Ushpizin

TORAH FROM JTS
learn.jtsa.edu
‫ | דבר אחר‬A Different Perspective
Ushpizin
Ushpizin (literally, “guests”) is the tradition of inviting the exalted men and women
of the Bible into our sukkot. Each year, since 5772, professional and novice artists
including JTS students, faculty, and staff have taken the concept of ushpizin as the
centerpiece and inspiration for an art installation in the famed sukkot built each
year in the JTS courtyard. Part of the JTS Arts Initiative, the sukkot exhibit is
managed under the guidance of Tobi Kahn, JTS artist-in-residence.
Hol Hamoed Sukkot 5776
‫חול המועד סוכות תשע"ו‬
Grief in a Time of Joy
Alex Braver, Student, The Rabbinical School of JTS
My mother was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia the day before Erev
Rosh Hashanah last year. Through the Days of Awe we discussed her genetic
profile, her symptoms, bone marrow transplants, and chemotherapy.
We approached Hanukkah unsure of what was working and what wasn’t.
She died on Purim.
Purim, the festive carnival holiday of costumes and fun. It is a bizarre day for
someone attuned with the Jewish calendar to enter into aninut, the period of
mourning before burial, during which all religious obligations are exempted in
order to attend to the details of the burial, and to sink into the tears and the
shock.
Clockwise, from top left: Maya Orli Cohen & Rabbi Ayelet Cohen (RS ’02), Dr.
Eleni Litt, Danielle Kohanzadeh (LC ’16), Rabbi Mira Rivera (RS ’15), Richard
McBee, Yona Verwer
learn.jtsa.edu
To receive Torah from JTS by email,
visit jtsa.edu/subscribe
And then, time continued to move forward, as it tends to do, despite my own
sense that it ought to have stopped. Passover and Shavuot, the holidays of
freedom and revelation, came and went. Their larger themes washed up
against the shores of my grief; I was aware of them, I’d studied them and
taught them for years. But this time my own story, my story of loss and death,
felt so much more real than the sacred story of the Jewish people, and so out
of sync with it. Tisha Be’Av and the destruction of the Temple—the sacred
center—made me feel like the Jewish calendar and I were on the same page
again, as did the soul searching of Elul and the approach to the Days of Awe,
through the “Who Will Live and Who Will Die” of Rosh Hashanah and Yom
Kippur.
TORAH FROM JTS
But now we’ve arrived at Sukkot, called zeman simhatenu, the time of our
joy, based on Deuteronomy 16:14-15:
You shall rejoice in your festival, with your son and daughter, your male
and female slave, the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow
in your communities. You shall hold a festival for Adonai your God
seven days, in the place that Adonai will choose; for Adonai your God
will bless all your crops and all your undertakings, and you shall have
nothing but joy.
And again, I find myself feeling out of sync with the Jewish calendar.
Where can joy be found for those of us for whom it might feel distant?
What is the joy for which we are searching?
One common historical explanation for the Biblical injunction to be joyous
centers on the agricultural origins of the ancient three-holiday cycle:
Passover marked the beginning of the new planting season, Shavuot the
summer harvest, and Sukkot the fall harvest.
But in my mind I imagine earlier Sukkot festivals—the Sukkot festivals of the
Israelites wandering in the wilderness, with no crops to harvest, totally
dependent on manna from heaven for food. There, our ancestors—former
slaves—dwelt in booths as they underwent the trials and tribulations of the
desert; the heat and the thirst, the snakes and the scorpions, the doubt and
the desire to turn back to Egypt, the rebellions against Moses and his
brother. This was a people that had suffered, that had seen suffering, and
that would continue to see suffering until each of them died in the
wilderness, allowing only their children to inherit the Land of which they
dreamed. But they dwelled in sukkot too, just as their descendants would
when joyfully performing the fall harvest, and just as I too attempt to do on
the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where there is no need for me to
partake in the fall harvest, and where the logistics of urban life make
building a sukkah slightly more difficult.
The joy of our ancestors in the desert was not an easy joy, a joy that
appeared simply because there was a lack of sorrow. Their joy was the joy
of former slaves and of future rebels, of people who knew that grief and
loss are a part of life, just as delight and love are. Their joy came from the
learn.jtsa.edu
knowledge that no structure we can build in this world, physical or otherwise,
can keep us from experiencing pain, and so we might as well build a structure
that is open to the sky, whose walls are barely walls, and whose floor is the
earth. As Rabbi Alan Lew writes:
“In the sukkah, a house that is open to the world, a house that
freely acknowledges that it cannot be the basis of our security.
. . [t]he illusion of protection falls away, and suddenly we are
flush with our life, feeling our life, following our life, doing its
dance, one step after another.” (This Is Real And You Are
Completely Unprepared, p. 267).
The joy of Sukkot isn’t the joy that comes when our walls successfully
manage to keep out the suffering of the world. The joy of Sukkot is the joy in
knowing that, even when our walls fall down, we can still be in the presence
of something transcendent and holy. In the words of the Ohev Yisrael, the
Chassidic master and great-great-grandfather of Abraham Joshua Heschel:
Even though the Seed of Israel, while in Egyptian exile,
suffered enormous subjugation—subjugation of the body with
hard labor, with mortar and bricks, backbreaking work that
shattered the body—despite this, when they were redeemed
and went out from there, the essence of their joy did not come
from the fact that they had left their difficult subjugation for
freedom. Rather, the essence of their joy came from the fact
that while they were in Egyptian exile, the holy Shekhinah [the
presence of God] was with them. (Ohev Yisrael, Parashat
Masei, p. 224)
I’m not sure I’ve reached the place of this joy yet, the joy that can sit with
grief under the same canopy, open to the same sky. But Sukkot still holds out
that possibility for me, inviting me as a guest into the sheltering presence of
its sukkat shalom, its sukkah of peace.
The publication and distribution of the JTS Parashah Commentary are made possible by a generous grant
from Rita Dee (z”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (z”l).