We sit in the sukkah and look up through the roof at the sky.
Will there be rain, storm, heat, drought? That is important to know for the next harvest. We also look up at the sky, hoping for a year of health and safety. The sukkah is there to remind us that nature and life are unpredictable and that we are vulnerable.
But we don’t have to sit in the sukkah for that. The world around us is already unsafe enough, we read that in the newspaper and hear it from friends and family in Israel. For many of us it is also personally unsafe, on the street or on social media.
Is it less safe now than when we, baby boomers, grew up in the 50s and 60s? The Cold War, the atomic bomb, were also frightening.
But nature was still beautiful, you could take flowers with you without a care in the world, light the fireplace, drive as fast as you wanted without seat belts, without a helmet on a bike, eat fruit and vegetables sprayed with DDT, get on a plane (but that was still very special at the time), buy all kinds of clothes and stuff, although there was a lot of rubbish ‘made in China’ back then too.
Everyone smoked, ate meat, put a lot of sugar in their coffee and tea, which had been picked by exploited workers. There was no ‘asylum crisis’, at most some ‘strange’ Italians and later Surinamese and Turks who were all criminals.
In short, we lived in blissful ignorance of everything we worry about now.
Yes, the Second World War was only a short time ago and that cast a heavy shadow over the lives of our parents and therefore also of us, consciously or unconsciously. But they looked ahead and did not want to burden us with their troubles.
We also look ahead and are gloomy about the future for our children and grandchildren. How will that go with the climate, the wars everywhere? The loss of democracy, anti-Semitism, racism and anti-feminism here?
Yet we sit in the sukkah, because we must keep hope and trust. ‘Never despair’, said Rabbi Nachman, in a century that was also very unsafe.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z.l. called Sukkot ‘the Festival of Uncertainty’:
‘I call Succot ‘The Festival of Insecurity’. That is exactly what the Israelites experienced for 40 years in the desert. It is exactly what we experience, at least here in London, when we celebrate Succot exposed to the cold, the wind, the rain, and the storm. And Succot is zman simchateinu, that miraculous ability to rejoice even in the midst of insecurity.
The 21st century is the age of insecurity, and we as Jews are the world’s experts in how to live in insecurity, because we’ve existed with it for millennia. And the supreme response to insecurity is Succot, when we leave behind the safety of our houses and sit in succot mamash, in huts, exposed to the elements. To be able to do so and still say this is the festival of our joy, zman simchateinu, is a supreme achievement of faith and the ultimate antidote to fear. Faith is not certainty, it is the courage to live with uncertainty. It’s the ability to rejoice in the midst of instability and change, travelling through the wilderness of time toward an unknown destination without fear, because we walk towards God, and He towards us.
Renée Citroen Sukkot 5785 – 2024 October 20th at Barbara en Todd’s