A Message from Rabbi Adam Zagoria-Moffet
Succot is referred to, in our liturgy, as zeman simchatenu (the season of our joy). Next week we will mark the third anniversary of the 7th of October in the Gregorian calendar, but this Shabbat, which overlaps with Shemini Atzeret for the first time since that fateful day, is the yahrzeit in the Hebrew calendar.
A year ago, a deal was struck to bring the final hostages home to Israel. A day ago, a new 9/11 was deftly avoided by brave heroism and quick action aboard a FlyDubai flight. Sitting with the complexity of three years of conflict and crisis is difficult, particularly as we recline in the shade of the Succah, meant to be the tzila deheimanuta– the shelter of faith.
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 where 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 three years of war has completely reshaped the Middle East and the experience of Diaspora Jewish communities.
The geopolitical landscape for Israel this October looks nothing like it did last Succot, and certainly different than it did a two years ago. I expect, like Amichai’s version of Kohelet, there’s good and bad in that – all mixed up. But we are meant to – commanded to – feel an unequivocal good, an elation that makes Succot worthy of the name zeman simchatenu – the time of our joy.
Yesterday, as news trickled out about the events aboard that flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv – the whole Jewish world held its breath. Would this be a time of life or a time of death, a time of terror or a time of heroism. I was so relieved to see that the incredibly brave actions of the pilot (to whom we should wish swift healing), the two other FlyDubai pilots flying as passengers, and a small group of Israeli passengers who stepped up to act – saved nearly 200 lives. How easily it could have gone another, awful way.
The Torah tells us that our Succot are meant to resemble the ananei kavod – the clouds of glory which God sheltered our ancestors with as they traversed the desert. Yesterday, amidst the clouds over a very nearby desert, a different sort of miracle occurred.
Mandated happiness sounds like a cruel requirement, especially when the past three years have been so fraught, and the significance of Succot and Shemini Atzeret as the anniversary of such destruction pulls us towards sadness. Yet, even amidst that – there is a time for laughter, for gratitude, for celebration. Whether clouds of glory or shelters of faith, as we conclude Succot this weekend I hope that we can all find a way to find a time to truly make this season the time of our rejoicing.
Shabbat Shalom and Hag Same’ah!
Rabbi Adam
