Sukkot 2018

There are some paradoxical things about Sukkot that flavor the specific way the holiday feels for most of us. For one, there’s its peculiar proximity to Yom Kippur. There is, of course, the famous tradition of going out to the backyard after the end of the fast to put a first nail into the sukkah that will be built over the next couple of days. But who really does that? And even if there are, as there surely must be, people who actually make a point of beginning to build their sukkot right after they break their fasts, the reality is that there isn’t ever really enough time to work at anything like a reasonably leisurely pace. Plus the handful of days between the two holidays are work days for most—and in years like this one when one of the four days (Yom Kippur falls on the tenth of Tishrei and Sukkot on the 15^th) is Shabbat, then there’s even one day less than that to work. So there’s that.

And then there’s the seasonal thing. This paradox is mostly a diasporan affair: the rain-free sunny summer season is about to segue into the rainy season in Israel, but those of us who live in a temperate climate and for whom Sukkot signals the onset of autumn—in some sense always, but not always as dramatically as this year when Erev Sukkot is the second day after the autumnal equinox—for us, the joy that is supposed to attend the festival (and Sukkot is called exactly that in our prayerbook, z’man simchateinu, the season of our rejoicing) is tempered somewhat by the fact that the fall is suddenly upon us and with it the end of lush, verdant summer and the eventual onset of bitter-cold, snowy winter. It is that sense of autumn as the swing season that lends the magnificence of the fall colors their slightly wistful overtone, in fact: they are truly gorgeous…but the botanists among us know that those brilliant reds and yellows are merely harbingers of the annual death that frigid winter brings to the world of growing things. And, whether we are expert botanists or not, I think most of us bring that sense of things to our sukkot as well: they are surely gorgeous…but what they also are, are flimsy huts that a strong wind can easily knock over, and which provide almost no real protection against anything, including not against something as relatively benign as rain. So we are left with a kind of almost romantic ambivalence about Sukkot not at all too different from the way we look at autumn foliage: impressed by the great beauty of our gorgeous Shelter Rock sukkah, but also unsettled by the fleeting nature of that beauty and struck also by its impermanence, by its deeply ephemeral nature, and by the fact that, for once to speak literally, it truly is here today and gone tomorrow. Coming just a few days after Yizkor, how can that thought not remind us of ourselves? So that’s part of it too!

The first of my Sukkot paradoxes, the one about its position on the festival calendar, there’s not much to do about. But the second is the one that requires some attention: Sukkot is after all, the festival of our rejoicing. In old Jerusalem, it was the annual backdrop for the biggest of all annual extravaganzas which the public was invited into the Temple precincts to enjoy, a gala performance that included music, dance, juggling, and displays of acrobatic and pyrotechnical prowess. To find the joy, however, perhaps we need to look past the sukkah—with its autumnal overtones and recall that it isn’t the only symbol of Sukkot and that there are also the lulav and etrog to consider.

The famous “four species” were used in the ancient Temple in roughly the same way  that we use them, plus in some additional rituals that haven’t survived into our day. For most moderns, though, the specific symbolism behind the specific species in play—the palm frond, the myrtle twigs, the willow stalks, and the lemony etrog—is more than just a bit opaque. Yes, any shul-goer has heard a million sermons attempting to unpack the meaning of the four and their ritual juxtaposition on Sukkot—I’ve given more than a few of them myself—but the ultimate meaning feels elusive. That, however, is a peculiarly modern problem: the ancients seems easily to have found in the lulav and etrog a compelling symbol of release, restoration, and redemption. In other words, our forebears found in the lulav and etrog a kind of counterbalance to the melancholic ambience that even the most stunningly beautiful sukkah seems somehow to suggest.

When Judah Maccabee and his army liberated the Temple in 164 BCE, he decreed that the celebration marking his victory should take the form of a long procession of people carrying lulav and etrog to make of his success—later to be memorialized as the festival of Chanukah—into what he himself called “Sukkot in Kislev.” In other words, when the Temple was finally back into the traditionalists’ hands, the way they marked that victory was to mimic the missed opportunity properly to celebrate Sukkot and have a kind of a late-fall redo in the rainy Hebrew month of Kislev, which delayed version of Sukkot later morphed into a festival with its own name, Chanukah, and which lasts for eight days precisely to suggest its origin as a second Sukkot. (For Americans, that means that Chanukah is in some ways the Jewish equivalent of Thanksgiving, which holiday was also inspired by Sukkot.) To understand Judah’s interest in redoing Sukkot, though, moderns will need to know that the palm frond—the most visible and recognizable part of the lulav and etrog combination—was widely taken in ancient times as a symbol of military victory.

After the destruction of Jerusalem and the razing of the Temple, one of the first decrees issued by Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai was that the lulav, which to that point had only been in use on the first day of the holiday other than in the Temple itself (where it was waved and used on every day of the festival), was to be used everywhere on every day of the chag, thus subtly suggesting to all that there are different kinds of victory and that, for all the Romans had successfully won the war, the Jews could still snatch victory from the jaws of defeat…by remaining faithful to the covenant, by making Jewish life flourish even in Roman Judaea, and by using the symbolism of the lulav to inspire themselves to further both those goals.

Just sixty years later, when Bar Kokhba led the final Jewish revolt against Roman rule in the 130s, he made sure that his soldiers were all outfitted with a lulav to use on Sukkot, as well as with an etrog, and the requisite myrtle twigs and willow branches. Amazingly, his letter to one Judah ben Menashe ordering that enough sets be brought on the backs of two donkeys (that would be a lot of lulavs!) to his men stationed at Ein Gedi has survived and was published in 1971 by Yigal Yadin. (If you are reading this online, click here to read the full letter.) And to make his point even clearer—the point that the prospect for military victory was ideationally embedded in the concept of allegiance to the Torah through the specific commandment to take up the four species, and particularly the lulav on Sukkot—he had the largest of the coins he had minted, something called a silver tetradrachm, display a picture of the (now ruined) Temple on one side (surrounded by the words “For the Redemption of Zion” in ancient Hebrew script) and…the lulav and etrog on the other. The symbolism, unfamiliar to us, would have been crystal clear to Bar Kokhba’s audience. 

And so we are left, we moderns, to seek equilibrium in the contemplation of our upcoming festival’s two major symbols. From the sukkah, we are meant to learn to appreciate the fragility of life and its ephemeral nature, and to accept the challenges that inhere in its awful brevity. From the lulav and etrog—and particularly from the experience of waving them in shul and circumambulating the sanctuary while the cantor prays for the redemption of the world—we are meant to learn that there are different kinds of victory in the world…and that although the military version is the most widely sought after out there in the big world around us, there is also the spiritual version that beckons and reminds us, as we approach Sukkot especially, that each of us has the ability to alter the course of history for the better. Bar Kokhba, of course, failed militarily in his revolt against Rome. But all these years later—almost two full millennia—the Romans who opposed him are long forgotten while his name remains treasured by all who value the struggle for freedom from the yoke of oppression. So who really won? Perhaps that would be a good thing to ponder as we shake our lulavim this year and wonder what we could possibly do ourselves…to be remembered two millennia from now for the bravery we display and the good we do!