Sukkot: I'm struggling to find joy in this season of joy. Maybe you are, too.
Our fabric sukkah flags and panels from several years ago - sunflowers, a “PACE” rainbow flag, a panel with the names of our ancestors and notes from people who came to our sukkah that year.
Sukkot has long been a favorite holiday of mine, and not only because it's the next one on the calendar. Still, this year, I'm struggling to find joy in this season of joy. Maybe you are, too.
I created a maybe useful guide - attached here.
The High Holidays overall have been very challenging for me this year.
As someone I love put it, it's hard to celebrate a new cycle when it feels like so many cycles are getting worse or breaking all together.
Being with so many of my students and with some of you on both Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur mornings really helped.
Working on my Tashlich guide helped, too - and if you read through it or used it for Tashlich, I'd love your feedback as I work on a final draft and prepare it for publication.
I'd love to hear what helped you.
Now we are here on the brink of Sukkot - which begins Monday evening October 6th.
Struggling I may be, but I still love that our sukkahs are portals. They connect us through space and time with our ancestors and teachers and with Jewish folks all over the world - sukkah to sukkah to sukkah.
I also love that we don't need to build a sukkah to be in this holiday. This season is a portal, too. It connects us through space and time with our ancestors and teachers and with Jewish folks all over the world.
Sukkot begins 5 days after Yom Kippur, and it’s called Sukkot after the booths or huts (sukkot in Hebrew) that we’re told to dwell in during this week-long festival. (7 days in Israel and in some communities in the diaspora or 8 days for many communities in the diaspora.) Not only do these sukkot represent our dwellings when we wandered for 40 years in the desert after being liberated from Egypt, they also represent that after coming through Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur we are ready to go out into the world and build something with our own hands that we can dwell in.
We are building this world together.
Our sukkah is temporary and so is Sukkot. This time is for us to think about what else we can build this year. Sukkot is one of the shalosh regalim - the three pilgrimage festivals when historically Jews traveled to the Temple in Jerusalem. It is a time of ingathering - not only of our harvests, but also of ourselves. Sukkot is also known as chag ha-asif - the Harvest Festival. During Sukkot we welcome the Ushpizin, our ancestors, into our sukkot and into our lives.
We think about what we will invite into this new year, and what boundaries we will hold - what we will not let in. Around us during Sukkot is a semi-permeable barrier.
What comes in? What stays out?
We get to choose.
A sign from our front yard preparing for a Sukkot years ago. It reads, “Welcome Sukkah Builders! Please join us in the back yard! Chag Sameach! The sign is written in marker on a brown paper bag and is taped onto a political yard sign.
In case it's helpful, in this season of joy and of harvest as I think of welcoming guests and honoring ancestors and being grateful for what I have, here are some things I'm doing that I am intentionally linking with Sukkot in my heart:
1. I am making sure I have lots of stored, non-perishable ingredients for soup so that if or when folks in my physically local community need soup in whatever future is coming I'm ready to make it.
2. I am stocking up on first aid supplies and reviewing my first aid skills.
3. I am checking in with folks I know who are immigrants and seeing what they need that I can share.
4. I am restocking my car with resources I can share when I encounter vulnerable people who need water or food.
5. I am putting on music and turning up the volume and dancing in my house with my wife and my dogs.
6. I am making art that I can share and art that is for myself.
7. I am scheduling time to connect with friends.
8. I am harvesting herbs from our garden and drying them.
9. I am going to a farmer's market to support local farmers and preserving food for winter and whatever is coming.
10. I am committing to preparing food with every single vegetable we receive from our CSA (community supported agriculture) and freezing some for the coming months.
11. We've gotten a lot of honey from our CSA and it comes in those cute plastic bears - cute, but hard to actually get honey out of especially when it crystalizes. So this morning I cleaned them out and put all of the honey into Mason jars so we'll actually use it.
12. I bought the Handymam, Mercury Stardust's, very amazing and awesome home repair book and intend to learn to repair at least one thing this week from it. I've done very little actual building of things, other than a few volunteer stints with Habitat for Humanity. Mercury says we are each worth the time it takes to learn a new skill, and I believe her.
13. I said 'yes' when someone in my alumni group responded to my questions about my broken sewing machine offered to connect me with a fantastic and skilled human who takes in old sewing machines (before they were mostly plastic) and repairs them and gets them working again and then gives them away. Liddy and I picked up my new-to-me machine Friday and I'm setting myself up for more efficiently mending and upcycling clothing and other textiles - which for the past couple of years I've been doing all by hand.
14. This afternoon, Liddy and I will put up our sukkah. I'm tearing up a bit just thinking about it. I'm thinking about building it with the Karen refugee family we connected with after 2016. I'm thinking about having folks over for soup and tea and coffee on a chilly (seasonally appropriate) October day. I'm thinking about Miguel being here with us the year Maicol was born when he shook a lulav and smelled an etrog and we invited communities in Saint Paul and Minneapolis to help us help his communities in Honduras - help them generally and also help the folks with resources so they could stay there with their families and not come here. I'm thinking of the first Sukkot of the pandemic when we printed out photos of people we love and hung them from the ceiling of the sukkah. I'm thinking of the folks over the years who have some to spend time with their friends own friends in our sukkah - walking over from Mac or over lunch from work - when we weren't even home. This year, we will build it just the two of us. I don't have the spoons or the bandwidth to figure out how to make sukkot and sukkah building a party anymore. It's still a sukkah. It's still a portal. It's still Sukkot. And, really, it's still resilience. Maybe in the process I'll also find some joy.
I would love to know what you are doing to be IN Sukkot this year, how you are celebrating, and what joy you are finding.
Chag Sukkot Sameach!
Big love,
Rabbi Ariel
Yom Tov night in our sukkah some years ago. There are two lit candles on a small table with challah.