The Torah tells us to: “Live in succot for seven days: All native-born Israelites are to live in succot so that your descendants will know that I had the Israelites live in succot when I brought them out of Egypt: I am the Lord your God” (Vayikra 23:42-43).
There are two opinions in the Mishnah. Rabbi Eliezer held that the succah represents the Clouds of Glory that surrounded the Israelites during the wilderness years, protecting them from heat during the day and the cold during the night, and bathing them with the radiance of the Divine Presence. Rabbi Akiva on the other hand said, “Succot mammash”, meaning a succah is a succah, no more and no less: it is a hut, a booth, a temporary dwelling. It has no symbolism. It is what it is.
If we follow Rabbi Eliezer then it is obvious why we celebrate by making a succah. It is there to remind us of a miracle. All three pilgrimage festivals are about miracles. Pesach is about the miracle of the Exodus, Shavuot is about the miracle of the revelation at Mount Sinai, and Succot is about God’s tender care of His people, during the journey across the desert. But according to Rabbi Akiva, a succah is merely a hut, so what was the miracle? There is nothing unusual about living in a hut if you are living a nomadic existence in the desert. Why should there be a festival dedicated to something ordinary, commonplace and non-miraculous?
Rashbam (Rashi’s grandson) says the succah was there to remind the Israelites of their past so that at the very moment they were feeling the greatest satisfaction at living in Israel – at the time of the ingathering of the produce of the land – they should remember their lowly origins. They were once a group of refugees without a home, never knowing when they would have to move on. The festival of Succot, according to Rashbam, exists to remind us of our humble origins so that we never fall into the complacency of taking freedom, the land of Israel and the blessings it yields, for granted. However, there is another way of understanding Rabbi Akiva.
The succah represents the courage the Israelites had to travel, to move, to leave security behind, and follow God’s call, as did Avraham and Sarah at the dawn of our history. According to Rabbi Akiva the succah is the temporary home of a temporarily homeless people. It symbolizes the courage of a bride willing to follow her husband on a risk-laden journey to a place she had never seen before – a love that showed itself in the fact that she was willing to live in a hut, trusting her husband’s promise that one day they would have a permanent home.
What is truly remarkable is that Succot is called, by tradition, zeman simchateinu, “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 toward an unknown destination.
