Leviticus 22:26-23:44
Numbers 29:12-16
Zechariah 14:1-21
Call me strange. Yom Kippur may just be my favorite day of the Jewish year.
I love the power of the liturgy, and the evocative music. I love the fast itself, forcing our attention away from ordinary concerns, hinting at the life-and-death quality of the work we must do on this day. I love the custom of wearing the kittel, the funeral shroud in which we will someday be buried, making Yom Kippur a time to practice knowing that we will someday die, and a time when we are blessed with a chance to cleanse and renew and live again.
But most of all, I love the quality of open-heartedness which so many people bring to the observance of this most holy day. I began to notice this some years ago when I lived in a Jewish community where it was uncommon for people to speak from the heart in public — except during the Yamim Nora’im, the Days of Awe. Suddenly, as Rosh Hashanah approached, a heartfelt quality entered the speech of many community members. In place of the generally reserved kind of communication that the local culture encouraged, at this season people suddenly began to extend themselves, daring to offer blessings to one another, violating some of the ordinary etiquette of American privacy to wish for the healing of others’ pain or the strengthening of others’ joy.
Some people used beautiful, elegant language; others used simple words. But what struck me was that during this season — a kind of time out of ordinary time — people spoke from the heart, and spoke to the hearts of others, as we prayed for our own well-being in the year to come, and for the well-being of others.
Sadly, the season came and went. Come the end of Yom Kippur, the community seemed to go back to business as usual, everyone retreating into their usual reticence about things spiritual. What a shame.
In recent years, I find myself a bit sad to come off the bimah at the end of Ne’ila, the urgent and dramatic final prayer service at the end of Yom Kippur: It is the final hour when we have no time to waste, so we must offer our very deepest prayers before it is too late. It is for me a moment of truth so compelling that, despite my eagerness to eat and drink, I am loath to leave it behind too quickly. Must we wait till next Rosh Hashanah to re-enter this zone of truth and depth? Can’t we take a bit of the Days of Awe with us as we leave shul and return to ordinary life?
The festival of Sukkot serves just this purpose. The Torah reading for this day surveys the liturgical calendar. In connection with Sukkot, we are told to gather the four species — the palm, the leafy tree, the willow and the etrog, and to rejoice before God. And we are told to live in sukkot, booths, for seven days, as a reminder of the booths in which our ancestors lived when God brought us out of Egypt.
The observance, then, asks us to find in ourselves three central elements: an appreciation of the rich bounty of nature, an ability to celebrate and, paradoxically, a willingness to enter an exposed and vulnerable structure. Sukkot is a blend of these disparate spiritual elements: abundant gratitude for the powerful and uncontrollable gifts of the natural world; a readiness to let ourselves rejoice; recognition of God’s role in the beauties of life; and a concrete expression of our submission to the vulnerability of life, and to structures that are dependent on God’s power for their, and our, well-being.
I remember the Sukkot of 1990. I had just moved to California, and so it was our family’s first Sukkot in the Bay Area. For many of the people with whom we celebrated that week, Sukkot was the anniversary of the Loma Prieta earthquake. Over and over again we heard stories of the Sukkot of 1989. Over and over we heard otherwise rational people tell, with incredulity, how the quake had damaged homes and property in multiple ways, but left so many sukkot undamaged.
The sukkah, a symbol of all that is transitory, of human exposure to the elements, of powerlessness in the embrace of divine protection, was said to be in that quake the least vulnerable structure of all.
Sitting in the sukkah, we can recover some of the open-hearted, life-changing quality of Yom Kippur. In the sukkah, we sit in the midst of plenty, of bounty, of blessing and wonder, and we sit in the reality of our own vulnerability to powers larger than ourselves. Perhaps the sukkah is precisely the place to be after the intensity of Yom Kippur: just the place to keep our hearts open for just a little longer.