Heading into a Rainy Sukkot
Tonight at sunset, we enter into the week-long festival of Sukkot. This holiday always brings together many themes: harvest and hospitality, sensory pleasures and vulnerability, exile and in-gathering, impermanence and joy. The central mitzvot of Sukkot include:
building and "dwelling in" a sukkah -- a temporary hut reminiscent of our ancestors' period of wandering in the wilderness.
gathering together the four species of plants commanded by the Torah -- a palm branch (lulav), two willow branches (arava), three myrtle branches (hadas), and one large yellow citrus fruit (etrog) -- which are then bundled and waved together in all directions on each day of the festival except for Shabbat.
inviting guests in, including real friends and family who might share meals with us in the sukkah, and also ushpizin -- spiritual ancestors or other symbolic guests whose presence would enrich our celebration.
reciting Hallel -- extra Psalms that serve as prayers of thanksgiving.
rejoicing/experiencing simcha, a deep feeling of contentment stemming from gratitude, purpose, and connection.
I built my sukkah this past Sunday morning, the day after Yom Kippur, with the help of family members. It was a beautiful sunny day and the sukkah looked great: frame, decorations, walls, schach on top. By Monday, however, the weather started to turn, and some huge gusts of wind blew the bamboo mats off of the roof! Now it's looking like the weather forecast for Seattle over the coming week will be iffy at best, with rain almost daily and plenty more wind to come.
The laws of Sukkot suggest that in general, we should try to maximize the time we spend in the sukkah during the week of the holiday. And yet, Sukkot falls at a time of year when, in many parts of the world, rain is likely. According to the Mishnah (Sukkah 2:9), it is permissible to leave the sukkah when it's raining hard enough that the water falling through the schach roof could ruin the food you are trying to eat. Later Jewish legal experts expand on this concept: for example, Rabbi Moshe Isserles ("the Rema") comments in the Shulhan Arukh, Orach Hayim 639:2 that it's also not necessary to remain in the sukkah if it's uncomfortably cold outside. The big idea behind these rules is that Sukkot is supposed to feel joyous, and too much physical discomfort might prevent us from being able to experience the requisite joy of the holiday. It's actually pretty remarkable that Jewish law permits each individual to determine for themselves, subjectively, when the weather is extreme enough that it should exempt us from mitzvah of dwelling in the sukkah.
In many ways, it feels right to me that we are headed into a potentially rainy and windy week of Sukkot here in Seattle, where we will have the opportunity to hold discomfort and joy side-by-side. I can imagine that over the coming week, there will be moments when it will be wet enough out that eating inside will feel necessary, and other moments when my family will try to squeeze an outdoor sukkah meal into a sun-break, wiping off chairs so we don't have to sit in puddles. I'm guessing that this toggling may make for a more muted Sukkot celebration overall, which feels like an honest reflection of my mood heading into the holiday. To me, the Jewish togetherness that Sukkot promises cannot feel complete with some 100 hostages, several of whom have direct ties to members of our Kavana community, still being held in tunnels underneath Gaza. (I do love the idea of inviting all of the hostages into the sukkah symbolically as ushpizin.) In addition, the thought of celebrating in soggy conditions this year already has me considering who is more vulnerable and has even less shelter than a sukkah in the Pacific Northwest might provide. This year, for me, this holiday certainly points us towards empathy for the nearly two million(!) Gazans who have been displaced by war, the tens of thousands of residents of northern Israel who have been living away from home for the past year, and the many civilians in Lebanon who have fled bombardment in recent weeks. As I think about those who do not have shelter this year, Jewish or not, I can't help but wonder whether there is more we could be doing to feed and shelter the displaced, to help bring hostages home and bring this war to an end, and to help bring everyone in the region to greater safety.
In the book This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared, Rabbi Alan Lew reflects: "[The sukkah] exposes the idea of a house as an illusion. The idea of a house is that it gives us security, shelter, haven from the storm. But no house can really offer us this. No building of wood and stone can ever afford us protection from the disorder that is always lurking all around us. No shell we put between us and the world can ever really keep us secure from it. And we know this. We never really believed in this illusion..."
And yet, despite this truth -- that as human beings, our homes cannot truly protect us, there are no guarantees in life, and security is an illusion -- we are still meant to experience joy on this holiday! The joy of Sukkot comes in small increments and in tangible units. Simcha is found in picking up an etrog and breathing in its sweet fragrance, in waving the branches of the lulav in all the directions, in singing songs in community, in sharing a cup of tea with a friend, in getting outside (whatever the weather!). This Sukkot, I need every ounce of that joy I can find, and I'm inclined to try to make the most of the holiday this year, even if this means I'll be bundling up in a sweater and a jacket, or eating a bowl of soup in the sukkah with some raindrops mixed in.
I wish our entire community a chag sameach (a joy-filled holiday), whatever the weather. My fervent prayer this Sukkot is for a "sukkat shalom" -- that is, that all the hostages and all who are displaced by war can find their way home, to places that are secure and peaceful.
Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum
