sukkah – Sim Lev

This sermon will be addressed to two girls who are having baby blessings at Kingston Liberal Synagogue. Their names are redacted from this online version.

Girls, welcome to your synagogue.

I will address this sermon to you, but you will not remember it, and that’s OK, because I am really speaking to all Jewish children when I give this address. And you should know that all adults, no matter how big they get, never stop being children. So I am speaking to you, but really I am speaking to everybody gathered here today.

My message for you, girls, and for all Jews is: learn to be like a spider.

You see, from the moment a spider is born, she already carries everything inside herself to make a home. The silk with which she will construct her web is built into her body. Without ever learning from a parent or attending a school, the spider already knows how to build her home, wherever she goes.

In this way, the spider is the perfect Jew. Jews, wherever we are, carry in us all we need to make our home. Our home can be woven absolutely anywhere. Whether in a desert, an ocean, or an Arctic tundra, Jews will always find ways of creating our sacred spaces.

Our home is not made of silk, like a spider’s. Our home is made of the bonds we build with each other. Between every community member, there is an invisible thread. If you look around this room and squint in exactly the right light, you will see how one thread connects to each other, and every thread interlocks somewhere. That is the web of our community.

Our home is also made of rituals. In Hebrew, the word for a tractate of Talmud is masechet. The masechet is the page of our religious texts that tells us how to mark every moment and celebrate every festival. Do you know what masechet also means, dear girls? It means a weaving; a web.

Because our home is made of rituals, you can find yourself anywhere in the world, and if somebody starts a prayer, or lights a candle, or cooks a food, you will realise that you are suddenly back in your Jewish home.

Our home is made of stories. Yes, we sew together patchworks from ancient traditions and family tales and our life experiences and all of it comes together in this great big web, so that Jews are all brought together by these stories.

Now, some religious knowledge may be innate. Girls, there is a story that before a baby is born, her soul has already been to the Garden of Eden and heard the revelation at Mount Sinai. Perhaps you are sitting there, knowing far more about the secrets of the universe than any of us.

But the truth is, we are not like spiders. We can’t just weave the Jewish home from the moment we are born. We need to learn how to do it. We need teachers and elders who have learned to build the web from the generations before them. The thread we spin with comes from a yarn thousands of years old, and you need people who will pass on the tools to you.

That’s why, here, in your synagogue, you will be able to come to Kinderlach when you are small, and join Beiteinu as you grow, and come to many family services, and go on adventures with your youth movement. All of this exists to help you learn how to make your web, so that it is strong and beautiful and unique, like you.

Children, a moment ago, you came and were held underneath the tallit to receive a blessing. We call the tallit a “sukkah” – a tent, a tabernacle. It represents the Jewish home. “Sukkah” has the same root in Hebrew as “masechet” – the weaving we mentioned earlier. You see, the Jewish home is a portable prayer shawl, made by people skilled with textiles, and we can pull it out at any moment.

In the Torah portion we read today, on this day of your Simchat Bat, God tells us how to build a mishkan – a sacred place where God can live. I’ll give you one guess what it’s made of.

The tabernacle where God lives is made of wool and cloth and thread and yarn. Oh, it comes in so many colours! Blues and purples and crimsons all finely interlocking on a great stretched canvas made of animal hides.

That is where God lived with the Jews for the years we wandered in the desert. After slavery, the Jews had to learn how to be truly free. We needed to be independent of the great demands of Egyptian slaveowners and even the comforts of their homes. We needed to know how to live transiently.

Yes, we needed to learn to be more like spiders. We needed to build a home wherever we went.

And you, dear girls, need to learn to make a home too.

Girls, I have been to your house, and I know how lovely it is. Somehow your dads manage to keep it such a calm and clean place at all times. I don’t know how they do it. I hope they can manage some semblance of the same order when you both start crawling.

But even if you ransack the living room, and draw all over the walls, and leave your toys strewn across the stairs, they will still love you, and it will still be your home. You may move many times, or you may stay in one place, but your home will be the people you come back to. It will be the stories you tell, and the songs you sing, and the rituals you make up. Home will be your own private language that only makes sense between you.

You come today into this synagogue, and know that it will be your home. Around you, you have your whole community, who have come here to show that they will love and support you. They will teach you how to weave webs, and you will soon start wrapping your own silky strands into the patchwork of this community.

When I welcome you to your synagogue, I am not talking about the building. That’s not our home – it’s just the frame we use to make it in.

Our home is the web we weave together – the invisible threads that connect everyone in this community.

