In view of Sukkot
Like many American cities, Detroit in the 60s became a dangerous place. Few Jewish families remained to live in the suburbs. One year on Sukkot, on Shabbat, one of those families was sitting in the Sukkah, eating warm cholent, that traditional Ashkenazi stew: meat, potato beans… To conform with Jewish laws that prohibit cooking on the Sabbath. the cholent pot is brought to a boil on Friday before the Sabbath begins and kept warm in a slow oven until the following day.
Two robbers armed with guns broke into the property — unfortunately, not an uncommon event those days in Detroit Being Orthodox, no one of the Jews present had access to money, so they stared in silence at the two criminals, who stared back in turn. After a long awkward moment, one of the two robbers looked at the other and said, “I don’t think these people have anything. They’re sitting in a hut! They’re eating beans! They’ve got less than we do! Let’s go somewhere else.”
I love this Sukkot story, and I apologise to those who have heard it already. But we can only imagine how grateful that Jewish family felt. And indeed, Sukkot is about gratitude.
We live inside the Sukkah; if we cannot live, we eat a meal; if we cannot have a meal, at least we do the Kiddush to fulfil the commandment in Leviticus.
“You shall dwell in booths for seven days. All that are home-born in Israel shall dwell in booths; that your generations may know that I made the children of Israel dwell in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God”. [Lev 23: 42–43]
The first mitzvah of Sukkot is to live in temporary accommodations, the Sukkah indeed. The other commandment is the waving of the arbah minim, a sample of the four natural species for which the Land of Israel was known. We wave the arbah minim while we recite the Hallel, the series of Psalms with which we express gratitude to the Almighty. Waving a sample of agricultural produces while reciting the Hallel is a way to express our gratitude for the harvest.
The thing about gratitude today is that we do not feel it anymore. In the contemporary world, nothing seems more foreign to us than contemplating a harvest sample while elevating thankful prayers. When we think about agriculture and its products, we rather experience other feelings. Concern for the equity of distribution, the fact that too much of that bounties will go to a too small group of people. Concern for the exploitation of the environment. The fact is that the natural resources land and rain- that are required to produce these bounties are not infinite.
We struggle to understand the feeling of farmers in the ancient Middle East who, every year in this season, looked at the harvest, trying to speculate whether they had enough food to survive another year.
We do not feel gratitude in the Western world. not anymore. In the democratic society in which we live, we know we have rights: the right to live, the right to housing, civil rights, and cultural right. We are not grateful when we exercise these rights; instead, we feel entitled. Gratitude is not the way we in Western democracies relate to the world.
On the other hand, as Jews, we are addicted to gratitude. The memory of the attempt to exterminate our people during WWII is still vivid; it is impressed in our DNA, it is part of the Jewish identity and will remain as such forever. When we remember the genocide, we also express gratitude for those non-Jews who protected us at the risk of their life.
In this Country, we are grateful to the Royal House and Winston Churchill. Because they refused to appease the Nazis to enter into some form of alliance, which would have brought antisemitic legislation in the UK. We look with pride and relief to the military achievements of the State of Israel. Because we know that if and when -God forbid!- things become difficult for us Jews, there at least we can find shelter. We are indeed grateful to Israel because it exists and -for all their faults- its leaders have been able to defend it so far.
Sometimes the Jews’ relationship with gratitude becomes a caricature: a particularly hateful motive of Vladimir Putin’s propaganda or Jeremy Corbyn’s is to present these leaders as champions of anti-racism and anti-Nazi resistance. We are told that leaders like those are “protectors of the Jews”, and we should be grateful to them. In the past, they had the chutzpah to say we should have been grateful to Stalin because — in their imagination- Stalin alone defeated the Nazis.
So, to sum up. As Europeans, we don’t do gratitude. As Jews, we do too much! The point is that in both cases -either as European or as Jews- we forget what gratitude really is and to Whom.
Enter Sukkot: a few days after Yom Kippur, which is not a tiny detail. On Yom Kippur, we experienced the Divine Presence. Following the reconstruction of the Biblical ritual for the Day of Atonement, going through the list of our transgressions and committing ourselves to do better, and making peace with our friends and family. All these are ways for us to perceive the Divine Presence, which the ancient Rabbis called Shekhinah.
That feeling, the Presence of God as our Protector, is symbolised by the Sukkah. We dwell in the Sukkah because we remember the forty years of wandering in the wilderness when we had only God to protect, feed, nurture, and guide us. And indeed, the Sukkah is both fragile and permanent: two opposites, it defies logic (just like God!).
The symbols of Sukkot, the Sukkahs and the arbah minim speak to us of gratitude. They remind us that we should be grateful not to human beings, not to ideology, but to God only. And this is, I think, the reason why the holiday of Sukkot, which is about to begin, is so difficult for us. And perhaps this is also why, despite being an important holiday, Sukkot does not attract masses of worshippers as we are used to on Yom Kippur. Because, as citizens of a democracy, we find gratitude a difficult feeling to express.
And because we tend to be grateful to any sort of thing, ideology or army, except God. But then miracles happen. Miracles like that in Detroit, when criminals run away because they see bowls of cholent, a dish prepared following the rules of kashrut, and to fulfil the mitzvah of eating warm food during the Jewish holidays. All commandments were given by God.
See how many things we should be grateful for to God!