Sukkot: Celebrating precarity and abundance
Photograph by Yoninah via Wikimedia Commons. Own work, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.
Jonah Mac Gelfand
This fall, as the leaves start changing and the air becomes crisp, you might start noticing little huts popping up in your Jewish neighbors’ yards: temporary dwellings with thatched roofs, twinkle lights, and paper-chain decorations. These are called Sukkot in the plural, Sukkah in the singular, and they are erected for the last of the Jewish High Holidays called Sukkot.
Sukkot is a seven-day festival (eight days outside of the land of Israel) that, like many Jewish holidays, contains layers of meaning. At its core, it is an ancient fall harvest festival, celebrated on the week of the full moon by shaking bouquets of specific produce. At this historical and agricultural level, these strange dwellings in which we eat all our meals — and in which some people even sleep! — are reminiscent of the temporary huts that were constructed in the fields to allow farmers easier access to their crops.
But what is their deeper significance?
Many reasons are given. In the Torah itself, they are presented as a way to commemorate leaving Egypt, as it says “all citizens of Israel shall live in booths (sukkot) in order that future generations may know that I made the Israelite people live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt” (JPS, Leviticus 23:42-43). In this framing, the sukkah is an experiential technique to teach our children about the precarity our ancestors felt while fleeing servitude.
But this is not solely a time of remembering the raw power of an awesome God who led us out of servitude, but rather one of recognizing the beautiful abundance we experience in our lives now. The autumn harvest is the natural occasion for this reflection, as we gather in the food that will sustain us for the cold winter to come. This meaning is reflected in Sukkot’s two nicknames: hag ha’asif (“the holiday of ingathering”) and z’man simchateinu (“the time of our rejoicing”).
And this joy we are commanded to feel is meant to be contagious — we are commanded to invite the hungry and share food with all. In fact,17th-century Rabbi Isaiah HaLevi Horowitz took this so far as to teach that if one fulfills all the obligations of Sukkot and eats every meal in the Sukkah with their family, but neglects to share with those in need, then “this is not the joy which was commanded, but [merely a] rejoicing [of their] stomach.”
We can therefore understand the purpose of the sukkot to be an annual reminder to leave the comfort of our homes and sit in precarity. We do this for two purposes: first, to wake us up to the precarity of others in our communities, and second, to find ways to shift our consciousness toward the grandeur of the Divine, who provides us with the bounty we feast upon in the sukkah.
Abundance and precarity are two ends of the same spectrum. On Sukkot we learn that although nothing is permanent, we must always rejoice in all that we have. May this Fall be a time of rejoicing in abundance and supporting those experiencing precarity.
In fact, the highly legislated blueprints of the sukkot lend themselves to this reading. One of the prescribed markers of precarity in the sukkah is a roof made of branches or vines (often palm fronds or corn, depending on where Jews live today) that leave enough space to permit the light of large stars to be seen through it. By gazing up through our precarity toward the stars, we are reminded of the awesomeness and ever-presence of the Divine who builds the larger sukkah we are protected by: the sukkat shlomecha (“Sukkah of Your Peace”) that we pray God will cover us with each night in the evening prayers.
In fact, the famed medieval French commentator Rashi comments on the Leviticus verse mentioned above that the “booths” that God provided for the Israelites leaving Egypt were none other than God’s “clouds of Glory.” So, when we sit in the sukkah we are surrounded by a physical reminder of the Divine Presence.
Not only does the roof remind us of the Divine Presence, but it reminds us of this Presence in lowly places that seem devoid of it. The roof is made out of material called s’chach in Hebrew, which refers to the organic material left behind after the harvest. The Torah writes that the holiday occurs “after the ingathering from your threshing floor and your vat” (JPS, Deuteronomy 16:13), which the Talmud understands to mean that the sukkah is constructed out of the straw and debris that are left on the threshing floor after the harvest.[i]
These unwanted pieces would normally be thrown to the compost pile, but on Sukkot, we uplift these fallen stalks above our heads and give them a place of prominence — without them, the sukkah would be incomplete. We do this to remind ourselves that just as those vines and branches can find new life, so too, in our lives, can we uplift the places where we feel low and thrown away.
The Jewish mystical tradition teaches us that things must descend before they can be uplifted. Therefore just as the Israelites had to descend into Egypt before receiving the Torah at Sinai, so too must the schach be left on the threshing floor before it can be uplifted to be the sparse ceiling through which we gaze upon the stars.
And this is the deep, universal meaning of the holiday Sukkot: there are times when we feel precarious, and there are other times when we experience abundance, but these two modes are not antithetical to each other. Rather, they are two ends of the same spectrum. On Sukkot we learn that although nothing is permanent, we must always rejoice in all that we have.
May this Fall be a time of rejoicing in abundance and supporting those experiencing precarity.
Jonah Mac Gelfand (he/him) is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Boston. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Gashmius Magazine, which publishes progressive neo-Hasidic art, poetry, and writing. Before starting rabbinical school, he got his MA in Jewish Studies from the Graduate Theological Union, where his research focused on neo-Hasidic leadership, and his writing has been published in both popular and academic journals.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
[i] This is informed by Rabbi Adin Evan Steinsaltz’s commentary on the Talmud.
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