Torah Reading Leviticus 22:26-23:44

Haftarah Day 1 Zechariah 14:1-21

Shabbat Sukkot Megillah Kohelet

The Sages taught: One who did not see the joy of the Place of the Drawing of the Water never saw joy in his life. (Talmud Bavli Sukka 51b)

Our ancient texts describe Sukkot as a festival of all festivals – Jerusalem brimming and buzzing with pilgrims; music, dancing, juggling, endless learning and debating; a lot of food and drinking, not to mention a series of sacrifices offered in the Temple. Sukkot falls out at the end of the harvest season, so the mood might have been elevated in joyful gratitude for the soil having yielded blessings of sustenance and prosperity. The sense of gratitude might have added to the optimism that God would send rain for the beginning of another successful sowing, growing, and harvesting cycle.

The change in the Amidah insertion during the Gevurah blessing, from morid ha tal (who brings down the dew) to mashiv a ruach umorid hagashem (who causes the wind to blow and the rain to fall) at the end of Sukkot hints at just how important rainfall was – and is – in geographic areas that go through prolonged months of drought, when the morning dew on lawns and crops is the only natural source of moisture. Israel and California are very similar in climate and landscape, so we can relate!

Water of course is the most important element, for plants, for humans, for all life. In Hebrew, “life” and “water” even rhyme – mayim chayim, מַיִם חַיִּים – which brings me to the Israeli folk song Mayim mayim b’sason, that celebrates the joyful drawing of water, from what the lyrics call a well of redemption, or salvation. It is a fitting theme to consider on Erev Sukkot:

One can interpret these lyrics in different was: As the words of a joyful song for halutzim (pioneers) or kibbutzniks as they water their crops and make the desert, the land arable – or as a religious statement, where the water, the well of redemption, is a metaphor for God and Torah that sustain those who hold on to or drink from them; a spiritual fountain that nourishes the soul like dew or moderate rain nourish the plants.

Israel being the spiritual-agricultural project that it is, these secular and religious layers have often been merged in art, poetry, and national narrative – paintings of papercuts of olive trees or waving wheat fields can have religious symbolism to some but to others might just represent pastoral landscapes. This is similar to what I was speaking about on Kol Nidre – the secular and the religious are often interwoven in ways that can’t be fully disentangled.

And it is the same with the many layers of the Sukkot festival.

When we teach about it today, we often say that it was a harvest festival, and indeed, the sukkot (plural for sukka) were huts that provided shelter for the workers on the field – the hut Boaz’ men are mentioning, in the book of Ruth, is probably a kind of makeshift structure similar to a sukka.

And like a sukkat shlomecha, the divine shelter of peace many of our prayers allude to, or the divine clouds of glory in Rabbi Eliezer’s argument with Rabbi Akiva, this ancient agricultural hut was a space where to rest and get some shade from the burning sun, thus providing a moment of relief. I always think that’s probably also why the right amount of shade is one crucial aspect of what makes a sukka kosher: A hut out in the fields that didn’t give enough shade was useless — unfit.

I don’t know how each one of you imagines redemption, or whether the concept at all resonates with you, but arguably, it is something joyful, or at least something that brings release. Even on a mundane level, when we redeem ourselves, when we redeem a coupon, we’re doing something good, we’re getting something arguably positive that might make us happy, that might sustain us — sustain us like water, offer release like shade.

From here, it’s not a huge step to a ceremony that celebrates water, on a holiday that celebrates a successful harvest in a religious culture that values agricultural work as a spiritual, redemptive act. The Drawing of the Water ceremony (Beit HaShoeva) was a popular feature of the pilgrimage festival of Sukkot and sounds like a religious revelry, maybe not everyone’s taste, but certainly a procession and spectacle to behold:

The pious and the men of action would dance before the people who attended the celebration, with flaming torches that they would juggle in their hands, and they would say before them passages of song and praise to God. And the Levites would play on lyres, harps, cymbals, and trumpets, and countless other musical instruments. (…) Two priests stood at the Upper Gate (of the Temple) (…) with two trumpets in their hands. When the rooster crowed at dawn, they sounded a tekia, and sounded a terua, and sounded a tekia. When they who would draw the water reached the tenth stair the trumpeters sounded a tekia, and sounded a terua, and sounded a tekia, to indicate that the time to draw water from the Siloam pool had arrived. (…) They continued sounding the trumpets until they reached the gate through which one exits to the east, from the Women’s Courtyard to the eastern slope of the Temple Mount. When they reached the gate through which one exits to the east, they turned from facing east to facing west, toward the Holy of Holies, and said: Our ancestors who were in this place during the First Temple period who did not conduct themselves appropriately, stood “with their backs toward the Sanctuary of the Lord, and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun toward the east” (Ezekiel 8:16), and we, our eyes are to God. Rabbi Yehuda says that they would repeat and say: We are to God, and our eyes are to God. (Mishna Sukka 5:4)

