Next Thursday, the Jewish calendar will have come full circle since Simchat Torah 5784.
October 7 has infused every holiday since then with an extra layer of meaning; with contemporary significance. When lighting the Hanukkah candles, thoughts went to the IDF soldiers in Gaza – the new Maccabees. On Purim, to the modern-day Hamans—Yahya Sinwar, Hassan Nasrallah, Ali Khamenei – out to destroy the Jewish people.
At the seder on Passover, who didn’t think about the hostages, giving present-day meaning to the cry: “Let my people go.” On Shavuot, a holiday imbued with agricultural significance, prayers went out for the farmers being devastated by rockets and drones in the North and South. Tisha B’Av put October 7 in the context of so many other horrific moments in Jewish history.
On Rosh Hashanah, with wars waging on so many fronts, the prayer “Who shall live and who shall die; who shall come to a timely end, and who to an untimely end; who by fire and who by water,” was chilling in the context of our current reality.
And Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, took on added meaning this year as a day of communal reflection and repentance for the failures that led up to October 7, the failures of October 7, and the failures since that very dark day.
And now it is Sukkot.
Celebrating Sukkot during a year of war
“You shall dwell in booths seven days,” reads the Torah. “Every citizen in Israel shall dwell in booths, in order that future generations will know that I caused the Children of Israel to dwell in booths when I took them out of the Land of Egypt.”
Leaving one’s home, one’s permanent brick-and-mortar place of residence, to eat and sleep in the sukkah – a flimsy hut – is a lasting memorial to the days when the Israelites lived in temporary booths as they wandered through the desert. It is the quintessential symbol of transience, dependence, and wandering.
While Sukkot has always been a reminder of our vulnerability and transience, this year the reality of displacement is all too familiar to tens of thousands of our compatriots who were forced out of their homes and have been living in transition for 12 months, not for only seven days.
Sukkot enables one to appreciate the solidity and stability of a permanent residence after eating and, as some do, sleeping for a week in a feeble booth that can barely weather the gusts of wind or provide sufficient shelter from the burning sun.
Sukkot this year comes to remind us that hundreds of thousands of our countrymen are still living in that transient state, and though they may not be sleeping outside, they have been displaced in their own land and unable to return to their permanent homes for a year.
MOREOVER, SUKKOT, always a festive holiday, will for so many take on a somber feel this year, this somberness given poignant expression in the many sukkot still standing from last year.
In Kfar Aza and Metulla, Be’eri and Kiryat Shmona, dozens of sukkot are standing – but not sukkot built with joy and festivity last week. Instead, they were left standing from last year, as their owners were killed, kidnapped, or forced to flee, unable to take them down.
Those sukkot – which have been brought to the public’s attention by reserve soldiers serving in those areas over the last few weeks – are a brutal reminder of what happened on October 7, a stark indication of the impermanence of existence in general and the fragility of Jewish existence in particular.
One religious reserve soldier who fought in Kfar Aza on October 7 confided that sitting in the sukkah this year will be difficult due to the new and painful associations he now has with the holiday. He saw brightly decorated sukkot standing bereft amid the horrific sights, smells, and sounds he and his comrades experienced as they fought to clear the terrorists out of the kibbutz.
Yet, sit in the sukkah he will this week because he has two preschool and kindergarten-aged children who associate a sukkah not with horror and pain but with festivity, fun, celebration, songs, food, and family – something he wants to perpetuate.
The sukkot left standing for 12 months in Kfar Aza and Metulla are sad reminders of what was. Those two young children playing happily in their sukkah are a promise of what will be. Their joy cannot be quenched by the October 7 sorrow. The challenge this year and for years to come, as October 7 remains fresh in our memories, will be finding the right balance between the two. It will be found.
Now, we are too close to the pain; it is all too raw. But that balance will be found. That is what Jews do: find the balance between sorrow and joy, between remembering and moving forward. This is not always easy, but it is the secret to Jewish continuity – like a sukkah: frail, vulnerable booths buffeted year after year, century after century, by the elements, but which Jews insist must stand, and always do stand, at the appointed season.