Sukkot as ‘stance’

Sukkot, our little festival huts that we build outside, are a practice in ‘stance’.

In martial arts we practice our stance as often as we practice defence or attacking.

It is in stance that you find balance, grounding and which gives you options of where to go next.

Sukkot is no different and for it we have three stances.

The first is that the Sukkah is our place of journey, from Egypt, in Sukkot, we traverse the desert on the way to the Promised Land. It is a symbol of our resilience, a nod to a people always on the move, perhaps at a deeper level connecting us to our brief foray in this world before the next generation takes the reigns.

The second image is of the Sukkah as a place of harvest collection; the ancient peoples took their Sukkot out into the fields to collect the harvest. Proximity to the fields enabled the harvest to be collected in good time. In those same Sukkot people hung produce out to dry, stored goods from the fields and accounted for the year's harvest. It is in Sukkot that we celebrate bounty and plenty and show appreciation for all we have.

The third is the shared image of ‘סוכת שלום’, the sheltering wings of the Almighty, the dream of ultimate protection in an uncertain world. The Sukkah is described by the Chernobyl Rebbe, Menachem Nochum Twersky [1730-1787] like the sheep that stands above its lamb for the first week of its life, sheltering it like the ‘schach’ ‘סכך’, the leaves and branches of the Sukkah that shelters us.

These are some of the stances of our lives…if we can go out into the world beyond Sukkot and travel with our heads held high, celebrating our achievements and returning home to the shelter of family, community and tradition, we stand to do well, to prosper and thrive in strength in the year ahead.

The final message of this week is beyond stance but at the core of the matter; the body, the centre of our strength. In the kabbalistic imagination, each of the festivals are represented in the limbs of the body: the two arms, Sukkot and Passover; two legs, Purim and Chanukah; the head, the New Year; the breath, Yom Kippur. It is the body that is our core, that core is Simchat Torah, the celebration of beginning again our bible-reading cycle. Why is our Torah our ultimate strength? It is the place from which we do meaning making, it is the focal point from which we ask big questions of the world, it is the beginning point of our derivation of wisdom and insight. ‘לַמַּחֲזִיקִים בָּהּ’, for those who grab this Torah, who hold onto it, it stands to be our inspiration and our sustenance, and in the year ahead might just make the difference.

‘חֲזַק וְנִתְחַזַּק’, Hazak v’nitchazek, we got a big year ahead of us, wishing us only good strength in the days ahead!

Hag Samayach, Shabbat Shalom, Shana Tova