Tag Archives: sukkot

Open Letter to My Students 69: A Box of Chocolates?

Posted on October 20, 2024 | 1 comment

Maybe Forrest Gump was right: “Life is a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re gonna get.”

I think about life at this time of year, with the High Holiday hopes in my rearview mirror and the immediacy of Sukkot upon us  – especially with Sukkot’s mandatory reading of Ecclesiastes – whose topic is exactly that: the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life.

My long-time friend, a Catholic priest, Dick Vosko, invariably sends me his own carefully crafted Rosh Hashanah wishes, and this year, he included Ecclesiastes 1:13, “I applied my heart to seek and to search out by wisdom concerning all that is done under the sky. It is a heavy burden that God has given human beings.” 

The Hebrew for “heavy burden” is inyan ra, variously described by commentators as “obscure” or “meaning uncertain.” So I asked Dick where he got his translation. Following his lead (and adding some research of my own), I discovered several options: 

  • Literally, inyan ra  means “a bad matter,” as if life were a bad joke being played upon us.
  • The classic King James Bible (KJB,1611) and the early American Protestant Bible, the American Standard Version [ASV, 1901]) translates it as “sore travail.” 
  • The old Jewish Publication Society translation  (JPS, 1917) converts the old English “travail” into “task” giving us “a sore task.” 
  • The newer JPS translation (NJPS, 1985) and a standard Protestant Bible (NRSV, 1989) prefer “an unhappy business.” 
  • Dick’s “heavy burden” competed with “terrible burden,” in three other Bible translations: New International Version (NIV, 1984, 2011); God’s Word Bible (Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, 1995); andNew Heart English Bible (NHEB, 2008).

However you look at it, this is hardly a cheerful message: Has God really saddled us with “sore travail,” “a sore task,” “an unhappy business” or “a heavy/terrible burden”? Is life a bad joke? Dick chose “heavy burden” because he had in mind the Hamas attack and ensuing war, and thought that for Jews this year, life is indeed a heavy burden. I appreciate his sentiment. 

In context, the inyan ra refers back to the eleven Ecclesiastes verses leading up to it: the ennui that sets in when we are so jaded as to believe that life is nothing but havel havalim, “vanity of vanities [KJB],” “utter futility [NJPS],” or “utterly meaningless [NIV]” (take your pick); because “there is nothing new under the sun,” or (as we might say), “Been there, done that.” Rabbinic midrash[i] focuses on the vain accumulation of wealth and even wisdom. Greed is never be satisfied; we can always have more. As to wisdom, think back to all the stuff you learned in College and how little of it you remember.

The choice of Ecclesiastes for Sukkot is probably just chance. An 8th-century source lists all five scrolls (Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations and Esther) as holiday readings.[ii] But reliable manuscripts for that book list only four: they omit Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes was added later on (the 11th century); at some point, scribes who were used to reading it assumed it had always been read, but had somehow dropped out of the 8th-century account. So they mistakenly added it back in.   

In other words, eighth-century Jews were reading Lamentations on Tishah B’av (when the Temple was destroyed) and Esther on Purim (Purim is derived from the Esther story). They also read Ruth on Shavuot and Song of Songs on Passover (two of the three harvest festivals). That left one scroll (Ecclesiastes) unread, and one holiday (Sukkot) with no reading. So the two were later matched up to fill the double void.

Adding Ecclesiastes to Sukkot was consequential. In biblical times, Sukkot was known as the holiday for experiencing joy,[iii] not “sore travail,” “an unhappy business” and a “heavy burden.” To this day, the prayer introducing it (the Kiddush) calls it “the time of our joy” (z’man simchateinu). Does the addition of Ecclesiastes suggest we should hedge our bets — change it to “time of joy and of carrying the weight of the world”? How can life give us family and friends, laughter and love, but also suffering and sorrow; not just all that is good, but much that is bad – even a Hamas attack (on, of all days, Simchat Torah, the day following Sukkot, which will never be the same again). 

But that’s the point: life is not just untrammeled joy. Any given moment of any given day can bring happiness or sorrow, good or bad — exactly what Deuteronomy records (v. 30:15) as God’s own judgement of the human condition: “I have set before you life and good, death and bad.”  We are urged to choose life and good (v. 19) but the tragedy of the human condition is that regardless of what we choose, the bad (not just the good) can come our way.[iv]

Nature itself can be cruel. Even if we somehow reversed global warming, we would still have hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes. And regardless of what we choose, other people get to choose too: there are genuinely bad people out there. And sooner or later (we hope later, but it can happen sooner), we die. Life is indeed an inyan ra: not (if we are fortunate) entirely “sore travail” or “an unhappy business,” but for all of us, at times at least, “a heavy burden.” The hardest lesson of all is the realization that we are not in charge down here. 

