Sukkot: The Holiday of Doubt

We didn’t build a sukkah in 2019. It was the first time since my son was born, six years before, that we didn’t do it. But my father had died a week earlier, on Yom Kippur, and so instead of planning our annual Sukkot party, where I’d make as many Ottolenghi dishes as possible, and figuring out how to make our sukkah even better than the year before, I was planning a funeral.

Our son’s favorite holiday is Sukkot, and so when we broke the news to him, he broke down. It was the first time he’d cried since he learned that his grandfather, with whom he had a very special relationship, was gone. I remember thinking how strange it was that it was the loss of his beloved sukkah that pushed him to that breaking point first, rather than the loss of his deeply special friend, my father.

The sukkah is, among other things, about remembering, and suddenly the space of memory and remembering was wiped away.

In retrospect, I understand why he cried over the absent sukkah. It was about much more than the three walls and makeshift bamboo ceiling with all its glittering gaps and spaces. It was about the way that the temporary brings us together and reinforces something within us. For my son, there was immense stability and security in knowing that each year that sukkah would go up in our backyard; and each year, there would be fun and laughter and gratitude and friends in that sukkah. And losing that meant losing everything. The sukkah is, among other things, about remembering, and suddenly the space of memory and remembering was wiped away.

How does one go on without that space to remember who we are? Our lives are, after all, an accumulation of memories, compounded and compressed. We are not blank slates.

As I mourned for my father—who I, mistakenly, assumed would live forever, the embodiment of permanence for me—I also mourned, along with my son, the loss of the temporary, made visible by the absent sukkah. But the truth is that even in the absent sukkah there was a lesson to be learned: Everything is temporary. The sukkah isn’t a reminder of what life could be like—out in the desert, wandering, searching for stability—it’s a reminder of what life is, always and already, though we may pretend otherwise.

During Sukkot we leave the “security” of our homes and dwell in what is, in theory, less stable—but what if the stable is no less secure than the unstable? Perhaps it isn’t meant to teach us to appreciate our perceived sense of security, but rather our perpetual lack of security. Perhaps the space of the sukkah is asking us to remember not where we’ve been, but where we are.

And as we find ourselves in the (hopefully) final throes of a never-ending pandemic, reflecting on where we are is inevitable. If nothing else, the last year and a half has taught us that nothing is certain. Life is one continuous jazz song—against the backdrop of a strong, prominent meter are the bent notes and reliable improvisations. The melody, harmony, and rhythm are all there, but it’s the unexpected that shake them up and render them unpredictable. In fact, the only predictable thing about jazz is its improvisational heartbeat, its unpredictability. It doesn’t exist without that crucial element.

Sound familiar?

Jazz, like life, elicits complex and competing emotions. There is creative freedom in it. It’s no wonder many artists and writers have drawn on the musical genre to tell their own stories. Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winning author Toni Morrison wrote a novel called “Jazz,” set in 1920s Harlem, but with flashbacks reaching decades into the past. In a foreword to the novel, Morrison writes: 

“I was struck by the modernity that jazz anticipated and directed, and by its unreasonable optimism. Whatever the truth or consequences of individual entanglements and the racial landscape, the music insisted that the past might haunt us, but it would not entrap us. It demanded a future—and refused to regard the past as ‘… an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle.’”

The past—the desert, the unstable—is with us at every moment, even when we think we’ve left it behind. But it need not pull us backward; it need not repeat itself, even as it remains with us.

Still, the music reminds us that there is nothing mechanical, predictable or inevitable when it comes to life, and while we may have conditioned ourselves over many years to fear such traits, they are also the place where hope resides, for they contain both our past and our future.

But the shifting sands of this long pandemic moment force us to confront this reality, and to ask, invariably, where we have been this past year and a half. We have a tendency to want to ground ourselves in a specific place and time. Have we been in the desert, or have we been in the promised land, we might ask ourselves.

Without the desert, we have no promised land, and without the promised land, we have no desert. Perhaps we are meant to inhabit both, all of the time, simultaneously.

But I suspect that this is a false choice, an unfair question. Since when have Jews been relegated to binaries? The truth is that without the desert, we have no promised land, and without the promised land, we have no desert. Perhaps we are meant to inhabit both, all of the time, simultaneously.

All of this is contained in the sukkah—a temporary structure that is built only after we have become free, but always before we become so stable, so set in our ways, that we become forgetful.

