Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Raising the Joy Quotient, or, The Jewish Thanksgiving! (Turkey optional.)

I remember the Sukkot celebrations of my youth with a great deal of fondness. We did not build a sukkah at our house, but where I grew up we actually used to go with volunteers from our synagogue, Congregation Knesset Israel in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to a nearby evergreen forest where we had been permission to cut down branches to use for the sekhakh. Somebody had a pickup truck, and we loaded up the back. I remember stringing up fruits - gourds and apples and pears and so forth - that looked quite nice and festive a few days prior to the holiday, but by the time Yom Tov rolled around, they were already looking pretty sad and attracted a whole lot of yellowjackets. The bees were a nuisance during qiddush, of course, but I seem to recall that nobody was ever actually stung.

Sukkot is the happiest holiday of the year - zeman simhateinu, the season of our happiness, as we refer to it when we recite “Ya’aleh veYavo” during services this week. This is a festival of pure joy; in the Torah reading for Thursday morning, for Shemini Atzeret, we will read from Deuteronomy (16:15, p. 1084 in Etz Hayim) that in this season,
שִׁבְעַת יָמִים, תָּחֹג לַיהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ, בַּמָּקוֹם, אֲשֶׁר-יִבְחַר יְהוָה:  כִּי יְבָרֶכְךָ יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ, בְּכֹל תְּבוּאָתְךָ וּבְכֹל מַעֲשֵׂה יָדֶיךָ, וְהָיִיתָ אַךְ שָׂמֵחַ.
You shall hold a festival for the Lord your God seven days, in the place that the Lord will choose; for the Lord your God will bless all your crops and all your undertakings, and you shall have nothing but joy.
And as if that were not enough, there are not one, but two additional observances associated with this time that actually have the word “happiness” (Hebrew: simhah) in them: Simhat Torah, and we all know what that’s about, and Simhat Beit HaShoevah, which was an ancient celebration during Sukkot that the Mishnah (Sukkah 5:1) describes as being the most joyous party of the year. It was a ritual designed to muster the water up from the deep to meet the rains that would soon fall from above (Ta’anit 25b), and ceased to be observed after the Second Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE.

But let’s face it. When it comes to rituals, Sukkot is also the most curious holiday for a few reasons. Its symbols and ritual items are, frankly, strange. There is a strongly agricultural theme, and how do we relate to that, as contemporary suburbanites? And also, there is just a whiff of paganism - living in a temporary hut decorated with produce, waving various types of flora around in unusual clusters and beating them on the ground on Hoshanah Rabbah.

Furthermore, this supremely happy holiday is just four days after the most solemn day of the year. The juxtaposition is somewhat jarring. We go from fasting to feasting.

But it is this juxtaposition which tells us everything about what it means to be a modern Jew. The whole range of contemporary existence is dense and frenetic. Our lives have become concentrated, chock-full of one thing after another, enhanced by the Information Age and the intrusion of our workloads into our personal time and the overwhelming number of extra-curricular activities our children are expected to check off. We are becoming an episodic people, where the Jews pop in for one thing or another from time to time, sandwiched in-between all our other obligations. The modern family hardly has  enough time to process where it has been before heading off to the next item. Current events come and go quickly; last week’s Facebook sensation is old news.

In that climate, it almost makes sense to put Yom Kippur and Sukkot right next to each other. They are almost polar opposites. But it also reminds me that my task as a rabbi is to even out the distribution. Wouldn’t it be a wonderful thing if the joys of Jewish life were highlighted as much as the repentance-driven, awe and vulnerability themes of the High Holidays?

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everybody who showed up for Yom Kippur also built a sukkah? Consider the following:

Yom Kippur is a journey of the mind. Sukkot is of the body.

Yom Kippur is about seeking forgiveness for what we did wrong; Sukkot is celebrating doing right.

