Rabbi Sarah L. Wolf

October 10, 2008

So What Happens Now?

A song has been stuck in my head all day.  Actually, two songs: the first is Avinu Malkeinu, but that happens every year around this time.  The other song is slightly less awe-inspiring.  It’s from the musical Evita: “So what happens now?” 

The final tekiah gedolah has been blown, the white robes put away, and we’re back here in our much cozier Beit Kehillah.  It would be easy to heave a big sigh of relief at having made it through another High Holiday season and think, ahhh, now we can get back to normal.  There is also a sort of letdown.  Hopefully, our souls have been lifted up by the liturgy, music, and ritual of the past ten days and we have been transformed, coming a little bit closer to our best selves.  But what happens now? 

Fortunately, the calendar won’t let us just get back to normal.  I always thought that Sukkot came at a very inconvenient time, just five days after Yom Kippur.  But I’m beginning to see the wisdom in it.  Our tradition teaches that the moment Yom Kippur ends, the most pious Jews immediately drive in the first nail of their sukkah so as to follow one mitzvah with another.  They link the introspection and atonement of Yom Kippur to their first action after the day has ended, the performance of a sacred obligation.  We come out of Yom Kippur inspired and ready to do something meaningful.  So what happens now?  Now, we build the sukkah.

Sukkot is really a strange holiday, full of contradictions and puzzles.  Have you ever tried to explain the holiday to someone who isn’t familiar with the tradition?  “We build this hut in our yard or at synagogue, and we eat and maybe even sleep in it.  Then we get some branches of different trees and put them in a bunch and shake them all around.”  And why?  Because Sukkot is z’man simchateinu, the time of our rejoicing, so naturally we celebrate by leaving our comfortable homes, living in temporary huts for a week, and shaking tree branches around.  Good times.

In all seriousness, though, it is appropriate that we are commanded to rejoice in this way, especially as it comes on the heels of Yom Kippur.  The obligation to be happy is, in and of itself, a safeguard against wallowing in self-pity or remorse.  And that we celebrate by building something temporary and fragile is also fitting.  Sukkot, unlike the other pilgrimage festivals of Passover and Shavuot, does not commemorate an important moment in the history of the people Israel , not the Exodus from Egypt or the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai .  It marks the in-between time, as the Torah tells us, “You shall live in booths seven days…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, I Adonai your God.”  We build and live in sukkot to remind ourselves of what it was like to wander in the wilderness, to be in between slavery and freedom, to be uncertain about the future.  Lest we think that our process of transformation ended with the setting of the sun on Yom Kippur, we celebrate this festival of journey.  We are still in the wilderness and we still have more wandering to do. 

Ahad Ha’am, the great Zionist thinker, describes the moment that Moses sings the Song of the Sea, Shirat HaYam, after escaping the Egyptians: “In this hour of happiness his heart overflows with emotion and pours itself out in song.  He does not know that he is still at the beginning of his journey; he does not know that the real task, the most difficult task, has still to be commenced.”  Moses rejoices, not knowing that he has forty years of wandering ahead of him.  On Sukkot, we are called to the more challenging obligation of rejoicing while aware of the journey that we are in the middle of, knowing full well that we are still in the wilderness.  We try to embrace the uncertainty and fragility of life and love it anyway, perhaps even loving the in-betweenness and appreciating the present even as we look to the future. 

Over these last Yamim Nora’im, Days of Awe, we built for ourselves visions of a new life, a life in which we inch from the way the world is toward the way it ought to be.  As the voice of the shofar dies out and the effects of these Holy Days diminish, we build again, this time the sukkah.  It may be temporary, it may be vulnerable to the elements, but it is a tangible reminder of the work we must do here and now.  As Franz Rosenzweig writes, Sukkot is “also the festival of the ultimate hope….  In this festival of redemption there is no present redemption.  Redemption is only a hope, only something expected in the course of wanderings.  And so this feast cannot be the last word….”  Yom Kippur is not the last word.  Sukkot is not even the last word.  But it is a time to recognize and celebrate the journey we are on and anticipate the destination, the time when our rickety sukkahs are replaced by a sukkat shalom, an everlasting shelter of peace over us and over all the world.