Forrest Gump was only partly right. Who knows what any given day will bring? “You never know what you’re gonna get.” But it’s not all chocolates!

The “end of the matter,” the final word, as Ecclesiastes puts it (v.12:14), is “Revere God and keep God’s commandments.” That sounds a little too pious for me. It resonates poorly in age when reverence for a supreme anything rings hollow, and when the very idea of being commanded runs counter to our rampant individualism. But beneath those ancient words lies a timeless message: that there is something beyond us to which we owe allegiance, a “something” we Jews call God. We do what we can to choose life and good; even knowing that we will all get sick, all suffer losses, all die someday – some of us sooner than we wish and more tragically. But the nobility of the human condition still stands: we have minds to choose wisdom, hearts to embrace love; a conscience to know good from bad, and a habit learned from childhood to put one foot in front of the other: no matter what the future holds.  

[i] Midrash Rabba to Kohelet 1:13. Cf. Ibn Ezra to our verse, “It is called inyan ra because human being occupy themselves with things that will never prove satisfying.”

[ii] Massekhet Sofrim, 14:1. 

[iii] Cf. Leviticus 23:40, Deuteronomy 16:15, Nehemiah 8:17. And, as the Rabbis remember it, Mishnah, Sukkah, 5:1. 

[iv] On the connection to Deut. 30, see Rashi to our verse. 

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Shabbat Chol Hamo’ed Sukkot

Posted on October 10, 2014 | 1 comment

Shabbat Chol Hamo’ed Sukkot

Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman

Ma’aseh sheyaha, as the Rabbis say – “Here’s a story for you.”

Several years ago, I was visiting Manhattan’s West Side Judaica -– one of my regular pilgrimages to a place of Jewish books, s’forim, as they are known: not the commercialized products reviewed in the New York Times, but arcane Hebrew texts from long ago that get newly reissued on occasion. With Passover arriving in a week, I decided also to buy a matzah tray for my kitchen table.

Noiach, the lovely man I deal with there, showed me several – one of them particularly beautiful, but so beyond my budget that I opted for something plainer and less expensive. As he began wrapping it, however, I changed my mind.

“No” I said, “I’ll take the expensive one, l’kuv’d yont’f “– literally, “in honor of the holiday.”

“Yes,” he nodded, knowingly, “l’kuv’d yont’f.”

I have no idea where I learned to say “l’kuv’d” anything – maybe from my Yiddish-speaking grandparents when I was little and still spoke the language. Whatever the case, the word l’kuv’d, which I hadn’t used in decades, somehow rose from deep inside my Jewish consciousness – a reflection of a value Jews hold dear.

L’kuv’d is the Yiddishized version of the Hebrew likhvod , “in honor of.” In context here, it meant honoring the holiday by beautifying its observance. The word occurs everywhere, however, in the Jewish conversation of the centuries and in all those s’forim I mentioned. Likhvod hamet (“in honor of the dead”) describes the Jewish instinct to show honor to the dead not just the living. “Honor” is what Torah commands us to show parents and teachers. Embarrassing people is forbidden because it contravenes k’vod habriyot (“the honor due God’s creatures”); we destroy places of idolatry, not for God’s sake, but because their existence is an embarrassment to the people who built them. We Jews are a culture of honor.

How spectacular! Noiach (from the traditionalist world of the Sanz Chasidim) and I (a Reform rabbi) may seem to have little in common. But I justify buying an expensive matzah tray by saying l‘kuv’d yunt’f” and Noiach knows exactly what I mean. Because both of us read and revere those s’forim that he sells and I buy, we share the rock-bottom Jewish commitment to a culture of honor – and we treat each other accordingly.

Reinforcing our loyalty to this culture of honor is central to Sukkot, which features our holding together “the four species”: the etrog; and the palm, myrtle, and willow branches that constitute the lulav. Those s’forim that we Jews pour over liken them to the Jewish People bound together as one despite our differences, likhvod hashem – “in honor of God,” whose People we are.

In this culture of honor, we learn from one another. The very expression, “culture of honor” came from Jonathan Rosenblatt, an Orthodox rabbi in Riverdale, who taught it to some 300 synagogue representatives from all movements convened by Synagogue 2000, an organization dedicated to transforming synagogues into moral and spiritual centers for the 21st century. We shared insight, music, and learning across denominations because as different as we are, we all insist that what God wants for organizational life, and for relationships generally, is honor.

