Jewish academic and Hebrew scholar Irene Lancaster reflects on the major Jewish festival of Sukkot and what it has to do with tents and 'clouds of glory'.
The Jewish community is currently enjoying the autumn festival of Sukkot, which takes place two weeks after Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year) and 4 days after Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement).
For the first time in three years, many of us enjoyed the company of others, as we visited the temporary dwelling-places known as Sukkot which we build every year and invited others to our own Sukkot. And the weather was most encouraging, with little rain and quite a lot of sunshine.
But what exactly are Sukkot? These are huts, built to specifications, in which (weather permitting) we are supposed to live for a week. At the very least, one is supposed to say Kiddush in the Sukkah, even if it is often too rainy to eat entire meals within, or even sleep in the Sukkah, which is common in Israel with its sub-tropical climate.
And in addition, these Sukkot (huts) are supposed to remind us of our sojourn in the wilderness, when we depended on G-d's help to survive and were often at the mercy of the elements (not to mention the surrounding enemies).
However, if we turn to the Hebrew Bible, we do not appear to find any mention of the people living in huts, and certainly not in Sukkot built to order.
On the contrary. Although it states in Leviticus 23: 42-43, 'You shall live in sukkot seven days ... in order that future generations may know that I made the children of Israel live in sukkot when I brought them out of the land of Egypt – I, the Lord your G-d,' elsewhere the dwelling most associated with the children of Israel is actually the tent.
So, in Exodus 33:8, it states that 'whenever Moses went out to the Tent, all the people would rise and stand at the entrance of their tent and gaze after Moses until he had entered the Tent.'
In Numbers 11:10: 'Moses heard the people weeping, every family by family, at the entrance of each tent...'
Even Bilaam, when asked by Balak to curse the children of Israel, stood on the heights, looked down and proclaimed (Numbers 24:5) instead: 'How goodly are your tents, Jacob, your dwellings, Israel', a passage which is incorporated into our present-day synagogue service.
But, the very interesting thing is that in Hebrew the word for 'tent' is an anagram for the word 'G-d'. So is there something special about the dwelling places of the Jews, which even the enemy is occasionally able to comprehend?
Jewish commentary was aware of this discrepancy between Leviticus 23 and the other biblical passages, referring to what actually happened in the desert, and had a debate about this. Rabbi Akiba decided that the term sukkot for the dwelling places actually means 'clouds of glory', which often accompanied the people in the travels towards the Promised Land, and sometimes even appeared in the vicinity of the tents themselves. Exodus 33:9 offers an example of this phenomenon.
The greatest Biblical commentator, Rashi (1040-1105) concurs with the view of Rabbi Akiba and maintains that the sukkot in which we are to dwell for seven days are actually 'clouds of glory'.
A number of Psalms describe the 'clouds of glory' when depicting divine activity. One such passage occurs in Psalms 18:12: 'dense clouds of the sky were His sukkah round about Him.'
So, somehow there is an amalgam of the idea of G-d, indwelling, dwelling places, clouds and protection.
Clouds appear as a pillar accompanying the children of Israel in Exodus 13, as a protective shield in Exodus 14, and as the divine presence in Exodus 40. Later, in 1 Kings 8:10-13, the cloud has filled the Jerusalem Temple, the House of the Lord, and then King Solomon says of the Temple he has just finished building: 'The Lord has chosen to dwell in a thick cloud. I have now built for You a fitting home, a place where You may dwell forever' (verses 12-13).
So, we now find a connection between the fragile Sukkah of the desert and the Temple in Jerusalem, the eternal capital of Israel.
Somehow, we can combine all these depictions of the Sukkah, built at the time of year when the entire community is involved, and sacrifices are made which include all the nations of the world. The Sukkah teaches us that there is no such thing as stability in the world. Everything is impermanent and fragile. All our certainties can come tumbling down in a moment.
The cloud is both a protection in a very hot country such as Israel, and a way of depicting the mysterious ways of the divine. Despite all our best efforts, our certainties can crumble to dust in an instant.
The poet Wordsworth (1770-1850) has described this phenomenon well in the English language. In his Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood (1804, published in 1807), he writes the following lines:
'Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From G-d, who is our home'
By building our Sukkah and dwelling in it for a week, we remind ourselves of our own mortality. And, by inviting others to share with us, we internalize our common humanity and love for all G-d's creatures.
So, as we come to the end of our Jewish year and start afresh in less than one week with the story of 'In the beginning' – Bereshit, let us ponder the words that we say at the end of our meals in the Sukkah: 'May the Merciful One raise up for us the fallen Sukkah of David.'
What is the fallen Sukkah of David? The 'fallen Sukkah' is the Temple in Jerusalem and all that Jerusalem stands for as the capital of Israel. The concept of Jerusalem as the Jewish capital may still be taboo in the eyes of the world; just as the Jewish people are still regarded as 'fallen' by many.
But in fact, Israel's capital city of Jerusalem welcomed around 4 million visitors this Sukkot, nearly half of the entire population of the State of Israel (equating to around 30 million people coming to this country at the same time each year).
Quite an achievement for a fragile and broken people, for whom the Sukkah, the emblem of the Temple in Jerusalem, is an annual reminder of what clouds of glory may truly symbolize in our fallen world.
