Sukkot Ecology

After Yom Kippur, Sukkot
provides an opportunity
shifting paradigms in what
become for the community

locations, where without a roof
Jews change for seven days world-views.
In sky-view sukkahs, not rain-proof,
commanded to rejoice, we choose

to act like ancestors who dwelt
within a wilderness wasteland,
our homes the sort of glatt greenbelt
kosher ecologists demand, 

as if we make apology
for climate violations we
had just confessed, ecology
all driving, unelectrically, 

after fasting and petitioning
a pardon from God: Yom Kippur,
replacing air-conditioning
for outside air, we pray more pure.

The word glatt is Yiddish for “smooth” and refers to the lungs of kosher ruminants, implying that their meat has been processed according to the strictest standards of kashrut, Jewish dietary laws. By writing in the third verse of this poem that sukkot – temporary, roofless dwellings – make Jewish homes as glatt kosher as a greenbelt (land in England which may not be developed) my rumination implies that sukkot enable Jews to breathe air that is not only halakhically correct but also PC, as Pulmonologically Correct as meat of glatt kosher animals.