All of this is contained in the sukkah—a temporary structure that is built only after we have become free, but always before we become so stable, so set in our ways, that we become forgetful. It’s a liminal space, the kind we usually only pass through on our way to somewhere else, and almost always want to escape because it makes us feel unanchored. There is danger in detachment, we think, erroneously. Because maybe we need to float, even flail about, for a bit in order to swim. Either way, we have to move.

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror,” the poet Rilke said. “Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

We imagine that the promised land—the place we end up on the other side of the sukkah, the other side of the temporary—is a place full of beauty and free of doubt and instability. But I’m not so certain of that. In the space of the sukkah, we are called to remember the fear and the doubt that must have haunted the original inhabitants of makeshift desert huts. I’ve heard some people say that this is to remind us to be grateful for the safety and security that is now ours. But I don’t think that’s quite right. I think we are, instead, supposed to be reminded of the importance of doubt—the “greatest civilizer on earth,” according to Rabbi Sarah Blumenthal, a character in E.L. Doctorow’s novel “City of God.”

Doubt is the only thing that functions consistently. Is there anything more stable, more necessary, than doubt?

Doubt is the only thing that functions consistently. Is there anything more stable, more necessary, than doubt? In a world in which knowledge and information are now regularly manipulated and deployed to further political agendas, shouldn’t we embrace doubt with open arms? Perhaps a lesson of Sukkot is that doubt is not just something that happens in the desert, but something that we should take with us into whatever we imagine is the promised land—because doubt, the “great civilizer on earth,” is precisely what brings us closer to a deeper, more profound understanding of both God and ourselves. Doubt forces inquiry, and compels us to seek answers, to engage in a process that we hope will lead us to the truth. And at the end of the day, there’s nothing more stabilizing than the truth. But we don’t get there without doubt.

Doubt both reinforces and reminds us of the importance of the improvisational and unpredictable. It’s reminds us of life, that we are alive, that we are complex human beings. It reminds us that we can be sure of nothing—not in a way that makes us afraid, but in a way that reassures us, that allows us to think and feel and move closer to the places we are meant to be. It’s the jazz song all over again, pushing us into a space of self-discovery. 

There’s a group of musicians in Doctorow’s novel that he calls “The Midrash Jazz Quartet.” Like jazz, midrash is an interpretive art, riffing on what comes before it. It contains what precedes it, without repeating the original. It is familiar without repressing spontaneity. All that to say: Jews know, deep down, the importance of doubt.

I admit that 2019 wasn’t the last year we didn’t build a sukkah. The following year presented its own challenges, as we all know. We found ourselves temporarily away from Los Angeles, in Vancouver, where our downtown high-rise apartment did not offer the possibility of building a sukkah. “Never mind,” I told my son, who was once again disappointed, though with fewer tears this time—the mark of a boy one year older. “We’ll find someone else’s sukkah to visit. We’ll find a shul with a sukkah.” But pandemic restrictions meant that sukkahs were few and far between. 

Another year with an absent sukkah.

And now, as Sukkot approaches once again, I find myself not just in another country, but on another continent, far from Los Angeles, where a drive through Pico-Robertson or Beverly/Fairfax is scattered with sukkahs popping out from behind homes and apartment buildings this time of year. In contrast, from my temporary home in the small town of Fiesole, Italy, I look down on the city of Florence, and see looming structures that aggressively assert their permanence, as if to defy the inferior idea of the temporary. There is power in permanence, they seem to say.

But as beautiful as they are, those aren’t my structures. They don’t remind me to doubt. They don’t remind me that there’s both beauty and value in the temporary. They don’t remind me that life is both the desert and the promised land, rather than just a respite from the time in the desert. They don’t remind me of who I am.

They’re formidable, these structures that have lasted for hundreds of years. I can spend hours looking at them and peering inside of them. But this time of year, I long for the temporary and deconstruct-able. I long for the space to doubt so that I have the space to appreciate the unknown and improvisational. I don’t know if this is the year where we get back to building our own sukkah (after all, I spent an entire day trying to track down challah and a Havdalah candle last week), but I do know that I have been, for now, uprooted, and that even an absent sukkah has a lesson to teach.

Monica Osborne is Editor-at-Large at the Jewish Journal. She is a former professor of literature, critical theory, and Jewish Studies, and is the author of “The Midrashic Impulse and the Contemporary Literary Response to Trauma.” Follow her on Twitter @DrMonicaOsborne