Amid Jewish vulnerability, Sukkot offers a lesson in dependence

(RNS) — As somebody who seems the a part of the Orthodox Jew I’m — darkish swimsuit, white gown shirt, black fedora — I’ve skilled my share of hatred directed at me as a logo of the Jewish individuals.

However, regardless of the “Heil Hitlers!” and various insults shouted from home windows and vehicles, I’ve by no means considered my nation as harboring any substantial streams of antisemitism.

There was, in fact, the 1991 Crown Heights pogrom (price some Googling, in case you’re too younger to recollect). Nevertheless it was, I assumed, an aberration. 

Making that assumption tougher to cling to had been subsequent occasions, just like the 1994 Brooklyn Bridge capturing, the 1999 Los Angeles Jewish Neighborhood Middle capturing, the 2002 one at Los Angeles Worldwide Airport, the 2006 Jewish Federation of Seattle one and the 2009 one at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. And, extra not too long ago, the 2017 “Jews is not going to change us!” chant in Charlottesville, Virginia; the Tree of Life capturing in Pittsburgh and people in Poway, California, and Jersey Metropolis, New Jersey; and the Monsey, New York, Hanukkah stabbing assault, all the next yr. And scores of much less lethal assaults over these years perpetrated on Jews merely for being Jews.

A private punctuation of the plague occurred in Might of final yr, when a fellow sat down reverse me on the Staten Island Ferry and, fully unprovoked, started shouting insults and curses at me on the prime of his appreciable lungs, to the purpose the place bystanders felt compelled to summon police.

However even all these issues didn’t put together me for the actually surreal sight and sound of Americans tearing down posters of civilian hostages kidnapped and held by vicious terror teams — whereas shouting praises for these pledged-to-Jew-murder teams.

As Bari Weiss not too long ago put it: “We anticipated Hamas to attempt to kill Jews. We didn’t count on Individuals to have a good time after they did.”

Have been the demonstrations clearly restricted to protesting Israel’s response to Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, bloodbath of males, ladies and kids, I might take challenge with the demonstrators however not less than perceive their emotions. However too lots of the actions and slogans of what purport to be “pro-Palestinian” activism are barely disguised, if in any respect disguised, Jew-hatred. 

The Anti-Defamation League stories that there have been greater than 10,000 antisemitic incidents within the U.S. since Oct. 7, when Hamas gleefully butchered greater than 1,200 males, ladies and kids in Israel.

Based on the Jewish spiritual custom, till the Jewish messiah arrives, there’ll all the time be those that hate Jews. Their hatred might take any variety of types and present itself in an assortment of the way. If one “cause” for hating Jews eludes the haters, they’ll discover one other. The justifications for the hatred will check the bounds of preposterousness. And so it has been.

In the event that they haven’t appeared already, short-term buildings of various supplies, sizes and styles will quickly be sprouting like post-rain mushrooms throughout Israel and all through Jewish neighborhoods in American cities and all over the world.

The vacation of Sukkot (“tabernacles” or “huts”) takes its identify from these buildings, which Jews are enjoined by the Torah to inhabit for per week annually. The partitions of sukkot might be fabricated from any materials. However in achievement of Jewish custom’s insistence that the dwellings be “short-term” in nature, their roofs should encompass items of unprocessed wooden or vegetation, and the fabric might not be mounted in place.

At first look, dwelling in sukkot — by definition susceptible to wind, rain and pests — would appear solely to compound any innate Jewish proclivity to fret. And but, not less than for Jews who respect the vacation’s import, the very reverse is true.

For Jewish custom considers the sukkah symbolic of the divine “clouds of glory” that the Torah recounts and that protected the ancestors of at this time’s Jews as they wandered within the desert after leaving Egypt. The miraculous clouds destroyed no matter obstacles or noxious creatures stood within the individuals’s path.

Thus, the sukkah represents a deep Jewish reality: Safety just isn’t a operate of fortresses; it’s a reward granted, finally, from above.

There’s a Yiddish poem by poet and author Avraham Reisen (1876-1953) that’s sung in numerous sukkot. The phrases, and a melody to which they had been way back put, are each stirring.

The poem/music paints the image of a Jewish father sitting in his sukkah, as a storm rages. His anguished daughter tries to persuade him that the sukkah is about to fall. He responds (rendered, maintaining the poem’s meter and rhyme scheme, from the Yiddish):

Expensive daughter, don’t fret;

It hasn’t fallen but.

The sukkah’s effective; no want for fright.

There have been many such fears,

For nigh two thousand years;

But the little sukkah stays standing upright.

Many a sukkah, in fact, has in actual fact succumbed to a storm. And lots of, many a Jew has been murdered, in antiquity by means of latest instances.

However as Reisen’s metaphor poignantly reminds us, there may be timeless that means in the truth that the Jewish individuals, as a individuals, has survived.

The sukkah’s fragility teaches that true safety, in the long run, comes from solely One Place.

So, all of the world’s craziness and evil, all of the unreason and hatred and plotting and violence, can not shake the serenity of the sukkah. Now we have, if solely we benefit it, an impenetrable shelter.

And so, regardless of how loudly the winds might howl, regardless of how susceptible our bodily fortresses could also be, we give harbor to neither despair nor insecurity. As a substitute, we redouble our recognition that, in the long run, God is in cost, that each one is in his palms.

And that the sukkah, because it has for millennia, continues to face.

(Rabbi Avi Shafran writes extensively in Jewish and normal media and blogs at rabbishafran.com. The views expressed on this commentary don’t essentially mirror these of Faith Information Service.)