Reflections on Sukkot and Simchat Torah

Sukka (סכה) inside the Jewish Center of Jackson Heights, 37‒06 77th Street, Jackson Heights, 30 September 2012. (Photograph by Elyaqim Mosheh Adam.)
Sukka (סכה) inside the Jewish Center of Jackson Heights, 37‒06 77th Street, Jackson Heights, 30 September 2012. (Photograph by Elyaqim Mosheh Adam.)

Sukkot, the fall holiday following Rosh Ha Shana and Yom Kippur, mandates you build a flimsy shelter called a Sukkah adjacent to your regular residence. The Sukkah, with only three sides and a roof covered with plant fronds that allows you to see the sky, is not a stable structure like your regular home. You are commanded to live a week in that shaky building in order to restore your connection to nature and to reexperience your relationship to the world around you.  You are commanded to eat, sleep and spend time exposed to the elements in that shell of a structure in order to remind you of God’s protection in an uncertain world. Hopefully, the experience will revitalize your religious observance and reconnect you with your faith.

What a particularly appropriate time to begin my monthly column for the Jewish Sacred Aging website. You, the reader like me, are also in the autumn of your life. You too are experiencing a loss of strength and a greater sense of vulnerability. You too need to faith in yourself  and God in order to continue your life journey.  Life in a Sukkah, removes the illusion of physical protection. Your task is to retain your confidence at a time in your life where your new reality like the Sukkah signifies neither strength nor stability.

Despite illusions to the contrary, the truth is that at every age, and at every stage you have been equally subject to powerful forces beyond your control. Consider the recent weather reports which have demonstrated that not even the sturdiest of homes can resist the power of a hurricane. Your spiritual task it to integrate that understanding with radical acceptance that  over time you like the Sukkah will become increasingly vulnerable to nature and the tides of time.

Sukkot in the Fall of the year and you in the Fall of your life emphasize a call for renewed faith in a future you cannot know, control or change. It is your job to be bolstered by your faith despite your being like a leaf driven in a cosmic wind. Despite your best efforts to control your life and your circumstances, you cannot. Rather you must live your life with hope and joy despite all circumstances. Just as the Sukkah is decorated to be welcoming, inviting, and festive you also must walk the path of being your best self. Wear your best clothes and use your best dishes both actually and symbolically as an expression of your faith to live with uncertainty as if it were an adventure, which indeed it is.

By focusing on the positive aspects of uncertainty and vulnerability, highlighted by the Holiday of Sukkot, with its call to socializing with friends and family, and to calling our ancestors into the Sukkah, you can better appreciate the positive aspects of your current life as well reduce concerns about your future. Consider the present moment as a gift. That is why it is called the present.  Longevity is an experience not everyone gets to enjoy.  Jane Fonda, now 87, sums it up when she said, “Anyone can be young, but only the lucky get to be old.”

So, embrace your age and the aging process and consider each day as if you were the Sukkah resplendent in your vulnerability.

Many blessings on your journey!

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