Faculty Sukkot: Revelation, Doubt, and Faith
At the end of Yom Kippur, as we heard the final blowing of the shofar, I found myself in a sea of white, as my fellow congregants and I stood dressed in white and wrapped in our talitot (prayer shawls). With the close of the day and the high holiday season, it felt as if we weren’t only draped in our talitot but that we had become them.
The talit represents God and symbolizes being enfolded in a Divine embrace. We see this is the liturgical tradition of reciting verses from Psalm 36 after putting on a talit in each morning:
How precious is Your faithful care, God
Humankind shelters in the shadow of Your wings.
The talit also represents a meeting point with God. In a beautiful play on words, our mystical tradition links the word tzitzit (צִיצִת), which are the tassels on the fringes of the talit garment, to the Song of Songs verse (2:9):
מֵצִיץ מִן־הַחֲרַכִּים
God peers through the lattice
The word for God’s peering is phonetically connected to the word tzitzit. These tassels are symbols and reminders of our capacity to see and be seen by God, even at the fringes of our lives.
And in the Kabbalistic text the Tikunei Zohar the talit also represents our Divine essence. The talit is referred to as “כנפי מצוה”, mitzvah wings. Rabbi Ebn Leader, a former faculty member at Hebrew College, writes that in the Tikunei Zohar’s interpretation, “when we gather in prayer, wearing our mitzvah-wings, we ourselves become part of the angelic merkavah (chariot) carrying God’s presence in the world.”
As we stand at Yom Kippur, wrapped in our talitot, our “rags of light,” to borrow from Leonard Cohen’s song “If it be Your will,” we are surrounded by God, encounter God, and as close to our Divine angelic essences as we can be.
This moment is the culmination of our high holiday season, which began 40 days prior with the month of Elul – a process of introspection, return, and renewal to sacred living. If Rosh Hashanah is mythically understood to be Yom Harat HaOlam, the day the world is conceived or created, the end of Yom Kippur is the moment of becoming a full, pure new being, freed as fully as we can be from the ways that have led us astray in the previous year.
But this is not the end of our holiday season. Immediately as Yom Kippur comes to an end, Jewish tradition instructs us to go out and build sukkot, impermanent structures that harken back to the huts our ancestors dwelled in as they wandered through the wilderness (Shulchan Aruch 625:1). Like the talit, the sukkah is a mitzvah we physically immerse in and are surrounded by. An old tradition links the sukkah to the clouds of God’s glory that surrounded, protected, and guided the Israelites as they journeyed towards the Promised Land (Talmud Bavli, Sukkah 11b, Rashi on Leviticus 23:43).
The sukkah is a hut sized version of a talit. It manifests our Yom Kippur achievements and aspirations from the sanctuary as a statement of faith about how we will journey through the world – surrounded by, encountering, and revealing the Divine within and between us. This half structure with its incomplete walls and porous roof is, according to tradition, our home for the week. It is a reminder that the real security of our souls and a life well lived come not from our impermanent and ultimately fragile human structures but our trust in the eternal insights of and guidance from the Holy One.
At the same time, the sukkah represents the confusion of the human condition and the impossibility of holding onto the Yom Kippur attainment in our day-to-day lives. As a structure that surrounds us, it obscures the light, separating us from God. We also see this imagery echoed in the clouds of glory: While traditionally interpreted to be God’s presence, clouds also block light, evoking the sense of God’s absence. The sukkah thus becomes an experience of our essential need for faith and trust – that even in our distance, our felt sense that God is not with us, we are nonetheless surrounded by God and must still serve what we know to be true and right.
As Rabbi Shalom Noach Berezovski writes, “This is why the Torah says, ‘You shall dwell in booths seven days … so that future generations shall know that I made the Israelite people dwell in booths (Leviticus 23:42-43, emphasis added).’ Faith is based in knowing … Sukkot is the foundation and root of faith for all generations. The purpose is to instill in the mind faith in God’s presence and protection” (Netivot Shalom, Mo’adim, “The Sukkah: Shadow of Faith”).
The incomplete nature of the sukkah, which allows some light to come through, reflects this experience of faith – the sliver of connection and pull we know is there, sometimes can even still feel, from our tethering to God, even in the darkness.
The journey through the year is not linear. We set out from a place of clarity and connection to our sacred source – and then life happens. We are challenged. We get confused. We lose our way. But we are never fully off the path. Sukkot invites us into the rich and complex quest for a holy life, a life well lived, and reminds us of the restorative power of faith – faith in our eternal connection to the One who sent us and is always with us, guiding.
Rabbi Daniel Klein `10, MJEd`10 is Dean of the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College in Newton, MA. He previously served as Dean of Students and Director of Admissions at the College.
Meet students and faculty at one of our fall open houses, Ta Sh’ma (Come & Hear) November 16 (in-person) or online (Dec. 6).
Learn more and register.