pleasure gardens, acquired wealth and all its control. The state of nature is a war of all against all. It trappings and 'denied myself nothing that my eyes is not where we find G-d or grace. In nature the weak desired'. Now, like all true hedonists, he has grown are preyed on by the strong. In the Torah the strong weary with life. 'Meaningless, meaningless', he says have responsibilities to the weak. The ethics of repeatedly, 'Everything is meaningless.' Nietzsche and the Hebrew Bible are stark alternatives, The Talmud records the great debate that took and much of human civilisation was and continues to be place before Ecclesiastes was admitted into the biblical the story of the conflict between them. canon as a holy book. Understandably so, for the world So it is no accident that Sukkot, the festival of according to Ecclesiastes is not what we expect from a nature, is built around the idea of rain. The 'four kinds' man of faith. Wisdom, he says, only begets sorrow. are plants which need rain to grow. In Temple times Wealth creates anxiety. Politics is an arena of Sukkot was marked by an elaborate 'water drawing' corruption. All striving under the sun ends in disillusion. ceremony, for at this time of the year, according to One thing alone is certain, and that is death: 'Man's fate rabbinic teaching, 'the rainfall of the world is judged'. is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them And in a remarkable speech at the end of his life, both; as one dies, so dies the other, for both have the Moses explains to the Israelites why rain will be same breath.
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