By Rabbi Dr Judith Rosen-Berry

“Hakol havel” – everything in life is fleeting and impermanent (Kohelet 1:2)

Like the ‘Clouds of Glory’ themselves Sukkot holds or inhabits ephemerality, a vagueness of meaning and purpose that is hard to find in any other Jewish festival. This ambiguity is remarkable. For seven days we ‘dwell’ on and within notions of permanence and impermanence. We ‘build’ on the experience of fragility, and reflect on how those things we believe to be secure (want to be secure) – and foundational (from homes to ideas), can fall apart. In a ‘dwelling that is not a dwelling’ then – we inhabit the lessons of uncertainty.

During Sukkot – it’s the breaches and gaps in our edifices (structures: social and personal, political and personal) that preoccupy the ancient rabbis (see B.Talmud, Sukkah 23a). It is the question of solidity or completeness that disturbs or agitates them. And it is perhaps within the ‘rules’ of how to construct the sukkah that we find their teaching of how to marry confidence with humility, strength with fragility, and with what is settled (known) alongside an openness or willingness to be unsettled (unknowing), to be at home in the ‘unhomely’.

Maybe this is going too far – but is it possible that Sukkot is a festival of the unheimlich, of the uncanny sense of being placed in a non-place? A festival then, that celebrates or calls on us to move from, or to depart from the familiar heim, in order to enter the unfamilar-unheimlich – into the unsettling realm of the sukkah. As I say maybe the imposition of the unheimlich onto Sukkot is too much. And yet, there is something about this disconcerting festival dwelling that teaches us, exposes us to the uneasy but very real/lived relationship that exists between permanence and impermanence, between the known and unknown.

Within the sukkah – with its fragile structure and its ephemeral decoration, we ask: what is really real – is it the transitional or the unchanging? An answer perhaps comes in the form of an image conjured of messianic times that has all the inhabitants of the world gathered in a sukkah. The prophets of our tradition then, recognizing that the longed for completion (end point) that comes with the eschaton of messianic time, cannot be envisaged as one of permanent security, but rather as a passing and fragile moment that is extended indefinitely – not a permanent palace (or Temple) ‘fixed’ at the end of time then, but more like a temporary hut, a sukkah exposed to the vagaries of real but passing time. Nothing is conclusive, nothing is permanent – not even in the so-called ‘end time’!

Sukkot lends itself then, to the paradoxical vision (or instruction) of inhabiting, of dwelling within permanence impermanently and to find peace within that tension. It is a celebration of the temporary, and an acknowledgment that all life, and everything that we build within it – is not only fragile, but also fleeting. That the structures that we build to contain and secure our very being can only ever change. Everything is always becoming. And this festival understands and teaches that ‘true’ joy is to be found in this realization. Sukkot is both the festival of the transitory then, but also an acknowledgement that this always ‘passing’ is also intrinsically a forever becoming. A dynamic then – that is to be celebrated. Fragility and future are entangled. Chag Sukkot Sameach.

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