Image: A sukkah in a park in Shapira, Israel. Photo is public domain, via wikimedia.
In the spring of 2002, I broke up housekeeping and got ready to move to Jerusalem. I kept only a few boxes of things that were precious to me: photos, books, some family memorabilia, and a few valuable objects including some papers. I knew that I’d be moving around for the next few years, so I rented a storage bin in my home town . I could quit worrying, I thought: my things were safe and would be there when I was ready for them.
A couple of years later there was a fire in the storage building. Everything in my unit was ruined by smoke and water. All the photos and albums were stuck together with black goo. The books were mush. Most of it was not replaceable and did not have any “value” in the sense that insurance companies calculate such things. The only thing to do was pick through for a few salvageable bits and toss the rest of the stinking mess.
We want life to be predictable, but it is not. We want to be “careful” and keep bad things from happening, but bad things happen anyway. Between natural disasters and human error and the other zillion ways things can go wrong, a person could go crazy worrying. We can ask, “why do bad things happen to good people?” but really, the answer is that sooner or later, bad things happen to everybody.
The secret of the sukkah is that it is a temporary structure. It takes the terrible uncertainty of life and puts it front and center. In the sukkah, all you have is “now” because tomorrow it will be taken down (or blow over.) And it teaches us that “now” can be beautiful and joyful in its own right.
The megillah [scroll] for Sukkot is Ecclesiastes. You might ask, “Who wants to sit in the sukkah and read grumpy old Kohelet?” But you see, he knows what the sukkah knows: most of what we think is important is temporary, volatile, fragile. No one in their right mind would try to hoard goodies in sukkah; better to share them than have it all blow away.
Sukkot is a festival of rejoicing. Enjoy the sukkah, enjoy the food, enjoy the friends. Enjoy them right now. We cannot predict tomorrow, but if we live life as fully as we can, at least we will know that we did not waste the golden moment.