A Message from Rabbi Adam Zagoria-Moffet
Succot is referred to, in our liturgy, as zeman simchatenu (the season of our joy). In the two years since the Succot holiday was marred by 7 October, it has been hard to think of it as quite such a happy time. Coming out of Yom Tov last night and finding that – finally – finally a deal has been struck to ensure the hostages come home, offered a welcome return to joy.
Kohelet (the biblical book we are assigned to read during Succot) famously includes many binaries of emotion. The introduction to Chapter 3, which is probably better known through its cover by the 1960s folk band, The Byrds, includes a full panoply of emotional range: a time to be born, a time to die; a time to love, a time to hate; a time to mourn and a time to dance:
Perhaps Kohelet was chosen for Succot because the holiday during which we rejoice and talk about universal salvation is also the one were we imagine apocalypse, and consider our own dependence and danger. If the rains do not come, we are finished – yet we mark this moment of vulnerability during the only season we are, at least according to some, commanded to be happy.
One of my favourite poems, by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, says that ‘Kohelet was wrong’ about there being a time to love and a time to hate, a time for peace and a time for war. Amichai suggests we’ve got to do them at the same time. He writes:
A person doesn’t have time in life
to have time for everything.
They don’t have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.
A person needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.
The last two years of war has completely reshaped the Middle East.Iran is on the back foot, their proxies defeated in Gaza and Lebanon. A new government emerges in Syria which, while imperfect, is a far cry from the awful days of Assad. Turkey grows in military strength and cultural influence. The Gulf have not backed away from the Abraham Accords, but doubled down on it.
The geopolitical landscape for Israel this October looks nothing like it did two Succots ago. I expect, like Amichai’s version of Kohelet, there’s good and bad in that – all mixed up. But one aspect is an unequivocal good, a source of elation that makes Succot worthy of the name zeman simchatenu – the time of our joy – and that is the hostages coming home.
20 are alive, 28 are not. Tragically, the majority of those returning are doing so in body bags. But it is over. Geopolitics will continue to shift. Some years will be times of joy and some times of sadness, sometimes war and sometimes peace – but right now, it is easy enough to ditch the collapsed binaries of Amichai’s poem and simply accept that there is a great deal to celebrate.
For us, for the families who have their loved ones home after two years of captivity, for the State of Israel which can move past this war and reckon with its causes, impact, and effects. For the Jewish people who need, more than ever, to be together – united against the threat of antisemitism –– today is a time of joy.
I pray that all goes as well as it has been promised – that by the time Shemini Atzeret begins Monday night there are no Israelis left in the dungeons of Gaza, and that peace can finally take hold after two years of war. Kohelet says there’s a time for war and time for peace. I reckon we’ve all had more than enough of the first – may this Succot be the latter – a time for peace, a season for joy.
Shanah Tovah,
Rabbi Adam