They are the yin and yang of the Jewish calendar. They butt right up against each other, but they are opposing forces. Theologically speaking, Sukkot represents what I think we need more of in the Jewish world. Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur place God on the mountaintop or on a throne, and we are lowly, frail creatures who can be terminated by God in an instant. It speaks of fear and awe. Untaneh toqef qedushat hayom, ki hu nora ve-ayom. Let us speak of the power of the holiness of this day, for it is awesome and frightening. Who will live, and who will die, etc. We add an extra word to Qaddish on those days: Le’eyla le’eyla (instead of only one le’eyla) - God is twice as far away from us, twice as high up in the heavens during the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah / Ten Days of Repentance.

Yom Kippur is about the distance between us and God. But Sukkot is about narrowing that gap, getting closer to God by getting closer to nature. The definitive sukkah experience is actually seeing the heavens through the sekhakh, about getting closer to God.
Sukkot is a “let’s roll up our sleeves, get out there and do something” festival. It’s about our own power, our ability to effect change with our hands. God is the source of our strength, the force and inspiration that works through us and within us to make things happen. But we actually do the physical work.

Yom Kippur is about yir’at Adonai, fear of God. Sukkot is about El Hai VeQayyam. The living, ever-present God, who is there with us as we build and shake and celebrate.

Yom Kippur is about how our fate is in God’s hands. Sukkot is about how we have the ability to fashion our own lives.

Yom Kippur is a synagogue-centered holiday. We spend all day in synagogue, essentially (if not actually) filling the entire 25 hours with prayer. Sukkot is about getting outside, about feeling open to the elements, as a part of the greater whole of Creation. The Simhat Beit HaShoevah party took place on all the nights of Hol Hamoed, with instrumental music and dancing and food.

I could go on. But what do we learn from this?

First of all, that we need both. Fasting and partying are right next to each other; afflicting your souls is right up there with celebrating.

Second, that, as modern people, we have inherited a Jewish world that emphasizes the self-denial and soul-affliction far too much, at the expense of the joy. Back in my engineering days, I had a friend, a fellow chemical engineer who was not Jewish, and she married a Jewish man. They would go to his family’s home for the High Holidays, and she went a few times to synagogue with them. And the only word she could use to describe the experience to me was “dour.” Not exactly a hearty recommendation of the Jewish experience, right?

We need the Jewish world not to de-emphasize the gravity of the High Holidays, but rather to highlight the joy of Sukkot. I am not sure exactly how to do this; we have reached a point where many of us think that we have reached our quota for Jewish involvement if we show up for an hour-and-a-half on Yom Kippur. One of the upcoming goals of the Great Neck Shabbat Project (Oct. 23-25 - be there!) is to emphasize the value of powering down and tuning into our day of rest and enjoyment. We are hoping for a hefty turnout for all of the events. But that will be just one Shabbat out of the year.

I have another friend, a former congregant from my last cantorial position before I came to Great Neck. He asked me this year for my help in an as-yet-unnamed pilot program that will put actual sukkot in the hands of Jews who do not yet have them. His thinking is that Sukkot, as the festival that brings together joy and creativity, the physical and the spiritual, and unites families together for meals and celebration and extending hospitality to our ancestors (Ushpizin), has the potential to raise the bar for Jewish engagement in America. He donated three lovely, pre-fab sukkot for us to distribute here in Great Neck. We held a contest, and there are now a few more families on this peninsula engaged with the festival. His goal is to scale this up with the help of other donors; the idea is similar to that of PJ Library, which put free Jewish books in the hands of families with children under the age of eight.

Perhaps it’s merely a question of marketing: we have tried this year to make sure that we emphasize all of the Sukkot-related events here at TIGN with a handy-dandy reference guide (“Sukkot-at-a-Glance”). But maybe this festival needs a marketing campaign: something like, “Join us for the Jewish Thanksgiving! Turkey optional,” or “You don’t have to feel guilty to celebrate Sukkot!” Other suggestions? (Post below.)

Marketing or no, what we should be striving for is to emphasize the joyous aspects of our heritage, and not just the weighty, dour ones. The overarching message of Judaism is not, “Because that’s the way we’ve always done it.” Rather, it is, because this means something, and you need more joy in your life. Come and celebrate with us!

So please, let this year be a shanah tovah, a good year, and this festival a hag sameah, a joyous holiday.


~
Rabbi Seth Adelson
(Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck, Shabbat Hol Hamoed Sukkot, 10/11/2014.)

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