The Soul of Sukkot: Circumcising our Hearts

Sukkot is the festival marking our turn from the introspection of Rosh HaShanah and the inner work of Yom Kippur. On this Festival of Booths, we built shelters that are simultaneously frail and resilient, reflecting the existential reality of human life and community. Using the months of Elul and Tishrei to turn inward, to plumb the depths of our souls, the need of the hour is to articulate a Jewish understanding of why engagement with the world is an essential component of religious life. In making that case, it is crucial that we locate this agenda not from a perspective of partisan politics, but from the core of personhood, a spiritual fleshing out of how we are in the world, and of who we are in the world.  In sketching out the related nature of our humanity, the place to start is in utero (as individuals; as Jews, in our history as slaves in Egypt and afterward).

Inside the womb the fetus does not know (from what we can tell) where their own identity stops and the boundaries of other people begin.  As we form in our very first few weeks and then months in the world, we live in a world of complete oneness, in which all is united with all, all is merged with all; in which our needs are magically met. We start the first (however many) months of our life in an environment that is perfectly suited to our own growth, our own formation, and our own fulfillment. At some time during this gestation, we start to hear certain recurrent voices, and those voices become familiar to us. We start to hear the recognizable voices of our parents around us; we might even start to hear the voices of siblings, if we have them; certain familiar sounds, that by the time we are born we already register, as familiar, and mishpachah, and our own.  

Jewish tradition speaks of our leaving Egypt as a moment of birth as a people, and the mystical tradition builds on that to suggest that the Sukkah (booth) that we build for the festival is itself a womb. Each year, we step outside the permanent (pyramids and homes) to enter the transformative dynamism of our sukkot.

At the moment of birth, we emerge into a world where the encompassing security of our environment shifts, but our perception of unity continues. The new baby experiences a world in which hunger and thirst are magically, instantly met with the milk of snuggling satiation; in which a sense of being dirty or uncomfortable is met with joyous cleaning. Inside the Sukkah, we surround ourselves with loving companions and delicious foods. Needs are met as if by magic, and their satisfaction is accompanied by human connection, love, and interaction. All of these transactions happen without the baby’s distinguishing between who he is and the fact that there are other, separate people out there. And the Jewish people dwell in an almost mythic unity in Sukkah booths that remind us of every other Sukkah across time and space.

The process of growing out of babyhood and into toddlerhood, and then the rest of life, is a continuing process of differentiation in which consciousness forms around the boundaries of one’s own identity as distinct and separate. This individuation is, by-and-large, good. Becoming aware of one’s own distinctiveness, and of the separate identity of other people leads us to individualism, to creativity, to an ability to play and interact with the world and with the other people whom we discover sharing our world.  

We see that individuation in the symbols that make up our Lulav and Etrog. Rabbinic midrash teaches that the different plants in the Lulav symbolize the diversity of people who comprise Am Yisrael, the Jewish people. Some are visual people, some are aural. Some stand strong and some lead with their hearts. All come together in their individuality to make up a kosher Lulav. All are necessary because of their differences.

That individuation is also a necessary part of having an identity. You cannot know who you are unless you simultaneously know who you are not. It is why Havdallah (distinction) — in concept and in ritual — plays such a key role in our own tradition.  The making of distinction is an essential component not only of Jewish identity, but of any identity whatsoever. Perhaps it is for that reason that the Talmud notes (Kiddushin 5b, Bava Metzia 61a, Avodah Zarah 46a), “The nature of this one is not like that one; and the nature of that one is not like this one.”  Each is unique; each is to be recognized for their distinctiveness and for what they alone can bring into the world. God makes none of us redundant. And yet, this distinctiveness comes at a very high price.

