Throughout the High Holidays we are inundated with reminders of our mortality and the fleeting, temporal nature of our time on this existential plane. On Rosh Hashanah our fate is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed. We ritualistically recite the myriad of possible gruesome ends to our lives and even go through the motions of death on Yom Kippur. However, less than a week later, we celebrate the festival of Sukkot as Z’man Simchateinu, the season of our rejoicing. We erect sukkot, temporary dwellings vulnerable to the elements, as we celebrate both the felicity and fragility of life itself.
This is the duality of Tishrei, and indeed the duality of Judaism, even as we acknowledge the tenuous nature of our lives, we are called to communally affirm our shared faith that this year will be filled with sweetness.
During the Sukkot holiday, it is a mitzvah to welcome guests, supernal and otherwise. On Wednesday night, Victoria, Deli, and I had the honor of doing so for the first time in our new home (with some help from sukkah-builder-extraordinaire Liam Mack Isaacs). We first assembled the parts of our sukkah on the small balcony of our New York apartment and carried them with us to Providence to build it up again last year. Like the Israelites in the wilderness, we carried our sukkah with us throughout our journey to the Promised Land, collecting treasured memories with friends, family, and perfect strangers whom we invited in along the way. Being blessed to host two dozen of this congregation’s best and brightest young people (from age 22 to 42) in our humble sukkah affirmed for me that, after our years of wandering, we have finally made it to our promised land. One flowing with coffee-milk and local honey.