The opposite of a culture of honor, says Rabbi Rosenblatt, is a culture of blame, where people cover their own faults by blaming others. It might also be a culture of nastiness or humiliation where we build ourselves up by tearing others down. But blame, nastiness and humiliation are not the Jewish way.

Sh’ma yisrael, we Jews say; and then: barukh shem k’vod malkhuto l’olam va’ed, which can be translated as “Blessed is the Name [of God]: the glory of His Kingdom is eternal; or better: “The honor [that is typical] of His Kingdom is what’s lasting.” To be a Jew is to construct together a culture that models what the world can be: however much we differ, we treat each other with honor.

 

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Time To Go Back To Work

Posted on October 19, 2011 | 2 comments

If you google sukkat shalom (“sukkah of peace”), you get hundreds of references, most of them titles of synagogues and lyrics for songs. The synagogue names bespeak a deep-seated desire for places of respite. The song lyrics acknowledge the metaphor’s origin, our nightly synagogue prayer that God “spread over us Your sukkah of peace.”  We call the prayer Hashkiveinu, “Lie us down,” a perfect nighttime meditation for that twilight moment when the daily grind succumbs (we hope) to nightly rest.

Tradition connects this sukkah of peace to Amos, 9:11, God’s promise to “raise up the fallen sukkah of David,” a glorious picture of the end of time when Israel’s travails will have come to an end. The nighttime Hashkiveinu reflects this very “raising up” by following “Lie us down in peace” with, “Raise us up to life.” Here too, it is possible to see a messianic theme, relief from exilic oppression, just as Amos had foreseen.

That can hardly have been the prayer’s original intent, however. It is a mistake to think that even people in the Middle Ages lost much sleep over cataclysmic metaphysical issues like the eventual restoration of the Davidic monarchy and the coming of the messiah. These eschatological metaphors were appealing because they provided ways to ponder the more immediate problems that prey on our minds and rob us of sleep: “disease, violence, want, and agony” (dever, cherev, ra’av  v’yagon), for example. Hashkiveinu was, first and foremost, a bedtime prayer reflecting the hope for a night of peaceful sleep.

Its bedtime image of the sukkah came from the holiday that ends this week. The simple joy of sitting in a sukkah and consuming festive meals in the ambience of nature’s fullness is a perfect antidote to the harried lives we normally pursue. Whether in our nightly prayers or in the temporary booth we call a sukkah, we are invited to pause for inner reflection and outer quietude.

But as we have seen, that is only half the image of Hashkiveinu — and half the image also of the sukkah. Like it or not, “Lie us down in peace” becomes “Raise us up to life.” If “Lie us down in peace” addresses the real nighttimes we endure, then “Raise us up to life” speaks to the real daytimes we confront. A nightly wish for peace is fine, but when morning dawns, we awaken to the real world of work and worry. So too, we should not get too comfortable in our sukkah of peace. Like peace itself, the sukkah is deliberately made to be temporary, a feeble structure that cannot last. When Sukkot ends, we face the autumn preamble to the inevitable blast of winter.

Sukkot peace is not supposed to become soporific, dulling us to the tasks that will follow. We have every right to enjoy a week of languor in the sukkah, but not at the expense of deluding ourselves about what lies beyond it. Words have many opposites, some healthy, some not. An unhealthy opposite to “tranquility” is “anxiety”; a healthy one is “urgency.” When life resumes at the end of this Sukkot week, it should do so with some urgency. Life matters, after all, and life consists of the real world outside the sukkah’s walls. Both peace and struggle are part of the human package; we don’t get one without the other.

Human nature suggests we would prefer evading life’s exigencies. I am not thinking of such immediate challenges as earning a living, confronting sorrow, building relationships, and just plain making it through each day; these impinge so noticeably upon us that we can hardly avoid them (although some of us try to). My concern is the larger issues that we delude ourselves into discounting, if not downright disregarding – the fractures in our country, aging of our Jewish institutions, and dangers to our planet. The life that greets us when the sukkah comes down is not an altogether pretty thing.

Not that we should despair; there is much about the world to celebrate, and celebrate we do, when we emerge from the cocoon of the sukkah for the joy of Simchat Torah; and recollect again how “In the beginning,  God created the heavens and the earth” and found it “good.” As we take up residence in the world outside the sukkah, it is this image of natural and intended goodness that should consume us. When sitting in the sukkah ends, we “rise up to life” in a world whose continued goodness depends on us. The holiday month of Tishri gives way to Cheshvan, a month known best for having no holidays in it at all. It will be time to go back to work.

 

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