As we recognize ourselves as distinct and separate from others and from the world around us, we also become open to the disappointment of that the chasm that separates us from others. People we love disappoint us. We realize that feeding does not automatically follow hunger; that one can be soiled physically or emotionally or spiritually, and no one will necessary come to cleanse us. This reality is enacted as we take our Lulav and Etrog and march around the sanctuary in a parade of hakafot. We march in search of a destination and a goal. In the ancient world, they used to march around the Altar of the Temple. The loss of that holy building is a continuing wound in our collective heart. We dance our exile and isolation as a people. Each of us, as we emerge into our separate selfhoods, begins to absorb the bruises and disappointments of a world that is not a womb in which we are automatically sheltered and nourished. It is so tempting to respond to life’s bruises by becoming callous or indifferent or cruel.

Years ago, living in Orange County, having bought our first suburban home, we did the thing that all suburban families are required to do virtually by law – we got a dog. We went to the local pound and found this great, floppy puppy with big feet and big ears and lots of enthusiasm for life. Being that she was a puppy, she loved everyone and everything. Until that fateful day, when wandering outside the house, she discovered — “Cat” — the ultimate other. Humie, assuming that everyone has the intrinsic goodness of a dog, went up to the cat and in her own loving way, invited the cat into fellowship and friendship. The cat, in its feline way, declined the offer by swiping Humie across the nose with her claws out. The shock (and the blood) on the dog’s face was palpable, and then she responded with the age-old animosity with which hurt dogs have always responded to uppity cats. Since that incident, she has punished untold numbers of possibly innocent felines for the sins of the one that hurt her so deeply.  

We all do the same. We are all inevitably wounded by our disappointments in life. We are shocked and appalled by the betrayal, the disappointment, the wound, and we try to protect ourselves from future hurt by preemptively lashing out at anyone and anything that reminds us of the person or the scenario in which we were first wounded. Or, we attempt to spare ourselves pain by wrapping ourselves in the isolating cloak of indifference. The pain of others is often too great to bear, their presence, and sometimes their absence. The death or betrayal of loved us leaves us radically vulnerable for sh’leimut, a sense of longing in a world that is shattered eternally.  

And then, there are socio-economic forces that also leave us vulnerable and alone. In one remarkable observation, the sages of the Talmud (Sanhedrin 98b) tell us, “When a person comes home and finds their son or daughter lying in hunger, it’s as though they were bitten by a snake.” There is poverty in the world; there is devastation in the world; there are the results of natural catastrophes such as are now afflicting the people in the Bayou; and there are humanly-constructed disasters in which we turn our back on the suffering on untold numbers of people who struggle simply to make ends meet, to put food upon the table, who live paycheck to paycheck, and barely that, and live one disaster away from complete catastrophe. And, the way many of us try to live in a world in which such suffering occurs is to chisel a hard casing around our hearts. We shelter our hearts from feeling the rawness of life by metastasizing what the Bible calls an uncircumcised heart. 

Try as we will to protect ourselves by avoiding engagement, connection, and involvement, life crashes in, time and time again. We are incapable of staving life off and therefore devote greater and greater expenditures of energy into shielding ourselves from what breaks through anyway. In that futile process, the problems of the world continue to grow, to fester, and to oppress. It was Albert Einstein who noted: “The world is too dangerous to live in, not because of the people who do evil, but because of the people who sit and let it happen.” Eventually we become trapped in our own web, originally designed to protect us, but ultimately, which traps us. Our cultivated insensitivity, our desire to shield ourselves, precludes us from appreciating life’s wonder and the world’s beauty. 

Enter the sukkah, which looks like withdrawal from the world, and enter a place of beauty, transience, and openness. The law of the Sukkah is you have to be able to see outside through the roofing or it is not a kosher sukkah. The very architecture of the booth is a goad to engagement, to noticing.

