Sukkot 2022

When the Bard has melancholy Jacques step forward to remind the audience that “all the world’s a stage / and all the men and women, merely players,” the point is not that nothing that happens in the world has any real importance in the same way that nothing that happens on stage in a play really matters.

In the theater, nothing ultimately matters because it’s all make-believe: when the show’s over, the actors head for their dressing rooms, take off their costumes, put on their street clothes, and go home to their real lives. Even the people killed on stage are fully resurrected in this magic manner: when the curtain goes down, they wash the fake blood off their faces, send their tomato-juice soaked outfits to the show’s laundry service, put on their blood-free (or rather, tomato-juice-free) street clothes, and go home to their husbands or wives or cats or whatever. But the Bard’s point is specifically not that nothing that happens in the world matters, but that society functions in many ways as though we were all part of a theatrical troop of players: people endlessly entering our stage and exiting it, behaving foolishly or wisely, interacting maturely or childishly, successfully summoning up the courage to be brave or good or failing to find the inner strength to behave virtuously at all. And this as well, the Bard implies: as we wind our way through the years of our lives, we all have the potential to transcend the role written for us by the all-seeing and all-knowing Playwright whose magnum opus is human life itself and, even while sticking to a script written by Another, investing enough of our own moral selves in the roles we are called to play to make the part, somehow, our own. That, as any theater critic will agree, is specifically what makes some actors great and others not, that specific ability to be true to the script and yet somehow also to be fully personally and wholly idiosyncratically invested in the role.

So that’s what the Bard meant to say. What the Bard surely did not mean to say is that it is ever morally justifiable to treat other people like pawns in a stage drama, like people who have somehow accidentally stumbled onto a stage without even realizing that there is a huge audience watching them and waiting for them to say a word, without understanding that they have been cast as players in a drama of which they haven’t ever heard, regarding the plot of which they have no idea, and the author of which they cannot name.

And that is the set of thoughts I brought to my analysis of the decision of Governor DeSantis’ decision to spend Florida taxpayers’ money unilaterally to round up fifty refugees who landed in a state a thousand miles to the west of his own and then to ship them to a third-state-destination so that the cold, unfeeling reception he must have been sure they would receive could function as grist for his own political mill, as proof positive that even those airy-fairy liberal types in, of all places, Martha’s Vinyard, would become immigration hawks as soon as they were faced with having to deal with actual refugees on their own turf and not merely by watching them on television as other people try to deal with what all sides to the debate agree is an unmanageable situation as it now stands.

But that’s precisely not what happened. The people in Martha’s Vinyard rose to the occasion nobly and kindly, providing the newcomers with lodging and hot meals. AP Spanish students from the local high school were pressed into service as amateur translators. Eventually, the government will have to decide what to do with these people. But the people in the Vinyard, whose problem this could not possibly have been less, responded decently and generously: they saw homeless newcomers in their midst and they did what normal people do when confronted with hungry, homeless people: they fed them and found them lodging. What happens next is hardly their call. But on the small-stage level, they responded just as decent, goodhearted people always should:  compassionately and humanely. Good for them!

The Bard had a point, but Jewish tradition takes a different tack: the whole world may well be a stage, but the lives we live on that stage are better compared to a journey than to the performance of a play. And that notion of life as a journey is at the heart of Sukkot, which begins this Sunday evening.

The other two pilgrimage festivals, Pesach and Shavuot, are tied in our tradition to specific events: Passover to the actual night on which the Israelites finally left Egypt and set forth on their journey to freedom, and Shavuot to the great moment at Sinai when the people, for a long moment transformed into prophets, heard God speak aloud the first ten commandments of the covenant that would forever more bind the people Israel to its God. But Sukkot, the third pilgrimage festival, is not tied to a specific event, but to a long, protracted experience—the one of wandering in the desert for decades until finally arriving at the boundary of the Promised Land.

The rituals connected with Sukkot are reminiscent, each in its way, of this concept of life as a journey. The Israelites who left Egypt died in the wilderness; their children knew no other life until they finally did arrive in Canaan. So for both generations, life was motion, journeying forward, travel through uncharted (and unchartable) territory dependent on God for their lodging (Scripture specifically says that God somehow provided them with the sukkot in which they dwelt as they made their slow progress through the wilderness), their food (the manna fell from heaven specifically to provide them with sustenance), and their water (the pillar of cloud-by-day and fire-by-night led them from oasis to oasis so that they always had enough to drink). And that experience of life as journey became so embedded in the national consciousness that it eventually merited being honored with an annual festival, one that commemorates nothing other than this notion of life as movement forward towards destiny under the protective wings of the Shekhinah, God’s indwelling presence in the people’s midst.

Perhaps that is why Jewish people are so predisposed to honor others whose lives have become an actual journey. I feel that way myself—and not because I am in favor of people not obeying the laws that govern immigration or, more ridiculously, of opening our nation’s borders to whomever wishes to cross over without exercising any control at all regarding who may or may not settle here. My own great-grandparents were immigrants to this land and they certainly (I actually know this for a fact) obeyed all the rules and settled here fully legally. My own wife came to this country from Canada and I can assure you that we followed each of a thousand rules to make her status here fully legal. All of that is true. And also true is that I have no idea who these poor people flown to Massachusetts as fodder for Governor DiSantis’s campaign mill really are, whether they deserve to settle here as legitimate refugees or are just poseurs taking a chance to improve their lot without waiting on line or following the rules that govern immigration to our nation. I have no idea who they are! But I was beyond impressed by the Martha’s Vinyard residents who, also having no idea who these people are, responded to them compassionately and warmly, leaving the federal officials to work out what their eventual status should be and specifically not using that detail to justify turning away from lonely, hungry people in need.

The road, the voyage, this lifelong excursion through the wilderness that is our lives—that experience of life as journey under God’s watchful presence is at the core of Sukkot, an idea that grants majesty to the human condition not by boasting crazily about our permanence and power, but by owning up honestly and humbly to the transient nature of all life…and to the fragility that inheres in living our lives, as we all do, on the road to Jerusalem. I responded to the story of those refugees the governor flew north because they, like my own great-grandparents once were, are on a journey regarding the destination of which they can only hope. But I too am on that journey. So are we all. And Sukkot is our annual opportunity to set aside the natural fear that that image of life-as-journey engenders and instead to embrace the hope that the road we travel through the years can generate…when viewed not as punishment but as opportunity, not as a death march but as a march of the truly living, not as a torturous trek through an unfeeling, uncaring world…but as the road to redemption. Our ancestors eventually found their way to the Promised Land and they celebrated the journey that took them there. So should we all!