Thinking about Sukkot

The fall is an inherently melancholic time.

It’s also beautiful. The lush green of summer is languorously lovely, of course, but at least to many of us, the range of bright colors and underfoot crunches and variability makes autumn both more stunning and more exciting.

But the word autumnal doesn’t exist for no reason. Our knowledge that this beauty will end — that it will go out in a blaze of glory — colors the way we see it. Sadness, like spectacle, is built into the fall.

Sukkot, at least in the American Northeast, is the prototypically fall holiday. We’re reminded of the fragility of life as we sit in the fragile, awkward structures we build up and take down and store, and then unpack and dust off and rid of the occasional bug corpse as we set it up all over again.

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It also gives us the chance to sit closely against each other, to tell stories and exchange memories and laugh and maybe get a little teary too. Because as we all know, winter is coming.

This year, the sukkah feels particularly fragile. We’ve gotten used to feeling safe in our towns and cities. Safe in our homes and also safe out on the streets, in the parks and on the beaches and as part of big, noisy groups at outdoor tables in expensive restaurants.

This year, not so much.

It’s hard to believe that we’re about to mark the second anniversary of October 7. With the typical Jewish inability not to add layers of complexity on top of absolutely everything, we have two anniversaries, two yahrzeits for the dreams of life and decency and goodness slaughtered on October 7. One is October 7, the date burned into our memories. The other is Simchat Torah; the holiday in Israel, when the massacre happened, and the other the next day, our Simchat Torah, when the unbearable enormity of it started to become more clear.

It’s two years on, and now there still are living hostages in Gaza, as well as the discarded bodies of dead ones. The war in Gaza, for a number of reasons, some logical, some insane, some antisemitic, some not, has turned the world against Israel, and made that dislike respectable.

But — and there always has to be a but — there is still life and love. There is still music and laughter. My husband, good friends, and I saw Yitzhak Perlman play klezmer to celebrate his 80th birthday onstage at the Beacon with some of the world’s best klezmer players — and also a young long-haired mandolinist from Vancouver, Patrick McGonigle, who didn’t seem like he’d fit in with the klezmers but did anyway, and a hammered dulcimer player whose instrument looked like a large square pillow in a battered wooden frame, whose hammers flew and vibrated like comic-book insect antenna, and who wore a black robe that made him look like Rasputin, except he smiled far more than Rasputin probably did. The audience was overwhelmingly Jewish, and the mood was overwhelmingly joyous.

The life in that room was overwhelming.

We hope that although we take the lesson of the fragility of life that the sukkah teaches us very seriously, life itself becomes maybe a little less fragile in the year that lies ahead of us. We hope that hope, love, and sanity prevail. Chag sameach.

—JP