The Courage to Rejoice
The Courage to Rejoice
by Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l
Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l, former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, was one of the best writers and scholars of our time, a master teacher who could enlighten both the simplest and most advanced thinker… at the same time in the same text!
Image by Jgavant at commons.wikimedia.org
Many of his works are now available on the Sefaria website, including this excerpt below about Sukkot. I urge you to visit it and his personal website rabbisacks.org
We have come to the Festival most associated with simcha / joy and rejoicing — namely, the holiday of Sukkot. And this very same holiday has been marred by the Hamas invasion of October 7th (on the last day of Sukkot in Israel) and the subsequent attacks on Israel by her enemies that continue to this day.
Here in America, nothing feels quite the same. Jews are shocked by the sudden vulnerability we are experiencing, a sense of insecurity that is both real and imagined by what potentially awaits us in the future.
As always, Rabbi Sacks was prescient and wrote us words of comfort and strength, though he passed nearly four years ago.
What is truly remarkable is that Sukkot is called, by tradition zeman simḥateinu / our time of joy.
That, to me, is the wonder at the heart of the Jewish experience: that Jews throughout the ages were able to experience risk and uncertainty at every level of their existence and yet they were still able to rejoice.
That is spiritual courage of a high order. Faith is not certainty; faith is the courage to live with uncertainty. Faith is the ability to rejoice in the midst of instability and change, travelling through the wilderness of time towards an unknown destination.
Of all the festivals, Sukkot is surely the one that speaks most powerfully to our time.
[The Book of] Kohelet / Ecclesiastes (which we read on Sukkot) could almost have been written in the twenty-first century.
Here is the ultimate success, the man who has it all – the houses, the cars, the clothes, the adoring women, the envy of all men – who has pursued everything this world can offer from pleasure to possessions to power to wisdom, and yet who, surveying the totality of his life, can only say, “Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless.”
Kohelet’s failure to find meaning is directly related to his obsession with the “I” and the “Me”: “I built for myself. I gathered for myself. I acquired for myself.”
The more he pursues his desires, the emptier his life becomes.
There is no more powerful critique of the consumer society, whose idol is the self, whose icon is the “selfie,” and whose moral code is “Whatever works for you.”
This is reflected in today’s society that achieved unprecedented affluence, giving people more choices than they had ever known, and yet at the same time saw an unprecedented rise in alcohol and drug abuse, eating disorders, stress-related syndromes, depression, attempted suicide, and actual suicide.
A society of tourists, not pilgrims, is not one that will yield the sense of a life worth living.
Of all things people have chosen to worship, the self is the least fulfilling.
A culture of narcissism quickly gives way to loneliness and despair.
By the end of the book, Kohelet finds meaning in simple things. “Sweet is the sleep of a labouring man. Enjoy life with the woman you love. Eat, drink, and enjoy the sun.”
That, ultimately, is the meaning of Sukkot as a whole. It is a festival of simple things.
It is, Jewishly, the time we come closer to nature than any other, sitting in a hut with only leaves for a roof, and taking in our hands the unprocessed fruits and foliage of the palm branch, the citron, twigs of myrtle, and leaves of willow.
It is a time when we briefly liberate ourselves from the sophisticated pleasures of the city and the processed artifacts of a technological age, and recapture some of the innocence we had when we were young, when the world still had the radiance of wonder.
Reflect... Where do you find the most meaning in your life?
…Most majestically of all, Sukkot is the festival of insecurity.
It is the candid acknowledgement that there is no life without risk, yet we can face the future without fear when we know we are not alone…
Sitting in the sukka under its canopy of leaves, I often think of my ancestors and their wanderings across Europe in search of safety, and I begin to understand how faith was their only home.
It was fragile, chillingly exposed to the storms of prejudice and hate. But it proved stronger than superpowers and outlived them all.
Towards the end of his great book, A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson wrote:
The Jews were not just innovators. They were also exemplars and epitomisers of the human condition. They seemed to present all the inescapable dilemmas of man in a heightened and clarified form…. The Jews were the emblem of homeless and vulnerable humanity. But is not the whole earth no more than a temporary transit camp?
Those words go to the heart of Sukkot.
To know that life is full of risk and yet to affirm it, to sense the full insecurity of the human situation and yet to rejoice: this, for me, is the essence of faith.
Judaism is no comforting illusion that all is well in this dark world.
It is instead the courage to celebrate in the midst of uncertainty, and to rejoice even in the transitory shelter of the sukka, the Jewish symbol of home.
Reflect... How can the message of Sukkot help us live through difficult times?
CHAG SAMEACH!