I recall a conversation with my childhood rabbi, a man who, to this day, I continue to remember with great affection, confiding to me that he had never lived with a pet because it would one day age and die, and he couldn’t bear the pain of its loss. I remember as a 9-year-old thinking that there was something wrong with that attitude; true it is that pain is the price we pay for loving, and the only way to shield oneself from pain is to never love. But then we never live; we are never fully present. There is only one way to remain fully alive – we must tear asunder the deadening wall encasing our hearts. In the words of the Torah, we must have the courage and the faith to circumcise our hearts anew: 

“Circumcise, therefore, the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiff-necked.  For the Holy One, your God, is the God of Gods, and the Lord of Lords, a great God, mighty and awesome, who favors no person, nor takes bribes. God executes the judgment of the orphan and the widow and loves the stranger, giving them food and garment.  Love therefore, the stranger, for you were strangers in the Land of Egypt (Deuteronomy 10:16-19).“

It is true that circumcising our heart does open us to feel pain, but also joy, and wonder, and community, and connection.  Rooting that courage to circumcise in the presence of the Holy One, being nestled in the bosom of God, gives us the strength, the courage, and the faith to risk the pain, to feel the pain.  

If you are not prepared to feel humanity’s pain, then you will not be privileged to experience humanity’s triumph “Rejoice with Jerusalem, and be glad with her, all who love her; rejoice for joy with her, all who mourn for her (Isaiah 66:10)” says the Prophet Isaiah, to which the rabbis comment in Massekhet Bava Batra (60b), “Anyone who mourns for Jerusalem merits to share her joy, and anyone who does not mourn for her will not share her joy.” One day, we will all dwell in a messianic sukkah of Leviathan pelt, celebrating in the holy city of Jerusalem.

I invite you, this year, to circumcise your heart… I bless us that we can gird ourselves to risk living life whole, embracing each other as brother and sister, and pledging ourselves to fashion communities in which no one is an outsider, no one rejected, no one made invisible.

We are among the most privileged people on the globe. Our wealth is the wealth of history’s grandest kings. We possess the security of people who lived in ancient mighty palaces surrounded by mighty armies there to protect them. Yet our wealth, and our security, threatens to deaden us. I invite you, this year, to circumcise your heart. When you stand before another person, you stand in the presence of God. When you sit in a classroom, an office, a public space, you stand in the presence of God. When you look out in the world and you see a need that you have a capacity to do meet, you stand under an obligation to God, Who gave you life, Who gave you talent, Who privileged you beyond the dreams of most of humanity to this day, and certainly of our ancestors across the millennia. As we learn from the poet Hillel Zeitlin, 

“Praise Me, says God, I will know that you love Me.  

Curse Me, I will know that you love Me.  

Praise Me or curse Me, 

I will know that you love Me.  

Sing out My graces, says God. 

Raise your fist against Me and revile, says God.  

Sing My graces or revile, 

Reviling is also praise, says God.  

But if you sit fenced off in your apathy, 

Entrenched in “I don’t give a damn” says God, 

If you look at the stars and yawn, says God, 

If you see suffering and you don’t cry out, 

If you don’t praise and you don’t revile,

Then I created you in vain, says God.”

This Sukkot, I bless us that we train our ears to truly hear the cries around us — the cries of those we don’t know, as well as those we do. This year, I bless us that we open our eyes to truly see the beauty and the holiness of the person before us at each and every moment, and to see the godliness of their aspirations and their fears. This year, I bless us that we can gird ourselves to risk living life whole, embracing each other as brother and sister, and pledging ourselves to fashion communities in which no one is an outsider, no one rejected, no one made invisible.  This year, I bless us that we should muster the strength to show our love for Avinu sheh-bah shamayim by loving all of God’s children, by honoring all of God’s creation, and by participating in the sacred and mighty work of repairing this broken world under the shelter of a true sukkat shalom, a tabernacle of peace.

Rabbi Dr Bradley Shavit Artson is a Contributing Writer for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles (www.bradartson.com). He holds the Abner and Roslyn Goldstine Dean’s Chair of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies and is Vice President of American Jewish University in Los Angeles.