A Shelter Big Enough for Everyone: Judaism Beyond Nationalism for Sukkot
On Yom Kippur afternoon, nearly 1500 of us lay face down in Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. As part of the third annual Rabbis for Ceasefire Yizkor, we embodied the ancient ritual of koreim, fully prostrating, as part of the Great Aleinu. We recited the Yizkor blessing, heard El Malei Rachamim chanted, and joined together to commemorate this moment in the Jewish calendar. We also heard from Mahmoud Khalil, Hala Alyan, and Hana Masud about their experiences of being Palestinian: Of Israel’s genocide and ethnic cleansing, going back to the 1948 Nakba; of the struggles of keeping the steadfastness of Palestinian culture alive, while living in exile, unable to visit their homes. We then left stones behind, holding down cards bearing the names of Palestinians murdered in Gaza over the past three years as a memorial. Some of them are probably still there.
Tonight, Jews around the world will go back outside, this time into their sukkot, temporary dwellings with roofs that give more shade than sun, but are open enough to show the stars in the sky. They must be fragile; a sukkah built too much like a house is invalid.
The Torah gives a reason for all this: "so that your generations may know that I made the Israelites dwell in sukkot when I brought them out of Egypt" (Leviticus 23:43). A debate, as usually occurs amongst the rabbis, ensued as to what these sukkot were. In the Babylonian Talmud (Sukkah 11b), while Rabbi Akiva says they were real booths, Rabbi Eliezer says they were ananei hakavod, clouds of glory. He believed that the Israelites crossed the wilderness sheltered by a Divine presence that they could not even touch, and Sukkot celebrates that intangible shelter.
I have been thinking about those clouds all week, because the story behind so many rabbinic High Holidays sermons this season has been one that rejects the clouds of glory, and instead asserts Jews are bound together by the need for a physical, tangible shelter from other people. I was raised and educated inside that story, usually taught as tough historical realism. Upholding it was a way of honoring those who died in the past as each tragedy unfolded, and the idea of the inevitability of those tragedies became the ongoing justification for a Jewish State: a place where "the Jewish people" couldn't be expelled, where neighbors would never turn on neighbors, where the hardened walls of a man-made sukkah would protect all Jews everywhere. This story grounds being Jewish in the historical actions of those who want us dead. It keeps fear of others at its center, and a child raised inside it learns that the first fact of being Jewish is being hated.
Prayer, study, argument, the long ethical labor of Torah: all of our beautiful tradition becomes secondary to a single question, whether you believe in the need for a human-made militarized Jewish nation-state to be the shelter in the wilderness: A sukkah with walls and roof so rigid and thick that it is invalid.
At the end of the day, the logic of this stance also requires a belief in Jews as a singular nation, with blood-based roots in a singular place. Nationalism just like this is metastasizing into its most virulent modes around the world, and the modern categories it sorted humanity into are coming apart everywhere. All groups were slotted into various descriptors by modernity, be it race, ethnicity, religion, or otherwise, and these categories have begun to fail at containing the incredible complexity that is human experience. So maybe we ought to move from category to action.
Our Yizkor service was the perfect example of what an active Liberatory Judaism can look like which overcomes these truncating categories. During the bright, sunny day of our outdoor service, occasionally we’d get a respite from the sun through a light cloud cover. The shade it granted us meant we could see the crowd standing in grief together, as diverse as any gathering in Brooklyn. We could see what the ananei hakavod must have been for the Israelites wandering in the wilderness: A beautiful, collective shelter, big enough for everyone, and, by including everyone, creating a sense of shared destiny that bound them all together.
Sukkot, of all our festivals, is grounded in this deep universal, liberatory frame of Judaism. During the week of the holiday in ancient Jerusalem, the priests in the Temple offered seventy bulls on behalf of all the seventy nations of the world, as the Talmud explains, with the conclusion of the holiday, Shemini Atzeret, offering a final bull for Jews (Sukkah 55b). As all Jewish tradition has been transformed from its earlier iterations, we learn from this not that we ought to sacrifice bulls, but that our practices are for the whole world, not just for us. Rather than the holiday being specifically about building a connection between Jews and God, it is about maintaining the connection with the Creator of All; all humanity under the shelter of ananei hakavod.
When you sit in the sukkah this week and see the stars through the roof, remember that our ancestors were sheltered by clouds. We do not need the blood and the soil. We need the intangible light of Torah, spread over us and over all our neighbors alike.
