D’Var Torah
Sukkot Day 1 5787

In the Zohar, the shade of the sukkah is called in Aramaic tzilah de’meheimnuta — צִלא דמהימנותא — the “shade of faith.”

What does it mean to call the shade of the sukkah the “shade of faith”? And what might this strange phrase teach us about the deeper meaning of Sukkot?

I want to begin with something very simple.

A sukkah is something we build.

It does not simply appear. We have to gather materials. We have to construct its walls. We have to put up the s’khakh. We have to make a place where we can sit, eat, invite people in, and celebrate.

And perhaps that is the first thing the Zohar is asking us to notice when it calls the sukkah the “shade of faith.”

Faith, too, is something we build.

To choose a Jewish or religious life is, in part, to actively construct a structure of faith that can support the way we live. And building that structure is not something we do entirely on our own. We need space to consult the beliefs and teachings of those who came before us, and the wisdom of people around us. We need spaces to study Torah and other disciplines that help us understand the world.

And we need spaces for communal conversations about faith: What do I believe? What don’t I believe? What am I uncertain about? What perplexes me?

The sukkah can be one of those spaces.

For one week, we sit in a small, vulnerable home and allow ourselves to notice the world around us. We eat there. We study there. We tell stories there. We invite other people into it. We encounter the natural world through its open roof and its temporary walls.

And perhaps, while sitting there, we are invited to construct — and reconstruct — our own structures of faith.

The sukkah is also a place of guests. We invite our ushpizin, our ancient ancestors, into the sukkah. And we invite literal guests: friends and family, people from our community, people whose stories and perspectives might influence how we see the world.

Faith is built in conversation.

It is built through inherited wisdom, but also through living encounter.

And that is important because the structure we build is never finished.

A week is not enough time to build a complete theology. A year is not enough time. Perhaps a lifetime isn’t enough time.

But Sukkot gives us one week each year to remember that we need to keep building.

And the sukkah teaches us something else about the kind of structure we are supposed to build.

A sukkah is not a fortress.

It gives us shade, but it does not seal us off from the world.

It has walls, but they are temporary.

It has a roof, but through that roof we are supposed to see the sky.

And if it rains, we might get wet.

The sukkah must be permeable. It must allow the world in.

And perhaps our faith must be permeable, too.

Our faith should give us enough shelter to inhabit the world — but not so much shelter that we stop encountering the world.

It should give us a way to understand our lives without pretending that everything is already understood.

This is one idea that has sprouted from my encounter with the Torah of the late Rabbi Menachem Fruman, an unusual Israeli rabbi who spent much of his life trying to build bridges between religious and secular Jews, and between Israelis and Palestinians.

Rabbi Froman had a particularly interesting understanding of faith in the modern world.

Modernity, he suggested, makes it harder for us to imagine that our religious structures are impregnable.

We know there are other religions.

We know there are other belief systems.

We know that people who are intelligent, sincere, and morally serious can look at the same world and come to very different conclusions about what is true.

And that knowledge can be unsettling.

It can feel as though the wind has begun to shake the walls of the sukkah we have built.

But perhaps that is not the end of faith.

Perhaps it is part of faith.

A sukkah is supposed to be vulnerable to the wind.

And sometimes our structures of faith are shaken, too.

Sometimes a strong wind comes through our lives and knocks part of the sukkah over.

A loss.

A disappointment.

A question we cannot answer.

Something we encounter in another person whose experience challenges our assumptions.

A belief we once held with certainty that no longer feels certain.

The question is not whether our sukkah will ever be shaken.

The question is what we do when it is.

We can put the pieces back together.

We can sit in whatever shade remains.

We can refuse to give up on the entire structure because part of it has fallen down.

We can make a bracha under the shade that remains — under the tzilah de’meheimnuta, the shade of faith.

And perhaps that is one of the things it means to have faith.

Not to possess a structure that can never be shaken.

But to know how to continuously rebuild a living structure each year.

There is a kind of faith that says: I know. I am certain. Nothing can shake this.

And there may be moments in our lives when certainty feels like a gift.

But Sukkot offers us another model.

A sukkah-faith says something more like:

I believe.

I build.

I inhabit.

I remain open.

I can be shaken.

And if I need to, I can build again.

That may be a less comfortable kind of faith.

But perhaps it is a more honest one.

And yet, strangely, the Torah does not ask us to sit in the sukkah anxiously contemplating its fragility.

It asks us to rejoice.

V’samachta b’chagecha.

Sukkot is z’man simchateinu, the season of our rejoicing.

We throw parties under the sukkah. We eat meals. We sing. We dance. We share stories. We invite people in. We raise a l’chayim. We celebrate being Jewish.

And I don’t think that joy is a distraction from the fragility of the sukkah.

I think the fragility may be part of what makes the joy possible.

We don’t wait until we have constructed the perfect shelter before we allow ourselves to rejoice.

We don’t wait until our theology is complete.

We don’t wait until every question has been answered.

We don’t wait until the wind stops blowing.

We sit down together in the structure we have built, knowing that it is temporary, knowing that it is imperfect, knowing that it is open to the world — and we rejoice anyway.

Perhaps Sukkot is teaching us that we do not need perfect security in order to experience joy.

We can have a great time being Jewish while still carrying doubt.

We can celebrate mitzvot and Torah and community while still asking difficult questions about what we believe.

We can welcome our ancestors and our friends into the sukkah while acknowledging that our own understanding of Judaism is unfinished.

We can enjoy the porous shade.

In that sense, Sukkot does not pretend to resolve everything difficult that Rosh haShanah and Yom Kippur. The faith of Sukkot doe not pretend to answer who will live and who will die.

Rather, Sukkot asks a different question:

What do we do when we still don’t have certainty about the big questions of life?

We build a place to live, along with our uncertainty.

We open it to other people.

We let the world in.

We repair it when it is damaged.

And then we celebrate inside it.

Perhaps this is what the Zohar means by tzilah de’meheimnuta, the shade of faith.

Not the shelter of certainty.

The shade of faith.

A temporary place that we build with our own hands.

A place strong enough to inhabit, but open enough to be challenged.

A place vulnerable enough to be shaken, but repairable enough to build again.

A place that is never only ours, because it is filled with the voices of those who came before us and the people sitting beside us now.

And a place in which, despite everything we do not know, we can still rejoice.

“Go, eat your bread in gladness, and drink your wine in joy; for your action was long ago approved by God.”

Go.

Eat your bread in gladness.

Drink your wine in joy.

Sit together beneath the shade of faith.

We may not know how long the sukkah will stand.

We may not know what the next wind will bring.

But for this moment, we are here.

We have built something.

We are together.

And there is joy to be found beneath this fragile, beautiful shade.

Chag sameach.