“…and they all lived happily ever after.”
Okay, it was a little violent beforehand. Everything comes out okay in the end, though.
The Haftarah for the Intermediate Sabbath of Sukkot discusses the envisioned nation of Gog, which will descend from the north upon Israel. Have no fear: God will destroy Gog, “with pestilence and with bloodshed…I will pour torrential rain, and hailstones, and sulfurous fire upon him.” (38:22). Another would-be conqueror, Magog, will get the same divine treatment. Israel will triumph, and the land will be purified – forever!
I will make My holy name known among My people Israel, and never again will I let My holy name be profaned. And the nations shall know that I the Lord am holy in Israel.
What is it about Sukkot that yields such a denouement? The Haftarah for Sukkot’s first day derives from Zechariah 14: 1-21, but the theme is very much the same: the nations gather in Jerusalem for war, rape and pillage occurs, yet God then smites them, and in the end, as we pray in the Aleinu, “the Lord shall be king over all the earth; in that day the Lord shall be one and His name one.”
As is so often the case, the Haftarot undermine the holiday. Sukkot is about impermanence and fragility; we welcome the bounty of God’s nature, but recognize that even our enjoyment of it is temporary, in flimsy structures. Over the long run, our bodies are temporary, flimsy structures, destined for collapse and failure. So the Haftarot tell us not to worry: the good guys will win in the end.
But the lesson of these two Haftarot transcend the immediate context of Sukkot. They offer more than permanence; they offer certainty. And that’s quite a problem.
Certainty is popular. Certainty with the good guys winning, even more so. This is particularly true in contemporary times with evangelical Protestants. So-called ““>the Rapture” where Christ will “meet them in the air,” and they are not a fringe group: Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series, based upon dispensationalist theology, has sold more than 65 million copies, and has spawned a series of major motion pictures. This is not a new trend: when I was growing up, the nation’s #1 bestseller was Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, based upon similar theology.
It is not limited to Christians: the Lubavitcher Hasidim so ached for the Messiah that they foolishly argued that he had come in the form of the most recent Lubavitcher Rebbe. They want Mashiach; they want Mashiach now. Too bad. He’s not coming. Right-wing settlers on the West Bank happily subvert Israeli democracy (with the help of the government) because somehow, some apocalyptic event will occur that will rid the land of Palestinians.
It is not even limited to theology. Marxism was fundamentally eschatological, promising an end of history in which the classless society returns humanity to fundamental unalienated nature. The human psyche aches for closure, for things getting tied up in a bow. Perhaps it represents the sublimation of the fear of death, assuring us of a good ending despite our demise.
The problem is that life does not work like that. Although it sounds nice to“>Danielle Berrin’s recent beautiful piece on mourning her mother hits far closer to universal truth.: “Kaddish doesn’t tell us God is good or fair; Kaddish tells us God is great — big, mighty, inscrutable. Jewish tradition, thank God, knows better than to promise a life devoid of pain. Instead, it offers us the tools — God, community, ritual — to help bear it.”
Just as importantly, we wouldn’t want life to work out perfectly even if we could. I am reminded of a classic episode of The Twilight Zone called “A Nice Place to Visit.” The central character is a two-bit gangster and murderer: after getting shot, he wakes up in a comfortable place with a servant named Pip (memorably played by Sebastian Cabot). Pip tells the man that he is there to serve his every need, and at first, everything seems great. The man realizes that he must have died, although he is confused about how he got into heaven. But then – precisely because everything works out, he gets bored. He wins every casino game, every woman grants him whatever he wants – he can’t even do a bank robbery because he always succeeds. Finally in desperation, he tells Pip that there must be some mistake, that he can’t stand heaven any longer, and that he needs to go to “the other place.”
Pip responds with mocking laughter, “What made you think that this is heaven? This is the other place!”
Haftarat Hol-Hamoed Sukkot quite literally says that the reward of Israel shall be the other place, where it triumphs and every other nation bows down and serves it. And that would be a disaster. A children’s paradise – candy every day! No school! I get whatever I want! – is an adult’s hell.
Rabbi Yitzhak Luria, the greatest Kabbalistic mind in Jewish history, knew as much. Lurianic Kabbalism holds that in creating the universe, God had to contract in order to make space for subsequent creation. From the inception of creation, God withdrew, leaving a zone of bereftness. Our yearning and empty feelings, then, are not necessarily marks of personal problems: they are inherent in the very structure of the universe. And as divine light – the Shefa – flowed into the vessels (Sephirot) containing divine attributes, the vessels could not handle so much divine energy and shattered. The broken vessels and light entered the world, creating much of the brokenness that we now find ourselves in.
Luria’s system is cosmological, not psychological, but the two are intimately linked. And they remind us that eternal happiness and rest is not of this world. Even as we engage in Tikkun Olam – literally the repairing of the world, now used more to speak of social justice work – the fact remains that brokenness is inherent. God still needs to withdraw for the world even to exist in the first place.
So how should we treat the Haftarot on Sukkot? Something like we might treat children’s fairy tales, which end with them all living happily ever after. The violence hardly obviates this interpretation: children’s stories are often violent and brutal (think, for example, of Jack and the Beanstalk or Little Red Riding Hood). They are excellent stories, and they are useful for children. I read them to my daughter when she was younger, and when I did, I had a wistful feeling. It reminds us to keep striving for closure and rebuilding of relationships. But we all grow up, and that is a good thing. Fairy tales edify and educate us, and they do so by demonstrating some of our deepest needs. But when we glimpse them, we see not the universe but our own childlike selves.