We are like the ancient Israelites who carried their home through the desert.

We are like the spiders who carry their homes in their bodies.

We build our home through connection and song and story.

May you build this home with us.

Shabbat shalom.

Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi was a Hassidic rabbi who left behind his Orthodox community to join the American hippies in the 1960s. He wound up founding the Renewal Movement, combining traditional Judaism with New Age meditation and spirituality.

He used to tell this story of an encounter he had with Brother Rufus, a Native American medicine man. Reb Zalman and Brother Rufus were attending a conference of psychologists and mystics; the psychologists were studying the mystics. As Reb Zalman was explaining the Jewish festival of Sukkot, which occurs at the autumn equinox, and the holiday of Pesach, which comes at the spring equinox, Brother Rufus lit up! “Oh,” he said, “in the autumn you teach your children the shelter survival, and in the spring you teach them the food survival.”

This answer makes a lot of sense of what Sukkot is actually about. Disconnected from the rural desert living of our ancient ancestors, the practice of erecting temporary shelters and covering them in fertility talismans might seem incomprehensible. But for those who are connected to the earth’s agricultural cycles, Sukkot makes a lot of sense. It’s about learning to survive the rainy season.

The Torah portion commands us to spend eight days in temporary shelters to recall our wandering in the wilderness. For the ancient Israelites, this probably wasn’t just recollection of a mythic past. In a world where entire years could be upended by flash flooding, droughts and unexpected ecological malfunction, being able to move must have been a necessity. Any young person would need to know how to build shelter and brave the elements. Considered in this light, Sukkot feels more like a biblical precursor to Scouts and Guides.

By the time of the Mishnah, Jews had migrated away from nomadic agricultural living towards inhabiting larger settlements and cities. Yet even this 2nd Century text seems to capture something of the necessity of surviving the rainy season. It talks about which building materials and supporting structures are appropriate. It instructs us to make sure there are holes in our roof – a sure indicator that we’ll really experience everything the Heavens can throw at us. The Mishnah maintains the survival lessons.

And then, suddenly, the Mishnah seems to strike an altogether different note. Out of nowhere, it tells us about all the different ways to conclude the festival celebrations. The text stops being about surviving and starts being about how to be joyful. Harps, lyres, cymbals and trumpets. Psalms and songs and dancing. Shofar blasts. Meat. Banqueting. Carnival. In fact, the Mishnah tells us: “if you haven’t seen a party like this, you’ve never seen joy before in your life.”

Why would the Mishnah jump from teaching us the survival methods of our ancestors to talking about all this revelry? Perhaps the answer is that they’re not so distinct after all. Joy isn’t an add-on to survival: it’s integral to it. If you really want to get through the rainy seasons and the darkness of winter, you’ve got to have the right mindset. Cosy homes and well-stocked cupboards matter a lot, but attitude counts too.

The health psychologist Kari Leibowitz reckons she can back this up with science. She studied the mental health of people living in the polar regions of Norway, when winter brings exceedingly long nights and disrupted sleep patterns. Amazingly, she found that Norwegians were just as happy in the winter as at any other time of year. This was because many Norwegians approached the long nights as a challenge that excited them. The more people saw winter as a fun time, the more fun they actually found it.

Maybe that’s what our forebears of Torah and Mishnah knew from years of experience. If you want to get through the rainy season, you have to actually want the rain to come. You have to be a little bit thrilled by the idea. Surviving is not just about keeping our bodies intact – it’s about having mental determination to get through.

Some of that is about what you imagine when you think of the rainy months. I’ve already started picturing hot chocolates, roast vegetables, games of Scrabble and complicated jigsaw puzzles. I’m imagining arts and crafts while sitting under piles of rugs with the baby in a handmade jumper.

Of course, not everybody has access to the luxuries I’m describing. Some people are legitimately worried that autumn could bring tighter finances, struggles heating their houses and even homelessness as recession kicks in. These are serious issues, and it’s not fair to expect people facing such challenges to feel joy. So why not start easing their minds now?

Our food banks, mutual aid societies and housing shelters need your support. Get down now to donate what you can, and give what you can through their websites. If you want to practice feeling joy, helping others is a great way to start.

So that’s how we’re going to survive the rainy months. By knowing our history. By learning traditional skills. By experiencing joy. By helping each other.

After all, there’s only one way we can get through all this: together.

I gave this sermon for Sukkot 5781 on 3rd October 2020 at Newcastle Reform Synagogue.

Tag: sukkah

Make like a spider and weave

How to survive the rainy season