To me, this sounds like the description of a libation ritual that centers around water but ultimately worships God as the source of life. Again, it is hard to disentangle. And like in so many modern Hebrew poems the religious, the secular, the pagan, the visceral, the sensuous, the mysterious all fall together.

There is another passage in the Mishna about the Waterdrawing festivities that always fascinates me, it is an image that never loses its mysterious allure and power:

There were golden candelabra atop poles there in the courtyard. And there were four basins made of gold at the top of each candelabrum. (…) From the worn trousers of the priests and their belts they would loosen and tear strips to use as wicks, and with them they would light the candelabra. And the light from the candelabra was so bright that there was not a courtyard in Jerusalem that was not illuminated from the light of the Place of the Drawing of the Water. (Mishna Sukka 5:2-3)

There was not a courtyard in Jerusalem that was not illuminated from the light of the Place of the Drawing of the Water.

Every time I read this, I feel myself again walking through the streets of Jerusalem, feeling sheltered, as if under a huge canopy of peace – walking endlessly through the maze of alleys in Nachlaot or Sha’arei Hesed, past the light coming from the sukkas in every yard. The buzzing brim of Erev Sukkot that I experienced during my first holiday season in Israel has always stayed with me.

As far as I know, they no longer make wicks out of used priestly garments, and the sensation of being surrounded by divine light on those nights might be that of a poetic mind detached from reality – but regardless of what it really is, I always rejoice in those memories and they make me yearn to go up to Jerusalem again. They are an endless source of spiritual joy and sustenance.

And then I think about how much humans in general long, yearn to be happy, to find ways to rejoice, to bring light, holiness into their lives. How crucial it is to feel spiritually sustained and replenished and to believe, even in dark and challenging times, that we can raise a tent of shelter though every thread is torn, to quote from Leonard Cohen’s song Dance me to the End of Love, to which we floated and moved through our Beit Midrash on Yom Kippur afternoon.

And that is what Sukkot comes to teach us as well: Even if it’s not permanent, make time to rejoice. In fact, Judaism commands up to rejoice: וְשָׂמַחְתָּ בְּחַגֶּךָ (Deuteronomy 16:14) At the heels of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur with their pleas to be inscribed and sealed into the Book of Life, the command to rejoice on Sukkot is a command to gratefully remember the living running waters that are our lives, even when that doesn’t always feel easy or conceivable.

Below is a poem that meditates on the difficulty of commanded rejoicing. I wrote it a few years ago, after welcoming Sukkot in Los Angeles’ highest sukka, which is on the rooftop of my friends’ community Der Nister, in Downtown LA.

Shabbat Shalom and Hag Sukkot Sameach!
Rabbi Julia Knobloch

Mandated Rejoicing

Golden fabrics billow and summon time

on a downtown rooftop, a sukka perks out

into the gentile weeknight

like a pinecone on a tree in Tzippori,

where sacredness lasts longer, stretched out

like winter’s shadows on stolid mosaics

cracked lips and silent eyes; on Broadway

sidewalks burst in red and yellow lights

One day after Yom Kippur, a woman from

the blue shores of a distant lake gave her son

over to the sandstone soil in Simi Valley

all souls still dressed in white

Shabbat pauses the mourning

but counts as one day of grief

The festival annuls

My mother, who hails from the same blue lake

of swans and flowers confides

she listens for my father’s breath

when he takes his nap each afternoon

In the old country an old love walks again

through the sandstone alleys of our youth

the river still the same, the castle ruin

He sends me photos from his parents’ attic,

how young we were in black and white

fresh eyes, plum lips and thicker hair

Things were new then under the sun

The walls of the sukka float in gold and red,

on Broadway, sirens hover through the twilight;

through the roof I hear Elazar and Yohanan

decry the end inherent to all beauty

the slow decay of all we love

the baffled hope of parents

Nothing can be added, nothing taken; we lift

our cups to sanctify this time of joy