Jewish academic and Hebrew scholar Irene Lancaster explains the significance of Sukkot in Judaism.
Leviticus 23: 42-43 states: ‘You shall dwell in huts for seven days … so that your generation internalizes the fact that I caused the children of Israel to dwell in huts when I brought them out of the land of Egypt.’
However, the rabbis disagreed as to the nature of this hut (Sukkah) in which G-d caused our ancestors to dwell during their trek through the wilderness.
Rabbi Akibah thought that these huts were actually ‘clouds of Divine glory’, while Rabbi Eliezer Ben Hyrcanus maintained that they were literal huts.
No doubt the main point is that the Sukkah represents the basic tenet of Jewish faith that G-d cares for His people and provides for their physical needs.
The manna from heaven was special food that sustained the wanderers in the desert, some of which was preserved in the temporary Mishkan, the building which they took with them as they travelled towards the Promised Land (Exodus 16:33). This manna was associated with Shabbat.
Just as the concept of G-d’s sheltering protection is impressed on the Jewish people each year through the symbol of the Mishkan, in similar fashion the Sukkah we build for ourselves and inhabit for a week (8 days in diaspora) also protects and elevates.
Just as the manna is linked to Shabbat, so Sukkot is linked to this autumnal time of year, the harvest season: ‘When you have gathered in the Land’s harvest you will celebrate the Feast of the Lord (Leviticus 23:39).’
From this perspective, the differences between Rabbi Akiba and Rabbi Eliezer become merely a matter of emphasis. G-d provided clouds of glory to protect Israel from harmful entities, such as human enemies, storms and the heat of the day, while at the same time telling them to build actual huts to provide shelter from the desert at night.
The question - which still haunts us today - is this: which group in society presents the graver religious problem - the ‘haves’, or the ‘have-nots’?
The experience of harvest time is not the same for all people. One person may have a most successful harvest. With his crops safely gathered in, he may assume that he is now independent of the elements. His success (so he thinks) is due entirely to his own hard work. He is filled with pride, a sense of self-sufficiency and even arrogance. His success may lead him to conclude that G-d is irrelevant and that he has proved himself completely independent.
This is the person who needs to build a Sukkah with their own bare hands and experience the fragility of dependence on G-d, subject to the whims of the weather.
He must be reminded that, despite appearances to the contrary, the lives of all of us are precarious; success one year may well lead to abject failure in the future. But what of the person whose harvest was poor and did not yield enough for the following winter? And all this failure despite his best efforts.
This person is to leave his home and worries behind and dwell for seven days in the glorious Sukkah, a reminder of the shelters in which our forefathers dwelt during their forty-year odyssey in the wilderness.
These huts were all they had. But G-d also sustained His people with clouds of Divine glory. He has been doing so ever since, for those Jews in exile, as well as for Israelis inhabiting their Land once again.
To synthesize these two concepts of humble abode and clouds of Divine glory is to perceive the Sukkah as symbolic of human existence itself - physically fragile, precarious, temporary, but in the light of Divine love and care, secure with limitless possibilities of eternity.
In his poem ‘Sukkot: the Light in the Sukkah’, the first Chief Rabbi under the British Mandate of Palestine, Rav Abraham Yitzhak Kook (1865-1935) captures this apparent ambivalence well:
‘… In the shelter of the sukkah,
Fierce rays are filtered;
A softened glow shines steadily within.
‘And from this gentle light,Twinkling motes float up
'Drifting through the latticed roof.’
